Subjective Awareness [Reworked]

Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight  

Adel's eyes were closed, her mouth shut tightly as if she convinced herself that she was invisible, she really could be to others. A cavernous voice crushed her infantile hopes with its sheer intensity. "Who are you, again?"

Adel sucked in as much nitrogen and oxygen as she needed to build her adrenaline up to answer. Still with her back towards him she said, "I'm a land surveyor. I was told to come down here and update my records about a few things. You didn't know about it because it was only something our office needed." She heard a stifled smirk from behind her and wrinkled her nose. "I just finished up so I'll be on my way." She lifted her right foot hoping upon every fortune cookie that had ever been right that he would let her go.

"You really think it’s gonna be that easy? What's your name?" she remained silent, still arguing to herself that if she was uncooperative, he would eventually just agree to her running away like a dog with its tail between its legs. "Oh, a smart guy, eh? First things first: how about you turn around? Can you do that for me?" Adel expanded her lips in an indecisive frown, but, to even her surprise, lifted her toes that had acted the solicitors of attachments to the ground, and slowly inched her way around to face her captor.

To her abrupt vexation, it was the laid back man, standing at a much taller height than she had originally predicted. He was staring at her with complete befuddlement and Adel wasn't quite sure how she felt about it. "That’s better," he said, giving her an once-over.  She hastily got jammed on a sudden anxiety about the clothes she had chosen. However, despite every hormone influencing her physical amenities to feel embarrassed, she forced herself not to blush. I'm not even gonna go there, she insisted, gagging at the thought.

"What's your name?" the man asked again, his persistence rubbing her the wrong way as sandpaper on plywood.

"Why do you wanna know so badly?" She immediately considered herself a fool. She had forgotten that the man still had every right to call the cops on her.

"Well it could be because you were hiding in my bushes, or the fact that you claimed to be a land surveyor, at seven o clock at night, riding a bicycle, without a clipboard or equipment. Sooo, this all leads me to wonder what a person like that is doing here and generally, pleasantries are good starters for topics like this."

Adel squirmed a bit in her clothes; he saw this and continued. "Fine, I'll start. My name's Eli. How bout now?" His face seemed perfectly innocent and hopeful. Her mind searched for the right thing to do. Who even gets in situations like this? Freaks, that's who, just plain creepers.   She couldn't find a single legitimate course of action. Nothing prudent came to mind so, in lack of anything else appealing, she replied, "Adel," purposefully withholding her last name in case he would call the police.

She vaguely laughed at her brother’s would-be reaction to a phone call of that nature. “Mr. Forestead, your sister Adel was caught prowling outside a suburban home earlier this evening. We have her in custody but she's not being very cooperative; she keeps repeating, the chipmunks made me do it." She laughed again; she would throw in the chipmunk part just for laughs. Now she somewhat wished she would get arrested.

The man standing three feet from her remained still, analyzing this odd situation of a girl. It was thing to catch someone in your bushes; it was another to discover it was a young woman. It seemed even odder to him that she did not show evidence of penitence for her crime. He could not process what was going on in this girl's mind, but he was growing in increasing determination to find out. "Ok, well, Adel" he paused and looked at her face as if to verify that it was correct, "would you like to come in?"

Now Adel was the one reeling from shock from the oddity of the man. "What?" the question stumbled out of her mouth before she realized that she looked like a retard. "I mean," she started over, "what?" Damn, that didn't work.