Snippet #1840756

The smile on Eli's face widened. "Thanks," he said, timidity diminishing, vanishing from his voice. "I really appreciate it." And Izzie had to quell her own smile. Never a woman prone to extended or overt displays of emotion and feeling, she allowed herself only to make minuscule expressions, granting only the most insignificant window into her own feelings. It was a habit from years past--giving overt indications of your feelings and emotions was a source of weakness. It gave others an opportunity to take advantage of you, to hurt you, to maim you. And ten years later she wasn't able to shake off that long-held conviction, not even when among people she knew she trusted.

"No, I came here for the pizza," Eli retorted sardonically to her following words. "You guys were merely an afterthought." Izzie feigned offence, her thin, dark lips still pulled in a smirk. "Well shit, I didn't know the pizza was so damn good around here." She glanced over to the main group--seeing, much to her distaste, that old accursed Ouija board. Oh, how it'd gotten on Izzie's nerves that first time five years ago Alice had taken the damn thing out. The point was lost on her. The dead don't communicate with the living. The reason being that they're kinda dead. Izzie reached up in an almost unconscious motion to her neck, where her long fingers stretched out to take hold of the object that hung from a simple thread around her tanned, slim neck--a cross. A mangled, rusted, almost unrecognisable metal cross.

It wasn't that Izzie was religious. In point of fact, she wasn't even spiritual. The cross, violently disfigured and mutilated, was there to make a point of that. That there was no hope to be found in supernatural explanations of why things happened--that there was no way of using religion or spirituality to try and justify, or understand, or comprehend why tragedies happened. They just did. The world had no particular way of working--it just was. And people had no particular reason for existing in that world--they just did, and there were no higher powers, no spirits of the deceased, nothing beyond the physical to grant comfort to them in times of distress. That was why she thought the Ouija board was such bullshit. It was marketed to gullible, hopeless fools who couldn't let go of past memories and let the memory of the departed rest in peace...

"Well, let them have their fun," she decided aloud, her hand falling from the mangled cross. Five years ago, Izzie would've marched right in and informed them all that Ouija boards were, in fact, a trademarked board game created by Hasbro in 1890, and that the whole spiritual aspect had only come into it when some idiot in the 1910s popularised some rumour that it was used to speak to the dead. Not now, though. Maybe she had matured that much, at the very least--enough to simply let the kids have their fun. She glanced back down at Eli. "Well, I'm none too keen to go and observe the calling of the unrestful dead. Guess I'll just stand myself here. Unless, of course, you take significant issue." She said it with a note of sarcasm--even though there was still a part of her that was concerned that he actually would.