The Inadequate Experiments: 2. Friction [Original]

Part 1; Impulsivity - 1. Abominable

 Raindrops lashed the window pane, white noise reverberating through the walls of the large house as the drops of water struck the glass and raced each other to the sill. Lightning forked through the sky at a speed impossible to calculate, posing unthinkable danger to whatever it struck, yet the forest it entered didn’t even shiver in the swirling wind. No longer than a second had passed since the lightning before thunder clapped over-head, a naturally occurring grandfather clock, telling me it was time to go home, just as it had been for the past week and a half. I never listened to it, though. My home wasn’t home anymore.

I dragged my eyes away from the window and the mesmerising weather, and back to the book that sat on my lap, leaning against my knees as I sat in the window seat in Oliver’s bedroom; my back against the wall, the window beside me. I forced my eyes to focus on the page, to decipher the symbols that served as letters and string them into words, stitch them into sentences, and maybe even pull the threads tighter so they became paragraphs. But my eyes drifted across the words, the letters floating off the page and dancing before my eyes. I sighed in frustration and slammed the book shut, forcing it over my knees and to the other end of the window seat, the gold block letters on the cover gleaming in wake of another lightning strike. I didn’t need to force my brain to read the words to know what they said; A Tale of Two Cities.

It had been that way ever since my Mum died; the one thing I loved enough to distract myself with was unfeasible to me. It felt almost like karma – I couldn’t bring myself to tell her the ending as she took her last breaths, so it seemed only fitting that I couldn’t even read past the first page, let alone that far. For the third time that hour, I reached back over to the book, opening it again in another feeble attempt to read it.

“Oliver!”  A voice was yelling somewhere in the house. “God dammit,” they said, a little quieter, before, “Oliver!”

Just as I blocked out the voice, two sets of heavy footsteps thundered up the stairs and the door to the bedroom burst open.

“Oliver!”

I looked up from my book and met the eyes of the intruder. Blue. Shining. Excited.

Calliope blinked. “You’re not Oliver,”

“I daresay I’m not,” I mumbled.

The younger girl stepped into the room, moving around the double bed to sit on the side across from me, leaving David to stand awkwardly in the doorway. “So, you’re still here, then?” She reached up and tucked a lock of brown waves behind her right ear, revealing the true extent of the swirling scar on her neck and arm for a fraction of a second, before she removed her hand and the hair fell exactly where it had been before.

I nodded. “I don’t really have anywhere else to go.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You could always go home,”

I shook my head. “It’s not my home anymore. All that’s there is a man who isn’t my father, and two fourteen year old girls who are hardly even my sisters. I don’t even know if they’d want me back. I’m an abomination.”

“They miss you, Sera.” Calliope insisted, ignoring my comment about being an abomination; I hadn’t realised at the time, but that was insulting to the both of us, not just me. “They want you to go home.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know if I can face going home quite yet.”

Her face softened, and she reached out to pat my knee. “I’m sure Mum won’t mind you sticking around. I think she likes you more than she likes me. Not that that’s a surprise, but still. I think she wouldn’t want you leaving if you weren’t comfortable with it. You need a Mum right now. She’s willing to fill that place for you.”