Nearafter (D.E.A.T.H. bk. 1)

Chapter Thirteen: [Sam]

SAMANTHA LOCKHART METICULOUSLY ARRANGED THE ITEMS ON HER MOTHER'S DESK.

She lined the pens next to each other on one corner: reds with reds, blues with blues, and blacks...well, there was just the one black pen, which she held in her hand as she rummaged through her mother's desk for another. There had to be at least two of each color or the problem would bother her, and she would never be able to do her homework.

She pulled open the center drawer and the inside desk was cluttered with stacks of multicolored sticky notes, a rainbow of paper clips, staples, highlighters, and band-aids. Her shoulders sank.

Her mother, of course, probably did this on purpose just to drive her completely insane. The entire drawer was in a disarray. She sat the one black pen down on the desktop, just for a moment, as she rearranged the contents in the drawer. She stacked the sticky notes together, yellows with yellows, oranges with oranges, greens with greens. Thankfully, there was an even number of each color.

She moved on to the paper clips next, counting them out by color, throwing away the extras, and stashing them all back into their respective boxes. She did the same with the staples and the highlighters and arranged the band-aids by size.

When she finished, she carefully pushed the drawer in, exhaling in relief. She stared at the pen still laying defiant on the desk, the lonely, odd numbered black pen. She searched the other drawers in the desk. No pens, and each drawer was stuffed to the brim with papers, which she was fine with. The papers would not bother her and the fact that they were everywhere would not either. Of course, if they were her own papers, she would count each sheet out, she would make sure that there were an even number in each stack and that each stack had no corners sticking out.

Excluding the pen problem, everything else on her mother's desk was exactly where it needed to be. She twirled the one black pen in her fingers, looking from the pen to the trashcan, and then back again. She wished that she did not have to, though if she did not, then this would only bother her, and she would never be able to do her homework.

Relenting finally, she swung her chair around one-hundred eighty degrees and tossed the pen across the room.

Score!

She got up and went to the supply cabinet next to the door, opened the bottom drawer and breathed a sigh of relief upon seeing that everything was still in proper order from the last time that she had been in her mother's office. She cracked open a new box of black pens, three hundred to each pack, and one hundred to each set. She fished out four brand new black pens and placed them in between the four reds and the four blues.

Satisfied, she sat down at her mother's desk. She put her ear buds back. The song that she had been listening to was paused on her iPod at exactly one minute and forty seconds in. She pressed play, picked her pencil up and resumed work on her report.

Another minute into the song, and she had to stop again. An old man stood at the service window, which was pulled shut, while obnoxiously tapping the glass with a clipboard.

Does he not see the freaking bell! Samantha wondered. Annoyed, she pulled the ear buds from her ears and slid the service window open.

"I'm sorry, sir, I don't work here-" she began to say but the old man had already launched into a lengthy and detailed description of what he suspected might be wrong with him.

"I got these painful spots on my lower back, near my ass," he began to explain, leaning over the counter, too far over the counter, through the service window while reaching down his backside as he went on. "There's about three or four of 'em, all lumped together. I think they're grouping up, forming some kinda mutant, super cist," he said. Samantha grimaced, while shaking her head and trying to push the old man back out of the service window.