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[off_the_ceiling]

Jess had never been a spoiled princess, no matter what people teased her about sometimes. She grew up with two brothers and a family who loved her dearly but expected her to be able to fend for herself by the time she was ready for college, so she sometimes figured she could do just about anything, from scrub the floors to whip out the mace

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[unchosen_son]

Sam had gone looking for her when he was bored and she wasn't at the hut. It didn't take too long to find her and he was glad because yeah, wandering the whole Island definitely wasn't in his game plan. He found her in the laundry room, giving her a worried look. "Are you doing my stuff too?"

[off_the_ceiling]

"Yeah, and I think I just accidentally dyed your underwear," said Jess with an unapologetic smile, leaning forward to offer him a bite of her apple. "You don't mind, do you? I'm sure you'll look just as pretty in purple as you did in white."

[unchosen_son]

"I just don't want you to have to do my stuff," Sam protested, because he seriously felt really bad about her doing all his things. He'd try to get less dirty if that was the case. He leaned forward to take a bite of the apple, winding an arm around her back to ease in close. "And so long as it isn't pink. Dean did that to me. And no, not while we were kids. A year ago."

[off_the_ceiling]

"Sam, it would've taken longer just to separate your stuff from mine than it does to just shove it all in there," said Jess, "but if you're that worried about it I'll just leave it for next time. Hell, for all I know I've got some of Dean's stuff crammed in there too. Would you feel better if I'm turning his socks a murky pink?"

[dillon_princess]

Laundry was a necessary evil, and one Lyla had always hated. Good clothes were too hard to come by here, and she wouldn't give them up. It wasn't as bad as home, helping her mom do laundry for the whole family, but it still got boring. It was why she had a couple of magazines on top of the pile of clothes. They might have been outdated, but gawking at the clothes celebrities wore always entertained her for a short while.

"Hey," she dumped her pile beside an empty washer, reminding herself this was Jess and not Tyra, yet again. "Looks like it's the day for it."

[off_the_ceiling]

"You'd think I would've done it when it was raining, but... wait, I did do it then, too," said Jess, flashing her a smile. "Could be worse. People just in from the barn could be doing theirs too."

[dillon_princess]

You couldn't grow up in Lyla's part of Texas without knowing what a field or barn full of cows smelled like, her nose wrinkling involuntarily. "Or they could make us do everyone's laundry. At least here it's just my own, I don't have to deal with my parents or my brother and sister's stuff to. Magazine?"

She tossed them up on the counter, opening a washer and shoveling her clothes in, "at least they have washing machines."

[off_the_ceiling]

"I'm good," said Jess, holding up her book, her thumb marking her page. "Catching up on my recreational reading. Didn't have all that much time for it back at Stanford."

[queensparkle]

Summer walked into the laundry room with a large bag of her own.

"Have you gotten any decent outfits since you've been here?" She asked, remembering her initial conversation with Jess.

[off_the_ceiling]

"I think my standards for 'decent' have significantly lowered," admitted Jess. "These days anything that fits and doesn't have cartoon characters on it falls into the category of decent. And I'm flexible on the cartoon character thing."

[queensparkle]

Summer nodded seriously.

"My boyfriend back home was a huge comic geek, so lately it's been giving me a lot of comic characters. I think it's evil." Her voice lowered a bit at her last sentence.

[off_the_ceiling]

"I'm not sure I'd call it evil," said Jess. Not now that she'd looked something in the face that really was evil. "But I'm not sure I'd call it anything nice, either. And let's not even talk about the kind of underwear it wants us to wear."

[jack_crew]

"Hey, Jess," Jack says brightly as he comes into the laundry room, carrying an impossibly large amount of laundry in his arms. Since they've moved up to the Compound, he's been put in charge of laundry, but he doesn't mind so much. It's better than letting Kate heave herself up and down the stairs a hundred times a week just so they can have clean clothes and clean sheets. "What're you reading?" he asks curiously.

[off_the_ceiling]

"It's, um," said Jess, laughing self-consciously and glancing at the cover for a moment before answering. "It's called World War Z. It's about zombies." She already made a mental note to ask Sam just how much of that was actually real.

[jack_crew]

"Hey, that's kinda cool," Jack says as he loads one of the machines with a bunch of jeans and a few dark shirts. Turning it on, he turns around and hops up beside Jess, looking at the book. "I was in a zombie movie once, but it was really early in my career, so I died about halfway through. It was my horror movie quota, though."

[off_the_ceiling]

"You think I'm ever gonna get to see this zombie movie?" said Jess, closing the book over her index finger and grinning at him. "You need to tell me what it's called so I can go looking for it. Maybe have a movie night so everyone can join in."

[texas_forever]

Not taking into account the fact that Tim won't ever go to college, he likely would've been just the type of Neanderthal to be tossing around a nerf football in the laundry room. As it is, though, he's only down there to grab his own clothes from the dryer and if Billy could see him now, the guy'd probably have a heart attack.

Tim's smile is warm and immediate when he recognizes Jess's long legs hanging over the edge of the dryer. Just like Tyra's, just exactly.

"Hey," he says, giving her a friendly nod as he pulls open the dryer door.

[off_the_ceiling]

"Hey," she said in return, looking over to smile at him. "M'not in your way, am I? A couple loads of cutoff shorts and Care Bears pajamas probably aren't worth guarding, but I'd rather sit with them than not."

[texas_forever]

"Pretty sad company," Tim says with a quiet laugh, bending over to pull out his over grown load, heaping them on top of the machine as he throws Jess another smile.

[off_the_ceiling]

"There may be a lot of things in this world that are my fault, but that's not one of them," said Jess. "Okay, maybe not in this world, but in its saner cousin."