Words I Dare Not Speak • Zarry

1. Scripted

Present day - April 2012

People moving all the time inside a perfectly straight line. Don't you wanna just curve away?

Man was Nostalgia, ULTRA by Frank Ocean hitting lately.

Could be blue, I don't mind. Without you it's a waste of time.

I had his Strawberry Swing cover bumping loudly through my IPod and into my dome, my red and black Beats headphones secured over my ears as my red suede Nike high-tops scuffed up the ground in the senior hallway on the second floor of my high school in Beachwood Canyon.

I was obsessed with this mixtape and Frank was a genius.

His voice was so fucking chill, melting my mind-waves like butter in this specific sort of way that no recent artist had ever done for me.

At least not like this.

I wasn't sure if it was the lyrics he penned out or the way he went about putting it all together or just the tone of the messages he was trying to convey, but fuck was he good.

I loved music. I loved the way music could fix shit, even if it was just a temporary fix. Even if the antidote only lasted for just 2 minutes and 25 seconds.

There was an artist fit for every experience, every emotion. I felt pretty deeply about stuff and life fucked with my emotions more than people realized, mostly because I kept it all to myself and acted like I was fine.

But music helped.

If I was mad and feeling like ass I'd just lay back and listen to some alternative 90's bands like Depeche Mode or the angry girl persuasion that is Alanis Morissette.

My content vibe for whenever I wanted to spark up a joint after my parents went to bed was anything Rhythm and Blues or some old school hip hop, especially shit like Aaliyah, Usher, Brandy and Monica, Mary J. Blige, Biggie, Tupac, MF Doom.

And Frank.

If I was trying to space out and forget about my life for a minute then I'd throw it back to the sixties and seventies eras with something trippy like the later Beatles stuff, Sargent Pepper's, or any Pink Floyd album.

And although maybe it didn't look like I'd be the type to listen to this specific genre, especially from the outside looking in, but pure happiness to me was country music.

Shania Twain blaring through the speakers with the windows rolled all the way down on a car ride to nowhere, just because.

That's something only Harry and I did.

I stood there at my locker in a daze, bopping my head to the low-fi beats and shuffling through a load of shit that I had scattered everywhere, trying to find the books I needed just after the last bell rang.

Zoning out, I was already half baked. I smoked the roach of an old joint in the bathroom by the library earlier.

But thank fucking god for it being the end of the school day because the hours were much too long and boring for me to sit through lately, especially with only two months left of school before graduation.

The sweet scent of that Lucky You by Lucky Brand perfume attacked me just then as I felt two jabby fingers poke me in the lower back.

"The fuck," I muttered, flinching slightly.

But it was just Taryn who had snuck up on me. I ignored her, shoving both my copies of 1984 by George Orwell and Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, as well as that deathly Bio II textbook into my red canvas backpack, then turning around to face her.