Sharing Space with a Ghoul

Irie had been lurking around the house, watching and waiting, and yet Lulu's sudden entrance still made him jump. He crept into the kitchen and looked out the window. Wow. That was a lot of stuff. He investigated the bags left on the counter before ghosting back against the wall in preparation for Lulu's next return. He stood in the shadows, easily missed if she wasn't looking for him, which she might not have been with all those bags. Who needed that much food? Then again, if he could taste properly, he might have requested that much food...

He shook the thought away, and as the peppy woman entered again, he said, "Thank you for getting those things for me." He hesitated. Manners, manners, small talk... uh... right! "Did you have an easy trip?" There, that was a standard question, right?
 
Lulu hadn’t expected Irie to actually be downstairs the next time she came in. As such, she almost dropped the bags she was holding when his voice came from the corner.

“Oh jeez you startled me! Do you always sneak around like that? Your stuff is in the bag on the left, if you want it.” She nodded at the bags next to the sink. Realising that the counter was already full enough, she settled for leaving the new load on the floor.

“We really need a table in here…”

Clicking her car keys out the window, she watched the lights flash once as the doors locked, before turning to the nearest bag and starting to sort through it.

“Trip was fine. My phone didn’t die on me this time, so no getting lost.” She struck a victory pose for a second, a carton to milk in one hand and a bag of onions in the other, before going on. “I met a nice old lady in the store. She lives just down the street in a cute blue house. Her name is Susan Pines, maybe you’ve met her before? I mentioned your name, but she didn’t seem to know it. Then again, she asked my name twice, so maybe her memory isn’t that great anymore.”

She decided not to mention the ID situation. She didn’t want Irie thinking he had made an extra hassle for her. It had been hard enough to get him to let her buy him anything and from the look of him he could need it. Living on take-out, as he presumably did judging from the empty kitchen, wasn’t good for anybody.
 
Irie hovered in the shadows watching Lulu as she juggled the bags. Oh, wait, was he supposed to be helping? But most of this was supposed to be hers, and if she put it away, then she'd know where it was, right? Still, maybe she'd like some help. He reached into a bag at random, pulled something out, and stuck it into the fridge without look to see if it was even something that was supposed to be refrigerated.

"Um, Susan Pines?" Irie mumbled, thinking about the name. He carefully picked up another item and stared at it. Flour? Why would anyone need flour? "Oh. Yes. Um. I think my mother was friends with her. A long time ago. I do not know her personally." He shifted awkwardly. Susan Pines, that name rang more bells then just the fact that his mother knew her, but he couldn't remember why.
 
Lulu caught Irie looking at the packet of flour with a highly puzzled look on his face and had to giggle. He looked as though he no idea of what to do with it. Maybe she would make pizza from scratch with him. Everyone liked pizza right?

“Lets swap.” She said, holding out the milk to him. He was closer to the fridge after all.

“She seems very nice. Invited me over if I ever want to chat. I bet she has some lovely stories to tell about the town.” Realising what Irie had actually said, she asked “Your mother? So have you always lived in town? Mrs. Pines thought this place was empty, but you’ve lived here a little while right?”
 
Irie handed the flour over to Lulu then took the milk. He held it for a moment, letting the cold seep through to his hand. He felt cold more easily than he felt heat. It was not unpleasant, merely there. He turned and slid it into the fridge.

"My family has lived in the town for three generations, I think, but on the other side," he said cautiously. How was he going to answer this? Lying could get complicated, but the truth was... more complicated. "I have not lived in this house long." Technically true. "I was gone a lot to school."
 
“Oh really? Where did you go to school?”
Lulu handed over several other items destined for the fridge, thinking maybe Irie wasn’t quite as strange as she first thought. This was a nice kind of normal thing, just chatting while putting away the groceries.
 
Irie put the items away, feeling awkward and trapped. She was so talkative and inquisitive! Maybe this was a bad idea, but at least she seemed to care and try to take care of things. She might even be willing to yell at the landscapers for him.

"A, um, private school out of town. Kind of like a boarding school," Irie said evasively. "You probably haven't heard of it. It was not well known." Actually, it was very well known, but only to an exclusive crowd.
 
“Oh wow, that’s fancy. I just went to a regular old public school, so I’ve only ever seen boarding schools in movies and stuff. Is it actually like they show it there?”

She wondered briefly why he needed a subtenant if he or his family had the money to send him to boarding school. As far as she knew, that wasn’t exactly cheap. Perhaps he had been disowned or something. She decided not to mention it, not wanting to risk their conversation for the sake of simple curiosity.
 
This was getting a little tricky, but at least it wasn't about him living here in this house. "Um... I don't know. I've never seen them in movies. I don't watch much anymore. It was cold. And strict. But good learning. If you actually wanted to learn."

Which he never had. It was a last resort for parents who did not want to deal with their highly strung son, and even that school had come close to kicking him out. Sometimes it had felt like how he assumed prison did, but there were plenty of "outs." Sports was one. He'd actually learned how to play polo and hadn't minded the horses. Fencing, as well, though he'd eventually been banned from that sport because of... well, a couple of incidents.
 
“Wait what? Are you actually telling me you haven’t seen Harry Potter?” Having finished passing over all the fridge worthy items, Lulu took the moment to stare at Irie rather incredulously before returning to shuffling through the bags.

“That’s almost 8 movies of boarding school. I mean yeah, I doubt you lived in a castle and learned magic in yours but that’s like the one ideal of boarding school everyone has... Maybe not a very good example now that I think about it.” The last part was more of a murmur.
 
No, I have never seen the movies. I sort of know of the idea of the books, but this is all," Irie said slowly. "I think my school was a repurposed manor, so it had castle-like vibes, I suppose you could say. No magic. Only science. Although a classmate did almost blow up the science lab, once."

That had been a good day. He almost smiled remembering it. He'd thought about doing it, himself, but then across the room, some other kid he'd never spoken to mixed two of the wrong things together and put them over the burner. The smell had been so horrid they'd had to leave the lab and could not go back for nearly a week. No one had missed it. The teacher had been irrational.
 
“How exiting! How did they manage that? The worst some of my classmates ever did was trash one of the art rooms and try to sell it off as an installation they were doing. Needless to say it didn’t work. They had to clean it all up in their free time. Took them ages to do it.”

Lulu looked around them with satisfaction. While they had been talking, all the groceries had managed to disappear into the various cabinets, leaving only a myriad of bags strewn over the counter and the floor. It had taken much less time than she had expected it to. Having company and a helping hand really was wonderful. She really hoped that Irie hadn’t planned on mostly shutting himself away upstairs.
 
Irie practically tip-toed over to the bags and started picking them up. With a somewhat concerning amount of care, he picked up each bag and folded it into a tiny square. He did this with every bag he saw and ended by putting them all in the last bag and folding it around all of them. There. Nice and neat. He didn't used to be a neat freak, but he'd had to find something to do when by himself and unable to leave the house.

"I don't remember," he mumbled. "It was a long time ago." He spotted a bag he missed and picked it up, fiddling with it. "I never understood art." He mechanically opened the bag wide and closed it around an air bubble, pulling it tight.
 
Lulu watched Irie collect all the bags together with meticulous care. Was it some form of OCD? She would have just chucked them all into the back of her truck with the idea of using them again at some point, only to probably forget all about them and eventually throw them out.

At his comment about not remembering school, she had to raise an eyebrow. Wasn’t high school and college supposed to be the time you never forgot? Enough people seemed to view it as such and loved to reminisce about their own times there. Perhaps he had been bullied or something and didn’t like to remember it too much. Better not ask any more for now.

“I’m not sure what they did could be counted as art in any sense of the term, so theres not really anything to understand in that situation. And I don’t think you need to ‘understand’ art.” She made the air quotes with both fingers, “It can be beautiful in its own right without meaning anything, or mean something different to different people who look at it.” She shrugged, not wanting to get into any philosophical discussions. She had never been good at that kind of thing.
 
Beauty... art... the joy of emotions triggered by sensory stimulation... He remembered those days distantly, but had no real hope of ever experiencing that ever again. What would it be like to be returned to a world of art and joy? He stared down at the sack, not really paying attention to how long the silence was stretching out. This sack. Perhaps at one time, this sack had been considered art. Actually, he supposed, in a way he, himself, had turned sacks like these into a sort of twisted, low-brow art of comedy. That was the only kind of art he had spent any time on, and the only kind he really brought out any more.

Mechanically, he moved as if to set it down. Then he brought his hands together hard. The bag exploded in a rather satisfactory bang. How many times had he done this to wake sleeping men and women from their beds when he tired of their company in the house? Then he looked at Lulu. Oh, yes, he'd forgotten about her.
 
Lulu watched Irie think for a moment, wondering what her words had prompted in his mind. His silence stretched on and she thought that perhaps he didn’t want to talk anymore. She was about to excuse herself and leave him to his own devices when he smashed his hands together over the bag.

While used to loud and sudden noises from the various machines she worked with, Lulu had not been expecting that in the least. Already half turned away to leave she spun back around, and in her surprise managed to knock her wrist painfully hard against the edge of the counter. Several very loud and unsavoury expletives escaped her as she clutched at her wrist and hunched over slightly at the pain.
 
"Oh... I am sorry," Irie said uncomfortably, realizing he'd caused her to hurt herself. He tossed the ripped bag onto the counter and moved half a step closer. "I... I forgot you were in here. Um. Is it broken?"

He didn't know what to do in this instance. Help? Call someone? Grab the ice cubes? Perform a rain dance? He had no clue! So he hovered awkwardly and tried to figure out what a semi-decent human being was supposed to be doing in this instance.
 
Lulu gritted her teeth as the waves of pain dulled to a more consistent but bearable throbbing. Once she could conjure more than just swearwords, she tried to smile, wanting to reassure the rather awkwardly fidgeting Irie.

“Well that’s a first. People usually tell me I’m far too chatty to be easily forgotten or ignored.”

She straightened back up and moved to run her hand under cold water in the sink. Inspecting it through the stream of water, she added, “Its not broken I think. Might bruise a bit but should be just fine.”

She flexed it experimentally and winced a little. It looked like she wouldn’t be doing many gymnastics in the near future, not that she had been planning to anyway. You didn’t need a fully functioning hand to read the mountain of hand books piled in her room.
She turned a slightly more teasing smile at Irie. “School boy memories coming back again? My little brother used to pop bags like that all the time in middle school. Drove my mum nuts.”
 
"Sorry about that," Irie mumbled again. "I was thinking of something else, and I did this just a few weeks ago to... someone else. Sorry. It's instinct." He picked up the bag of his items and started inching toward the stairs. "I will be upstairs. Just... yes. If you need something, let me know. I will try to help. And thank you. For this. Thanks."

Irie turned and fled to the quiet darkness of his rooms once more. He shut the door and sighed in relief. Being social really took it out of a body! Or... whatever he was. He put his cheese and wine in the tiny mini fridge he never thought he'd use and made certain it was plugged in before retreating to his bedroom. He'd spent so long hiding from others in the smallest space availible, it was strange to have even the upstairs to himself. It was almost nice to have a housemate downstairs to hide from just to feel normal.

Normal...

He looked down at his hands. He'd stopped trying to kid himself about that a long time ago. For him, this was normal and probably would be fore eternity. He sighed and sat on the edge of the bed for a few moments of intense moping.
 
“Its fine, really. Just warn me next time.” Lulus usual sunny smile was back in full force, again trying to reassure Irie. He looked almost stricken as he backed away from her, clutching his bag of cheese and wine. It hurt more than she expected to see him practically scurry up the stairs as though fleeing from her. She couldn’t remember someone acting like that around her before. Sure there were people she didn’t get along with or they with her, but that usually simply ended in avoidance or indifference. She didn’t want either of those in her relationship with her new room mate, but him being scared of her, or whatever it was, was almost worse.

She turned off the tap and patted her hand dry on her trouser leg, hissing slightly when she pressed too hard and a fresh spike of pain shot up her arm. Wandering back into her own room, she flopped onto the futon and stared up at the ceiling, reliving their conversation in her head, searching for something she had done wrong. They had just been talking normally, hadn’t they? Sure the thing with the popping bag was a little weird and out of place, but she didn’t quite understand why he had totally backed off after that. Was he worried she was mad at him for a little accident? It had been just that, an accident. She had had much worse happen to her than a slightly banged wrist.

She sighed, reflecting that her first day in her new home had not at all gone as she had expected, then reached for the topmost manual on the pile next to the futon and flipped through it, searching for her place. She knew this reading was necessary, but couldn’t wait to get through all these dull hand books and actually get to work on the machines they described.
 
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