The hall between the peak of the stairs and Anna's room was dark and nearly silent aside from the ever-present keyboard tapping coming from Jean's room just a couple of doors down. It was dark enough that Anna needed the light of her phone to make sure she didn't slam her face into a wall. She knew perfectly well where the light switch was for the hallway, but turning them on felt a little too much like she was shining a spotlight on herself for the whole house to see.
She fumbled for the doorknob to her room, twisted it, and threw the door open. Her room beyond was nearly as dark as the hallway, aside from the blue light of a laptop sat atop Kitty's bed lowly thumping some bassy jams from its tinny speakers, and a small ember bobbing near the open window. From the dim light, Anna spotted a figure suddenly shift, and ember go dark - "What the hell are you doing here?" Anna heard Kitty's voice ask in the same tone as if Anna were holding a gun to her head.
"I live here, you freak." Anna flipped the light switch next to the door and the room was plunged into high-watt yellow light. She spotted Kitty standing with her back against the wall closest to the open window. Her eyes were wide, her hair frayed and stringy around her temples, and the shirt she wore was dotted with oil stains along the front and sleeves. "What the hell is going on with you? You look like someone drug you behind their truck."
"Why don't you answer my question first! You've been gone all night and you choose now to burst through the door?"
"Why would now be different from any other-" The lingering odor in the room finally Anna's nose. "… are you fucking smoking?"
Kitty's shoulders tensed till they were touching the lobes of her ears. "No! What business of it is yours anyway?"
"It's my business when you make my clothes and room smell like a trailer park!" Anna made to toss her backpack onto her bed when she saw something tiny - the ember from before - fly out the window in the corner of her eye. She straightened up. "What the hell was that?"
"What was what?" Kitty slammed the window shut so hard the glass visibly vibrated. She plopped down on her bed, knocking her laptop to the ground. She mumbled something, and when she bent over to grab it, something else slipped from the sheets and fell to the foot of the bed. Anna walked over and picked it up.
"Fuck - Kitty, Menthols? Really? This shit will tear a hole through your lungs." The white and blue box was ripped out of her hand.
"Mind you're own freaking business, Anna! God!" Kitty shoved the package deep below her sheets, pulled her comforter forcefully over her lower body, and dropped the half-cocked laptop on top. She adjusted the screen so it better faced her and started typing something.
Anna turned to face her own bed and gently rested her backpack atop her unmade twisted mound of blankets. She glanced at her bedside table, at the single unlit lamp, and the abandoned charging cable. Seeing the cable, she remembered the phone she was still holding and checked the charge. Anna sat on her bed in the same spot she rolled out of that morning and jammed the charging cable back into the phone's socket. The screen lit up showing the same stock image she had received it with and she watched till it returned to black. With the generic black phone case facing the ceiling, she rested her phone in the same spot she found it that morning in the pool of ample space that was her nightstand.
There was a time - not so long ago - she couldn't even find a spot big enough to put her phone on her nightstand. Back home, the little table was filled with photos of her and her Moms on vacations, of her and Jess, of the little witchy trinkets and crystals she and Jess bought with their own money at weird a new-age store Jess knew about. Now it was all gone, the photos, the trinkets, all the relics of her life before 'Rogue.' And there was no telling if she would ever see any of it, or the people, ever again. It was almost like… it never happened.
Anna found herself picking at the sides of her thumb again. The dead skin had formed a concentrated sort of callus near her fingernail. She looked over her shoulder at Kitty's side of the room. Her wall was filled with photos of her posing with the other students, and with other people, Anna had never met. Below them Kitty sat, her hand pressed hard against her forehead, her foot vibrating hard enough under the sheets to displace them.
"You know, you take good pictures."
Kitty looked up at her, eyes blank. "What?"
"The pictures you put up. They look nice."
"Yeah - great." She looked back down at her laptop, her hand pressed back into her forehead.
Anna felt a splinter of ice form in her chest and grow in size. She stripped off her boots, walked over to her closet, and selected a handful of clothes. Without saying another word to Kitty, she left for the bathroom across the hall. For once, she could be sure it was empty. Kitty was in their room being weird, Jean was tapping away in her room, and Ororo - well she wasn't wholly sure Ororo ever used the bathroom. It was just hard to imagine the woman who walks with such grace and speaks with the authority of one of God's angels, taking a dump or needing to shower.
The gaudy pink bathroom was heavy with steam and the tile floor was damp enough for the previous user to have laid down a couple of towels. Anna dropped her armload of clean clothes on the counter and wiped a clean circle in the steamy mirror with her bare hand. She was greeted by her own scowling face staring back at her beyond the thin droplets of water lingering behind. Her makeup - to its credit - was still clinging on for dear life despite a day at school and a session of Danger Room bullshit. Still, it was time for it to go, and for another crappy day to get washed away down the dumb pink shower. She reached for the drawer where the makeup wipes were kept when a bare razor blade sitting on the counter caught her eye.
In all her time at the institute, Anna had gotten to know everyone's soaps, shampoos, and grooming tools pretty well. She had 'occasionally' and 'accidentally' dropped one of Jean's bath bombs into a couple of her own baths and suffered the consequences of frothy bubbles and CBD oil to relax her muscles. Never once, though, has she ever found any razor that took a blade like the one sitting on the counter. She picked it up and turned it over. It didn't take long to spot a caking of a white powdery substance near the tip of the blade. She was suddenly transported back to her living room back in Caldecott County watching crime dramas with her Moms when she was far too young to be watching them. In more than one episode she remembered druggies and crackheads portrayed in the shows using lone razor blades - just like the one she was holding - to make lines to better snort cocaine.
"No. There's no fucking way." Anna held up the blade to better face the light and the powder only became more clear. "No. She's acting weird, but… she can't - there's just no way." Anna ran her bare hand along the surface of the counter, and when she brought it back to her face, she saw small splotches of white along the length of her index finger. "No. No-no-no-no that can't be right. It's… foundation or something." The blade still in hand, she rooted through the drawers, flipped open a random compact, and touched a different finger to the powder to compare. The foundation and the mystery powder were clearly different colors.
Anna dropped the compact and pulled the bathroom door open with a loud 'whoosh.' She marched to her room and threw open the door with such force, if a person was unfortunate enough to be on the other side, they likely would have been knock-out cold. Baring the razor blade like a weapon in her hand, Anna faced Kitty's bed - but the other girl was gone. Anna straightened up, her blood pumping, and she scanned every corner of the room. When she didn't find her, Anna marched to the other bathroom across the mansion. When she found that empty, she ran down the stairs, nearly stumbling in the dark, and scoured the bottom floor. It was only when she was near the rear of the house did she finally get a sign of life, a choked sort of mumbling. She followed the sound, her thumb and fore-finger pinching the razor blade so hard she had lost feeling in them. It was when she reached the rear door leading to the pool was the sound finally clear, it was crying.
Anna made to reach for the doorknob but stopped herself. Instead, she peeled back one of the gauzy white curtains and spotted Kitty sitting at the pool's foot. Anna could only see the profile of Kitty's back, but occasionally her chestnut hair would bob up from her pillowed hands. The other girl's crying was ugly and loud. The sort of tears that pulled from a place deep within, from the soul, from the gut. It was the sort of cry Anna had herself more than once since arriving at the mansion.
Suddenly, all of Anna's holy fury was flushed out of her body and replaced with something heavier and colder. She bit down on her lip and looked at the little blade in her hand that had seemingly grown several times in size and was at least twice as heavy. She lowered her head, then gently shut the curtains.