Just Bent

Chapter Eleven

 Lunch time from then on found me on the back stoop of the store, surrounded by wooden crates and far uncut fields, wildflowers populating the spaces in between the blades of sky reaching grass. That concrete was a loading dock that usually sat empty on the inside of the lot, usually to my left, tucked into the the corner of the building; a slat of grey that backed out into the wild.

My mood was dark, my brow furrowed and my chest hallow. I'd woken up like this, with a tension burrowed under my skin, into my veins.

I didn't usually feel this resolute, desolate on an average day, but today it had overcome me to the point that I was helpless against it, so helpless I had found myself etching an overwhelming catharsis into page upon page of a small spiral notebook that I had become attached to over the past few days. Every moment I wasn't working, or fixing things around the house for Mom or walking aimlessly in the early morning, chasing off demons or running away from memories, which ever one suited the moment, I was writing in this book.

It came in waves, a blind whirlwind that left me spent after the pen stopped moving. My handwriting was jagged, empty of finesse, just a desperate scrawl that I did not read. I refused to read any of it. I couldn't. This mid-June afternoon was no different.

Mr. Hamilton was like a propeller in the wind, he always sensed the slightest shift in me. My lunch hour wasn't until 1, but today he had come to me at 11:50 with a knowing eye and a kind smile and told me that I could take it then. And so I found myself out back, my brown bag lunch discarded and forgotten next to me, black ink blazing a trail against the white page, inking my mood into oblivion and releasing me.

I was so lost in the tumbling outpouring of my blurred mood that when something crashed behind me, I was jolted up from something like a trance.

I had whirled around before I could think and stared down a wide eyed Kaye. Her hair was pulled back into a high pony-tale, her hair longer now then it had been when I first met her. Her multiple piercings glinted in the sun, her hands were put out in front of her as if to stop me from stampeding. She regarded me the way someone regards a wild, skittish animal. Slow movements, once the realization sinks in, and then calm understanding eyes. So much like her grandfather's...

"Sorry. I didn't mean to startle you."

I became aware of my body then, wound taught, muscles coiled, adrenaline hissing 'fight' in my veins, shoulders hunched as if to take a blow. I knew what I looked like through her eyes, and she knew that I knew. I exhaled slowly, relaxing, and then feeling ashamed. I shook my head.

"No... its not your fault-" I swung around finding my little notebook and hastily stooped to pick it up where it had dropped; the pen too.

"-I should have been paying attention."

"I write lyrics in mine." My eyes snapped back to her face. She was looking downward, picking her way over the cracks in the pavement to where I was standing. When she reached me, and looked up at me, a small smile played at the corners of her lips.

"Mind if I sit with you?"

My body was reacting before I could think, nodding, and then sinking back into my seat beside her, without my go ahead.

She also had a brown bagged lunch and hummed quietly as she pulled small tupperware from the way less un-scrunched version of mine. I recognized the tune from somewhere but couldn't name it for the life of me.

The sun had changed positions in the sky, beginning to hide behind the sharp corner that lead to the side of the store. I watched as the changing light did something to the skin on her face, her brown eyes glowing a warm, oaky chocolate brown, a dusting of freckles on her nose, a honied tan spreading over all the skin my eyes could see.