JACK WILKERSON
█ act one: way down we go▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ | 
Jack swivelled to the source of a nearby voice, hunching casually as though the empty glass in her hand wasn't full just a second ago. She'd done a quick run through of people's profiles the other day, mainly to give her a refresher on those she hadn't spoken to as often or others that were very obviously not at their peak in high school. Here, she didn't need it. Hanna Williamson had barely changed a day from high school; she just needed to find the right outlet, and influencer was clearly working. Jack supposed there were worse people from Ritman to play a major part in the "exploit everyone and step on their necks" industry. Hanna was on the milder end of that scale, though her domain had always been the internet.
As Hanna sat down on an adjacent stool, Jack actually registered what she had said. Meir? She quickly glanced over her shoulder and nearly jumped out of her skin.
"Jesus fuck— Meir, shit." He was different. At Ritman it was kind of obvious that high school wasn't his peak, but she honestly hadn't expected him to get ripped. If you didn't know him it would've been hard to pin him as the scrawny essay-for-hire virgin that he was. Jack wondered if the latter part of that had changed now, mainly out of passive curiosity.
She realised her shoulders were still tensed from jumping, so she slouched and cleared her throat. "Hey, Meir; Hanna. What's up?" The former's response to what Jack had treated as a rhetorical question was largely tuned out, as her thoughts turned to getting another drink as soon as possible. You look like a fucking idiot, Wilkerson.
Elbow leaning on the bartop, she peered further down the bar for a flash of Cal's bleach blond buzzcut, hand idly rolling the bottom of her empty glass against the wood in a circular motion. So what, she jumped. It was a stupid high school reunion and nobody would even remember it in a few months time. Hanna was busy with her being famous on the internet stuff, Meir was a professor at MI-fucking-T of all places, the rest of them probably all had better stuff to do. Have some drinks, open the capsule, watch a wrecking ball hit the building you spent your formative years in—it was a simple formula. She didn't even have to worry about introducing them to her girlfriend since that went up in smoke two weeks ago.
Jack paused.
Her (ex-)girlfriend who worked at P.J's. Who she had been avoiding since they broke up. Her ex-girlfriend who worked the evening shift. Because when she started planning this two months ago, that's why she'd cleared out P.J's at 5.
"Shit," she accidentally hissed aloud, immediately checking her phone. It was still only 4.47. If everyone else arrived in the next ten minutes, she could make an excuse for the group to get out of there and the damage would be avoided. No way was she going to open that can of worms in front of her old classmates. Hey, I was gonna introduce you to some people from high school, not even as a coming out thing, but then you broke up with me two weeks before, and now I have to either ignore you or do a weird coming out sequence with my ex-girlfriend who was also like my first serious relationship.
She had felt more comfortable dating after graduation, namely because all the people who would bug her about it had left town by then, but when she'd 'been in the closet' for so long it seemed weird to suddenly break a habit. It was just inconsistent. If something was a certain way for a while, she couldn't just wake up one day and change her mind. Or, at least that's how Jack justified it in her head. She wasn't ashamed of her sexuality—she never had been, even if she was hesitant seeing the attention kids got for being outside of the norm—it was just the sort of thing to tell close friends. Jack was too guarded for close friends. Well, she preferred private.
Shaking out of the grimace that had started to set on her face, she managed to finally flag down Calvin, who started pouring her another drink.
"Uh... how long's this gonna take? You know what time it is?" He tried to question in a hushed tone, but with how little Jack saw of him outside of P.J's and it's bustling noise she wondered if he knew how loud he was. What was whispering to him was a priest delivering mass to everyone else.
"You want paying customers to leave?" she deflected, ignoring the glare it garnered her. His eyes darted between her and the two alumni besides her.
"Well, last I checked you and Maya haven't spoken since.... y'know, and she's gonna be here in," he clicked his tongue, feigning deep thought, "oh, yeah, fifteen minutes."
She was about to brush him off with a retort when they were interrupted by swelling laughter, and Jack's mouth gaped slightly at the sight of Connor Sangster approaching the bar in his old Magpies gear. Of course he'd kept it gathering dust somewhere; the dude was obsessed with Ritman. She wondered if he kept it to put on in the mirror sometimes.
Jack had seen Connor around Delton now and then, it wasn't like it was her first glimpse of him in seven years, but it felt uncanny in a way. It was like Connor the married PE coach was wearing the skin of Connor the tryhard jock—he looked like an extra on Teen Wolf, and not the TV show. The cap was a nice touch.
"Actually, I always figured you'd get some kind of brain trauma," she quipped at his remark, words coming out maybe a little quicker than she could actually filter them. One time, she had joked that a coworker was having a stroke when she stumbled over somebody's order. Said coworker was both insecure about her performance at work, and had a grandma who suffered a stroke the week before. She'd started crying on the spot and didn't show up for work the next day. Jack tried to remember anything about Connor that wasn't related to him getting kicked out of her classes, or the brief glimpses she caught of him at sports events she'd been dragged along to for one reason or another, but was coming up blank on anything related to brains and their traumas. Maybe she was in the clear for this one. Time to gloss over. "You guys seen anyone else? I'm not meant to be the punctual one."
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