xp_logs | RX:R - Jane, Julio - Saturday Morning (Reply)

Houses get painted and Jane finds her toes to be delicious.

Julio sighed and stepped back, wiping an arm across his forehead. Unfortunately, that also wiped paint on his glasses. He muttered to himself in Spanish, pulling them off and cleaning them with the edge of his t-shirt. Between the sawdust, sheetrock, and paint, he was going to have to burn all of the clothes he had worn this week.

"Okay, so what did that mean?" It had sounded pretty, but not particularly polite. "I really gotta take some language classes." Jane slapped another brush full of paint on the wall in front of her with far more enthusiasm than skill. Painting was fun, but she kind of wished that she'd signed up to do roofing all week. She'd liked walking along the peaks of the houses looking down at the ground.

"Um," Julio said, flushing slightly. "I just said that a goat had done something unlikely with someone's mother," he said sheepishly. He held up is glasses and squinted at them, before settling them back on his nose. He's been used as a defacto translator since they arrived, even though many in the neighborhood were Salvadorian and not Mexican, it made life easier for everyone. He'd had several lapses in the morning though, forgetting what language he was using before he had coffee.

"Oh." Jane wondered why it always seemed to be goats and sheep. She dumped the brush back in her pail and sat next to it. "Is it hard translating between English and Spanish? Because it seems like it'd be confusing."

"Sometimes," Julio said, dunking his roller back into the paint. "The grammar is different, so sometimes things come out funny when I try to translate when I am tired, like 'the car big' and 'watching the cat of Kyle." He rolled out some more of the wall, having finally caught onto a rhythm, but oh, were his shoulders going to hate him tomorrow.

"Cat is gato, right? And I still haven't seen this rumored cat of Kyle's. I'm starting to believe it doesn't exist." Stretching, she stood and dragged her bucket over closer to a window. "I can't believe how much work has been done to build the city back up, you know? It's really amazing."

"Yes, cat is gato," Julio said. He finished joining his lines and dunked his roller again, using a little more force than necessary and splashing some of the paint onto his jeans and the floor. Thankfully, carpet would not be put in until after the walls were dry. "The city still has a long way to go," he said quietly.

"True! But compared to the way it was right after the earthquake, it's like, a thousand times better," Jane noticed the way Julio's paint spattered across the floor and started to feel a bit better about her own mess. "Plus, the way people have pulled together to help fix things is incredibly cool. It's all very 'triumph of the human spirit'. I mean, you were here when it happened, right? I think Amanda or someone said you came to the mansion right after."

Julio stopped dead. "You don't know?" he said, sounding a little hoarse.

"Know what?" Jane wiped her thumb down the trickled of yellow paint that had landed on the white window casing. It smeared worryingly. No one would notice, right?

"Jane," the younger boy said quietly. "I cause earthquakes. That is my power."

Jane turned toward him with a sunny grin. "Yeah, I-- Oh." She ducked her head. Oh, wow, had she stepped in it.

Julio sighed, pulling his roller out of the paint and putting it to the wall. "Yes, that is why I hold the title for world's most traumatic manifestation. It is one that I hope that will never be topped."

Well, he didn't seem too mad or likely to have a screaming fit, so that was a good sign, although Jane supposed he'd probably had a lot of time to deal with it. She nodded and turned back to her own painting. "I'm glad you came out of it okay," she said, simply.

The sound Julio made was halfway between a laugh and a snort. "Some days I wonder," he said, trying to let the rhythm of rolling paint push him back into zen. Especially in regards to people who had lost much in the earthquake. How would they feel if they knew the scrawny teenage boy they were talking to was repsonsible for all of this?

"You're walking and talking and you're not practicing evil laughs, so it's a start, anyway," Jane winced inwardly at the flipness of her comment. "But, I mean, and I don't know what's going on in your head, obviously, that you seem okay, and you're clearly trying to do the right thing by helping out and trying to do good just in general and be an all-round nice guy, so you know, it doesn't seem like there's anything wrong with you. If you weren't okay you wouldn't be trying to do or be any of those things."

"This is true," Julio said, finishing up that wall and setting his roller back into the bucket. He rolled his neck. "What happened, I did not intend for it to happen. It was not exactly an accident, but it was beyond my control. I have had lots of therapy to this point. But understanding it here," he tapped his head, "and actually knowing it with my heart is hard."

"They don't always like to agree," Jane gave him small, wry smile, thinking of some of her own head and heart stalemates. "I hope they come to terms, soon."

"Me too," Julio said. It was hard to not like Jane. It was like disliking a puppy. Completely physically impossible. The boy sighed. "Are you finished cutting in over there?" he asked.

Jane looked at the wall with it's crooked, drippy edging and random hearts and stars. "...yes?"

Julio stopped, and blinked. Then he laughed. "The good thing about paint is that you can never truly mess it up."

Jane grinned. "Thank goodness for small favors. Onto the next room, then?"