House of Cards RP

Exploring that house with Leigh had proved less than successful. Oh, it had been fun, she had to admit, but it didn't get her anything but a ruined pair of tights, a few uncomfortable splinters, and a rather frustrated sense that if they'd just been able to get that door at the end of the hall open, they'd've found so much more. As it was, there weren't any ghosts. No people, either. Just a bunch of dust, some stuck doors, empty rooms, old furniture and weird smells.

And the box. A music box, just sitting on the floor in the corner of one of the upstairs rooms. The key they'd found in a drawer of the secretary downstairs. It fit, and it worked, playing a wistful melody that seemed to fit the very nature of the house they'd found it in. She'd asked Leigh if she could keep it, intrigued by the sound. Part of her wanted to learn it, maybe to play on the piano sometime when her mother wasn't around to hear. It wasn't like she had anything else to do, right now, things being what they were. School was easy, everyone going light on the work thanks to the recent events, and she'd never had much trouble keeping up with her work, anyway.

Which is why Wednesday evening, she's curled up under her favorite tree out on the Green, winding the key in the bottom of the music box and letting it play that oddly sorrowful song.

It's hard being a young person.

At this point, Evan isn't exactly a young person. Not an old person, but finally safely removed from the this way and that way of being a teenaged and recently-teenaged young person. Lots of things are settling into place. Since getting back to Montréal, even, he's even getting his head properly around what his life might look like when he moves back home.

But the Deck is (par for the course these days) not doing well. There's no telling what travel back and forth is going to be like, not really. There's no telling what his mother will say has popped up in the backyard. There's no telling how Elani's going to sound on the phone when he calls.

There's no telling when a giant bouquet of orange lilies and jonquil and white clover is going to show up in the middle of your Intermediate Managerial Accounting and remind you that it's almost Valentine's Day on top of the fact your home is falling to pieces while you're not there and you can't tell anyone about it.

So Evan McCartney? Is playing phone roulette. Not looking at names and numbers so much as hitting at random to make sure that the general population hasn't completely vanished into thin air.