Event Private Tenebrae

Jasmine had been distracting herself from the darker thoughts in her head with the school elections. She wasn't participating, of course, but listening to and reading the stuff from the different candidates was a good way to take her mental focus off of herself. Voting was a small thing comparatively, but it was a way that she could feel useful to the people around her and it had the benefit of letting her go unnoticed for it. No praise or damnation for her decision as long as she just quietly kept her voting preferences to herself. It was perfect, or very near to it.

She was sitting in the student lounge, tucked away in the corner where she wouldn't disturb anyone while she read her Bible. Or, at least she wouldn't get berated for being religious in a public space. Really though it was an excuse to people watch, to validate the knowledge that despite the dozen or more people around her at most any given time, she was alone. And she was. Eric seemed to spend less and less time with her. The other Enigmas had completely cut her off after Risky had pointed out to everyone that she had tried to take Monday's place.

She'd been stuck on the same passage for a while, reading it over and over again. Psalm 73:26, 'My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.' She was too distracted by the goings on around her, especially the girl who was campaigning for student council. Jasmine would read the passage, then find her eyes wandering to her. Bel, she thought she remembered her name being. One of the cheerleaders. Jasmine had seen her at the games she'd been to to cheer on Eric. And then Jasmine's thoughts would wander to things she really would have rather not thought about, and she would return to the passage to try reading it again. Rinse. Repeat.

Jasmine looked at her book quickly as she noticed Bel approaching, wanting to look like she hadn't been staring. A brief memory of short skirts flipped through her head and she dispelled it quickly by subtly digging her fingernails into her wrist underneath the book in her lap.

"Oh hey, yeah." She smiled as she looked back up at Bel, trying to focus on her words and not the intrusive desire to run away. "That's me. I'm Jasmine. You're, ah... I've seen you with the cheerleaders. And you're running for student council. Bel, right? What's up?"

Jasmine felt her cheeks warm when Bel asked her if she was interested, and flushed even more with embarrassment when she realized what she actually meant. The elections. "A-ah. Yeah those. I was never on the student council back home, no. I was always kind of busy with boy -" she cleared her throat, feeling like her tongue was going to stick to the roof of her mouth.

"Boy Scouts. I was a Boy scout back home. Even though I'm a girl. There wasn't a Girl Scout troop. My dad wrote a letter to get them to let me in."

Okay she was rambling. Stupid stupid stupid. Jasmine feigned a smile up at Bel and closed her Bible to leave it in her lap. "So you're running for president? What, ah, are you running on? Like, platform-wise."

"A-ah," was all Jasmine managed at first, blinking back her initial confusion when Bel rattled off her platform. She focused herself firmly on Bel's face, chewing over the information in her head before nodding.

"That sounds nice. I know that I had a hard time adjusting here when I first arrived. I probably would have been pretty lost if I hadn't had my friends here with me," she lied as easily as anything else. Or, really, it wasn't a lie so much as it was a carefully curated untruth. The kind of thing Jasmine told herself so that she wouldn't have to face just how alone she was here.

"What kinds of things would your, ah, welcome committee do?"

Jasmine nodded along, actually finding it easier to listen in now and actually think about what Bel was saying. "Oh yeah, that makes sense. One person whose job it is to answer questions for a particular new person."

She could have used that when she had first arrived, after all. Maybe it would have saved her some heartache or grief. "So many people here are socially responsible. It's really strange to see, looking back to how home was."

The fact that Jasmine had a half-cocked conspiracy theory that all of this was some elaborate plot by the demons to make her out her guard down, and that she might actually just be dead and in hell, she did not share.