Mistake - (?)
I know what you’re thinking: “Man, you really know how to fuck shit up, don’t you?”
(It’s not really knowing. It just comes naturally for you. I swear, you’re a new kind of cookie in that regard.)
You might be wondering why I’m writing to you. Or maybe not, seeing how you’re still dealing with the repercussions of me.
So, sweetheart, what was it? Why’d you choose me as you did? Was it because you didn’t have a choice? Was it because they made you choose me?
(Hint: Choice #3.)
That’s what I’m here to tell you. You didn’t choose me. It looks like it, but the decision was out of your control. Yes, I am a mistake, and all the problems I’ve caused you since then are really a kick to the teeth. But I’m not your mistake. You didn’t choose for me to happen, not really. You were forced to choose me by forces far beyond your control.
Yeah, what’s happening right now sucks. But just remember, this isn’t really your fault.
So chin up, pretty doll. Take the hate with dignity, and move on. You’ve got greater things in life to look forward to.
Chapter Nine: Caden
Shit. He was back. Part of me had been hoping he had crashed his car or gotten shot or something. Sure, if he magically died we would likely all starve to death or something of that general ilk, but at least we would die with dignity. Or at least as much dignity as we could after being kidnapped by a psycho.
I willed myself to forget about my dream with Brie. I needed to focus on the situation at hand, as much as I didn’t want to. There were footsteps coming down the hallway.
I attempted to comb through my tangled, knotty hair with my fingers. The footsteps got louder, and louder, and louder, until I was sure they were right outside the bedroom door -
Then they stopped.
The sound of keys jangling replaced the noise.
A key entered the lock and turned.
The door opened.
Once again, that nagging feeling of wanting to run, run through that door and get far, far away from this place whispered in the back of my sore head. But, I saw the gun, still faithfully at the man’s side like a guard dog.
And I couldn’t leave Elena and CJ here. It was stupid, I knew it, but according to Brie, I was a sweetheart. Plus, my hyperactive imagination plus my hypersensitivity wouldn’t stop showing me all the horrible things that might happen to them. We had all been gathered here by this man, be it his psychotic mind or the powers of some higher being working through him. If they were to suffer, I were to suffer with them. But more importantly, if I could help get them out, then I would.
However, less admirably, I had a sinking feeling that it wouldn’t be that easy to get out of this perfume-reeking farmhouse. Especially with that stupid ankle of mine.
I peeled my eyes away from the gun, then gasped when I saw the man’s face.
He wore no mask.
It became real to me then. It wasn’t me jumping to conclusions that said that our kidnapper was the chief of police. It was no longer speculation. It was true.
We would never be found.
Because the people keeping us were the ones that were supposed to be looking for us.
“Hello,” Porter said.
Elena started crying. Shivers crawled up my spine.
“It’s all right,” he said. I bit my tongue so hard I tasted blood. “I’m just here to look at Caden.”
I thought up a few choice words for him that translated to basically, “Leave me alone.” He slowly entered the room and Elena and I both flinched. He stopped walking.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said, the same way one would speak to a child. “I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just need to look at Caden. She got hurt.”
More mental choice words here. As much as I didn’t want to let the man even get me, I decided it would be better for that to happen than to try to stop him and face whatever consequences might become of that. Be smart, I reminded myself.
I nodded slowly, and the man came towards me as Elena backed herself into a corner. I would have done the same thing if I were her.
The police officer knelt down in front of where I was sitting on the bed. Much to my surprise, he was gentle with me, which I think terrified me more than he if had been mistreating me. With a considerate touch he moved my head around and lightly brushed his fingers over the painful spot on my head.
“It should be all right,” he said. “You hurt your ankle too, right?”
He must have noticed me limping. Slowly, I nodded.
“May I?” he asked.
No. I nodded again.
With the same gentle touch, he grabbed my bare foot.
Holy motherfucker- It hurt. But as much as it hurt, he was obviously trying to be careful. I watched in pain and in fascination as he closely examined my now more swollen ankle.
After a moment, he stopped looking. “I think it’s just twisted,” he said. “It should heal just fine as long as you stay off it and keep it iced. I’ll get you an ice pack at dinner.”
Great. Looking forward to it.
He stood up, then looked at Elena and I together. “Can either of you cook?”
Suffice to say, the causal question took me off guard. Neither Elena nor I said anything. He nodded. “Yeah, me neither. CJ!” he called, louder. He obviously knew about the thin walls. “Can you cook?”
I could feel CJ’s nervousness in the other room. Answer him, I mentally told him. Even if it’s a no.
“Not really,” CJ answered light-heartedly enough, but I could hear the tension in his voice. He was a good actor.
“Alright,” Porter said. “I hope you don’t mind bad cooking.”
He walked back out of the room, closing it behind him.
“What the hell was that?” Elena asked. I didn’t know what to say. “Is the door locked?”
I hadn’t heard it lock. She cautiously walked to the door and ever so slowly turned the knob. I could hear my heart pounding in my throat. “Elena…” I whispered. She looked at me with wide eyes. I didn’t feel great about this. “Be careful.”
She nodded and pulled the door open.
It took a second, then she gasped. “We can leave.” I don’t think she meant the comment for me. It was rather out of shock.
“I don’t think so, Elena, something seems-”
But she was already gone.
Dammit.
“What’s goin’ on?” CJ asked.
“Check if your door is locked,” I told him. There were creaking noises as he obviously got up. A few seconds later, I saw him through the open door.
“I guess not,” he said, and I could see the excitement in his eyes. It wasn’t nearly as much as Elena’s, but it was there.
Once again, something didn’t feel right here.
My feelings are usually right.
Damn it all, I thought, hobbling to my one good foot. But Porter had left the doors unlocked on purpose. If he didn’t want us walking around he would have locked them. That wasn’t what I was concerned about. What I was concerned about was the fact the Elena - emotionally unstable, scared, and nervous Elena - was now running around.
“Elena,” I told CJ. He looked confused for a second. Normally I would have explained more, but my lungs were more busy heaving huge painful breaths past my lips due to my ankle hurts, holy shit, too bad I didn’t pay attention in health class than they were on speaking. He nodded, though, so the two of us made our way through the creepy hallway that we had been lead to. Up ahead, there were lights turned on in what appeared to be kitchen. As CJ and I slowly made our way down the hallway, he being gentleman enough to lend me a helping hand, I noticed a quiet creaking sound from in front of us. CJ didn’t seem to notice it, though, because he kept walking.
“C-” A hand covered my mouth, muffling me. My heart burst in my chest as adrenaline caused all the pain in my body to be washed away and replaced with fight-or-flight reaction. The person yanked me to the side, and I flailed my arms around. My hand grabbed a lock of soft hair and I knew that I’d made a mistake even before Elena hissed an “Ow! Calm down, it’s just me!”
I’d been ready to bite her hand. For a second I considered still doing it, but she removed her hand, leaving me panting heavily and with my heart still racing. I was getting scarily used to the feeling of fear and adrenaline making anxiety crackle through my veins. It felt like an electric shock.
“Elena!” CJ whisper-yelled back. “What the hell are you doing?!”
“Trying to find a way out, what the fuck do you think I’m doing? Now help me!”
The two of them kept walking down the hallway, but I stayed behind.
This isn’t right, I was sure. Porder wouldn’t it go through all this and then mess up by keeping a door unlocked. And wait... he only went into the room where Elena and I were to go and check on me…
He never went into CJ's room. That means he purposely unlocked CJ's door.
“Guys…” I whispered as I walked into the pitch black hallway Elena just pulled us into. My eyes were slowly adjusting to the darkness and I could just barely make out an outline of what I thought was the door we were brought through.
“There’s a door,” Elena whispered in awe.
I noticed it too late. The other two didn't notice it at all. It was a thin dark wire that ran across the wall that led to the door. I struggled to open my mouth. “Elena!” I screamed.
But it was too late. She grabbed the doorknob and for a second I thought I smelled ozone.
I also thought I saw the world ending. As it turns out, it was just a life ending. Time slowed and kept me frozen in its grasp.
Elena screamed like a dying animal, her cry cutting through the air like a jagged knife blade.
She’s dying, dying, dying, my mind screamed with her. I don’t think my voice followed suit.
CJ’s did, though. He screamed “Elena!” and went running towards her.
CJ-
“No!” I yelled, and time released my body from its clutches to allow me to lunge forward and grab him, clawing at his clothes and tumbling us both to the hardwood floor to try to stop him.
Another one of the infinite ways all humans are alike: their bodies are great conductors of electricity.
In my own weakness, I clenched my eyes shut as Elena screamed for what felt like hours more, but they couldn’t have been, because someone can only die for so long. I couldn’t look. I didn’t want to look. I could feel her pain rattling through my bones and I could hear the electrified blood running through her veins.
When she stopped screaming, I heard the death cry in my head even louder. CJ began screaming again, this time out of horror. He yanked himself out of my grasp and ran to what was just a few minutes ago Elena Maria Lopez and now was a corpse. Maybe he thought she was still alive; I don’t know. I knew she was dead, though.
And I should have known she was going to die.
Shouldn’t I’ve?
Brie, I sobbed silently.
Another surprised cry ran through the air, and it was one that I was not expecting. It was a man’s voice. “Elena!” Porter yelled, running past me and pulling CJ off of Elena. “Elena, no, no, no, why!?” he yelled. He sounded distraught, which I couldn’t make sense of. It was obviously his contraption that killed her.
I knew she was dead, but apparently Porter wasn’t sure, as he checked for a pulse in the darkness.
“I told you to stay away from the doors and windows!” he shouted at us. I could hear his heart racing in his chest, just slightly slower than my own was. “I told you!”
The next several minutes went by a blur. The next thing I knew, I was sitting on the floor of the bedroom with my back to the wall. I knew that CJ was doing the same on the other side of the wall. Shivers racked my entire body, causing my ankle to throb. There was a paper plate with some sort of food on it. The smell made my stomach churn, but I’d just thrown up a few minutes ago so I had nothing left inside me to vomit. Briefly, I thought back to the book Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, when Vonnegut quickly inserts himself into the story to say that the man crying out that he was throwing up his guts had been him. For once, I understood what he had meant.
I’d just seen a human being die.
It wasn’t the first time I had seen something die. I had seen it once before.
But never like that. Not screaming in pain.
Why didn’t you listen to me, Elena?
Through the metal-covered window, I could hear the wind howling. That was right, it was supposed to be really cold tonight. I wondered if I ought to be thankful that I wasn’t still sitting in that damn barn. For some reason, I couldn’t work up the nerve to be grateful for anything.
“Hey,” CJ’s muffled voice said tiredly. It was the first time he’d said something since Elena died.
I sniffled.
“If my parents were here, they’d be talking about the kogarashi,” he said.
“The what?” I asked. My voice was hoarse and thick from screaming and crying.
He coughed. “It’s one of the few Japanese words that I know. It basically means the cold wind that signals the arrival of winter.”
I cleared my throat in an attempt to sound less like I was dying - ha. It didn’t work. “Both of your parents are from Japan but you don’t speak the language?”
A moment of silence went by. “No,” he said, this time quieter. Remorseful. “Growing up, I was always embarrassed when my parents would speak Japanese around my friends.” He seemed to chuckle self-deprecatingly at that. “Once.... in fourth grade, w-when I got onto the basketball team and they were really proud of me, they came to the last game of the season. I got the winning shot and they looked…” his voice cracked, “they looked so proud. Then they started congratulating me in Japanese, an’ I-”
He stuttered. I didn’t say anything, I wanted to let him get it out by himself. Sometimes, that’s what a person really needs.
“-I told them to stop and speak in English like normal people.” He coughed again. “They looked so sad, an’ I-
“I realized too late that I was being a fucking idiot, but I never apologized to them for it.”
I thought about my parents. About Brie. About all the things I should have said, and will likely never have the chance to.
“I guess I’ll have to tell them when I get home,” CJ said, this time with less tears choking him.
He was optimistic. Optimistic in the way I couldn’t be. I had seen Death. I had seen her as she took away Elena. I had seen her before; but she has never seen me.
She has now.
When she took Elena, I saw her dark green eyes flash over all of us.
As I thought of those eyes, my heart began beating painfully fast, threatening to pull apart my chest. Blood rushed through my head like a torrent. Pain, pain, pain. I was suffocating. “CJ,” I gasped.
“Yeah?” he sounded panicked. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
Brie, I sobbed silently. Mom? Dad?
I clenched my eyes shut and tried to focus on my breathing, like the psychologist had always told me to do.
The problem was, when I had trouble breathing, there was always someone there that would help drag the water from my lungs and lead me to the air. When I was born, it was my family. When I met Brie, it was her. They kept my head above the water when my legs were too weak to keep swimming.
That’s what love is, isn’t it?
None of them were there as I sat on the floor unable to breathe.
My shoulders heaved with my attempts to take in oxygen. I could slightly hear the sounds of CJ shouting to me. I closed my eyes and for just a second, saw a flash of blonde hair.
I took in one small breath.
I heard my mother’s timid voice.
Another small breath.
I felt my father’s hand lightly brush my shoulder.
My lungs filled with air and my eyes flew open. My heart was still beating fast due to adrenaline, but I wasn’t suffocating. I had been pulled out of the water.
“CJ,” I said again.
“Yes?” his voice was high-pitched.
I looked straight ahead and saw another picture of the two sisters. They were smiling. “Just tell them that you love them.”
it’s okay.
Who do you thinking you’re kidding?
True, them.
But you’re not kidding yourself. You’re not kidding me.
You don’t want to be around others, that isn’t news. You haven’t wanted to for a while. Don’t act and play the part of a social butterfly because you feel you have to. If you don’t want to, then don’t. No one will blame you for staying in your shell, the ones you care about have already come to learn that is how you prefer life.
Don’t worry about trying to impress others or pretend to be someone you’re not. If you’re happy, then stay there. That’s really how easy it is.
Permanent Midterm Break
I hoped that the world would end before my shift at work ended. It would have been poetic, honestly. I’d been trying for years to get a job and finally found one several weeks into the start of my university career. And then I would die. That, and, I really did not want to continue my studying for my upcoming history exam or work on an essay for my literature class. When I finished work that fateful Saturday, I would have to do both of those things, before – you guessed, it, going back to work Sunday morning.
And hey, I had just purchased the last two Lord of the Rings books that I was forgetting to complete my collection. So, life complete, I suppose.
I mean, I had gotten into college. I had a part-time job. I had Lord of the Rings. I was good for life.
Granted, I might have been a bit upset that I never got around to publishing any of my writing. But I suppose at my tender age of I’m-not-tellin’-you, this-is-the-Internet, I was never expected to have published anything. Still, I’d been practicing for years, biding my time until I was old enough to have some sort of reputation in the world. It would have been a bit of shame, in a way.
But I really didn’t want to write that essay or get up on Sunday morning to return to work.
The next morning, I realized as I was driving to that fateful place where I go to make money and sweat like a pig while dealing with unruly customers, that the world hadn’t ended.
Really, it was a pity in the end.
I mean, I still have to go to work this Saturday, and I still have that history exam next Monday, and I still have that literature essay due next Tuesday.
Poetic irony ruined.
But I least still have Lord of the Rings.
Why?
1. Because I wanted to find a place where I could post my rambling thoughts without anyone that I know seeing them.
2. For the aforementioned reason.
3. Because it's the only thing I'm good at, I suppose.
Female
Less than 20.
Currently in the process of being educated. More like worked to death, but if that's what education is, well, then.
In school and employed. And it's more difficult than I thought it would be.
In three years, being well on my way to graduating university with a stable state of mind and more than a penny to my name would be just fantastic.
L’Artiste
“He was a man of few words,” they’ll tell you.
But that isn’t completely true. In fact, it is false to say that this man - boy might be a better thing to call him - was one of few words.
In reality, this boy was a master of words, a practised expert in the subject. But it was not spoken words that were his domain, it was written words. For this boy was an author, as precise and as careful as a painter, his pen his brush and his words his paint. Indeed, this boy had talent! Truly, a quintessential artist of the floating world.
His mind was a powerful machine, creating worlds, bringing characters to life. He would sit alone for hours, never speaking with his tongue, speaking volumes with his hands.
To the few that understood, he was a success. The brilliant mind of a brilliant artist creating art that was a marvel to behold.
But as it is in this physical world, art is as fleeting as beauty, not suspended for all eternity, as it is in the floating world.
He would temporarily leave his words for a while, if he was told he must. He was not one to cause disagreements in the physical world.
Those older than him would smile at him, their wizened eyes and skin wrinkling as they did so. “Do you know what you want to be when you’re older?” they would ask.
He would nod, a twinge of nervousness in his heart (as aforementioned, he was a man of few spoken words,) and reply that yes, he did, he wanted to be a writer.
Their reactions were always the same. As if he hadn’t spoken, they would laugh and shake their heads, saying “Oh, don’t worry, you’ll find what you want to do in time!”
He would smile in return, his lips tight. He would silently assure himself that they didn’t know what they were talking about, that they were just blind. That they didn’t understand his art, that his goal was right.
Ah, yes, truly, an artist of the floating world. Perhaps he would have succeeded, had the physical world had been more kind to him. He had been walking to class when a careless driver, drunk from the night previous, hit him with a two-ton pickup truck, and the dear artist was killed.
Pity, pity, pity.
Pity he didn’t prove those adults wrong. Pity he didn’t become the celebrated artist he had always dreamed of being. Pity the physical world wasn’t so kind to him, ending his beautiful dreams and words with the mistake of another man.
The words remained, their meanings gathering dust. The stories were forgotten. And what of the elders?
They’ll shake their heads and pity the man of few words. “He died so young,” they’ll say. “He hadn’t even figured out what he wanted to do with his life before it was taken from him.”
An Average Friday Night
I didn't goddamn wanna die, okay. I didn't. Everyone's going around, saying that "oh, it was all his fault he went and jumped off that cliff." But lemme tell you, it wasn't my fault, and I didn't wanna bloody go cannonball off a rock face wall and into the big blue sea. I'm sure now you're thinking, "Well, then, Carl, what really did happen?"
So you know crazy fangirls? Like, the kind that drools over every step her favorite celebrity takes? That kind. Well, I had one of those. And some shit happened. And uh, well, I'm sorta dead. Sorta.
Young Gods
You enter the darkened gymnasium and hear the sound of fists pounding a punching bag. The divider prevents you from seeing the boxer from the entrance of the room. So one of the other three is in there… which one? You do a quick mental checklist. No shouting. Not Angel. Rules out the boys, leaving the two girls. You listen to the footsteps. She jumps around, fighting like a wolf. Attack violently, retreat back, lick wounds if need be, attack again. It’s how she fights, it’s how she lives. She is a wolf, she is a fighter, she is a protector, she is Liar.
Liar is not her real name, but it’s the one you all prefer. It’s the word a cruel man cut into her back. It has scarred and stayed there and she carries it as a symbol of pride and strength. Truth be told, none of your names are your real names; they are all other words that represent your pride and strength.
No point in calling out. If you can hear her, she can hear you without trying. You enter and see her facing the other way, her pale skin illuminated by the sunlight above her head. She is wearing exercise attire- running shorts that clearly show the thorn crown tattoo wrapping around her right thigh, a sports bra showing off the scar on her back and a tattoo you all have over her heart, her hands and bare feet are wrapped in cloth bands for practice, and her long golden hair that she is so proud of is tied into a braid that bounces off her hips. From most accounts, minus the scar, she looks like a completely normal teenage girl punching a bag, except for the black cloth wrapped around her head and falling with her hair, blindfolding her.
Suddenly, the pounding noise stops. She is standing there, gripping the punching bag between her hands, her back facing you. Slowly, her head moves so her unseeing face is looking at the ground. The world then freezes. You both stand in your places, unmoving. For a few seconds, you stay like that. You know what she’s doing. She’s taking a mental checklist, just like you were doing when you walked in. She’s not going to ask who’s there; she is both too confident and too prideful. Finally, she decides she knows who is there.
“Hey, Axel.” Her musical voice carries well across the large room.
You smile, because she is smiling. “Hullo.” You both cross the room to each other, her walking in a perfectly straight line even though the blindfold is on.
She wraps her arms around your chest, and you hug her back and lightly kiss her forehead, just above the blindfold.
It’s often been thought that your group has some sort of foursome romantic interest, because you always are so close to each other. But you don’t, it’s just the way you are as best friends that have been through a lot together.
She backs away and reaches her hands towards your face. Slowly, as she has always done, she brushes her hands over the features of your face: your cheekbones, your nose, your chin. Her long pink fingernails tickle your face slightly at the strange, but not unusual, mannerism. You all know why she does it; you all choose to not talk about it, because you know it’s in her blood to do it. It’s also the reason she wears the blindfold.
When she puts her hands down, you reach to the back of her head and slowly untie the knot on the blindfold, careful not to worry her. When you take down the cloth, you are for about the sixteen-thousandth time startled by her shockingly blue eyes surrounded with mascara. Apparently, when she and her brother were born one of the nurses thought the babies were possessed by demons due to the brightness of their eyes. Well, technically, her eyes. Her brother had the same color, just his happened to be clouded over and blind.
The first few years of their lives Liar and her twin brother were impossible to separate. They never left each other’s sides- the sister on the left and the brother on the right. They had their own language that made sense to no one but them, and when she was old enough to figure out how to do it, and was allowed to, Liar began wearing a blindfold to keep her the same as her brother. Because of her on and off voluntary blindness she developed the incredible hearing and sensing ability of a blind person even though she still had sight.
There was a reason she was destroyed mentally and emotionally when her brother was killed by the same disease that blinded him.
You never met the boy, he died before you met Liar at age six, but you thank God every day he existed and Liar turned out the way she did. You wouldn’t change her, or the others, for the world.
“Ax? You okay?” Her voice spurs you out of your thoughts.
You look at her face, at the blue jewels staring at you with concern, and look down. “Yeah, I’m good.”
She tilts her head slightly, confused. You clear your throat and decide to change the subject as she walks to her duffel bag, the contents of which are strewn on the floor. That’s your Liar, classy as always.
“今、袋を使用できますか?” “Can I use the bag now?” you ask.
“絶対に。なぜ我々 は日本語で話しているか?” “Absolutely… why are we speaking in Japanese?” she replies, without looking at you.
“Your fighting style just now. It was Kenjutsu form. Samurai style. Or did you not notice?”
She smirks at you. “Very observant, young Padawan.”
“I’m older than you, you know.”
“You don’t act it.”
That was true. While often reckless (second only to you in the often reckless group of four), headstrong, overly emotional, impulsive, prideful, anger-prone, violent, and strangely independent (likely the result of being permanently separated from the person she was born to be with her entire life by none other than Death himself), Liar was the youngest but most mature out of the four of you.
You pull off your T-shirt, grab the tape on the floor, and begin wrapping your wrists the way your teacher taught you and your friends to years ago. You look at Liar, who is standing in front of the wall covered by a huge mirror, reflecting an image of the whole room. She had taken the braid out of her hair, and had begun brushing it. You hear a soft, light, musical noise, and realize she’s singing.
“But do you feel like a young god? And the two of us are just young gods, and we’ll be flying through the streets with the people underneath, and they’re running, running, running…”
You know the song. You ought to, considering she has been playing that album nonstop for nigh a week.
As she sets down the hairbrush and continues singing the chorus, her voice gains confidence and volume. Slowly, as she doesn’t mean to, her hips and arms begin swaying to the melody of song she is singing.
You don’t mean to, but you finish the chorus with her.
“and they’re running, running, running…”
She stops singing, instead takes on a much harder form of dancing along to the song you now sing alone.
“He says, ’Oh, baby girl, don't get cut on my edges, I'm the king of everything and oh, my tongue is a weapon-'” You are suddenly cut off by an unexpected banging noise from the door. By the mirror Liar nearly jumps out of her skin.
“¿Hola? ¿Niños pequeños? Are you here?” An old woman’s voice with a thick accent comes from the source of the banging. You smile, and Liar lights up.
“¡Abuela!” She shouts happily, and the two of you begin running to the door. There, you find your abuela, a Hispanic woman who is related to none of you but whom you love and respect as another grandmother.
As it turns out, Abuela had knocked over an old storage shelf, which you and Liar pick up and set back without a problem. That done, the smiling girl followed tradition and properly bent down and kissed the back of the old woman’s right hand; you followed suite.
The two women then speak in a flurry of Spanish- you understand of course, but don’t pay attention much. The two talk about what had happened in the few months since the teens had last seen their abuela.
Eventually, Abuela prompts that her niños pequeños (for some reason she still calls all of you “little children”, even though you all have at least a foot of height and 50 pounds of weight more compared to her) go get changed into more street-worthy clothes- “it’s not good for a young niña or niño go around like that!” – and you and Liar walk back into the dark gymnasium.
“Ax, what’s up?” she asks you.
“What do you mean?”
She shrugs. “You’re quiet,” she remarks, not looking at you.
“You’re making up for it.”
Slight growl from her. She’s trying to be nice, you think, not an easy task for her.
She starts humming and keeps humming until you leave the building together.
Suddenly, you start laughing, eliciting a quizzical look from her.
“You’re weird, Liar,” you tell her.
She stares at you. “Thanks, I think.”
She begins singing again, her lovely voice filling the air, and you soon join her as you walk together to meet the others.
“He says, ‘Ooh, baby girl, you know we're gonna be legends, I'm a king and you're a queen and we will stumble through heaven, If there's a light at the end, it's just the sun in your eyes, I know you wanna go to heaven, but you're human tonight’…"
~
Song: Young Gods by Halsey
No copyright infringement intended
Day 2.
I asked my manager to switch me to the Saturday shift.
It's nothing personal, I swear, I told him. I just had something I wanted to do on Sundays, and besides, the coffeehouse was busier on Saturdays.
And lo and behold, I saw the girl in the coffeehouse again. Her hair was still auburn and lightly curled, but today instead of a white blouse and floral shirt she wore a light blue dress that fell to her knees. To many, it would be considered old-fashioned, but it suited her.
Her fingernails were a sky- blue color as she took her latte in one hand, smiled at me again, and walked back to the same table as last week, another book in her hand.
No one had ever captivated me as much as this girl in the coffeehouse did.
I realized then that I would have to speak to her.