Scary Kids (NaNoWriMo 2019)

Chapter 6.

Busker Street is like any other main strip in a small town. It has about ten buildings on each side of the road, all built at different points in time so that the architecture looks like a four-year-old's collage of magazine clippings. There's the post office, some mom and pops shops, a local hipster café and two restaurants that have been in a heated feud since 1978. Personally, I think April's has the better homemade ketchup. I'm really not kidding, they've been fighting over ketchup for almost forty years. Now, this is nothing in comparison to the oldest house in Sandsville which sits right at the end of the road. Whoever was in charge of city planning really screwed up when designing the layout. Who would put a dead end on the busiest street in town?! Somebody tell me because, for a town on the brink of two-thousand people, half of them have never heard of a three-point turn. And why make that stupid old house the center of it all? I don't think anyone has lived there since the 1920s and whatever records we had on the people who originally built the place went up in flames with the library, which was attached to the school in 1953. ... You can see why I wanted to leave. There's no way I was going to become one of those mindless drones who created this mess.

"This place looks like the rapture just took place," Elijah mentions.

"Hasn't it always looked like this?" I say scratching my head.

"Well," he starts, "Mrs. Fudge is usually sitting on her rocking chair outside of Lavender's Emporium."

I giggle as he mentions the old woman's name.

"What?" he pries.

"I thought only preschoolers called her that," I reply.

"Hey," he jokingly snaps, "seventeen-year-olds are still three years old at heart."

"Says who ?" I point out.

"I do!" he says.

"You're funny," I chuckle as I lightly tap and rest my head on his shoulder for a few seconds.

"Despite everything," he tells me in somewhat of a disbelief, "how where we not friends before this?"

"We're friends?!" I squeal in awe.

"We're going to have to be, aren't we?"

"Yeah, I guess," I say nudging him with my fist, "it's nice to have a friend, and I'm not going to lie when I say that I like you better than Frank."

"You better not tell him that," he snickers.

"What would he even say?"

He hums for a second, "I don't know, maybe... I thought you actually liked me."

"I didn't say I didn't like him," I remind him, "you just have a better pros list."

"I doooo?" he replies.

"I'm not going to reveal all my secrets," I tell him as he grins at my comment.

We continue to walk along the sidewalk for a while and just as Elijah said, something felt off. The sky might be overcast but this place is ominously deserted. I even stopped to look through the tinted glass of Olivier's Hardware to see absolutely no one. The lights weren't even on which told me that there wasn't anyone in the back counting stock.

"I think you might be right," I say.

"Me?"

"Yes, you," I reply sarcastically. "I half expect to see cowboys in the street having a shootout while everyone else hides away behind the shutters."

He takes a second to look around, "Where do you think everyone is?"

"I don't know," I try to come up with something, "maybe city hall?"

"It wouldn't hurt to take a look," he says.

We retrace some of our steps back a couple of blocks before turning in the opposite direction to where we came from. Within a couple of minutes, I can see cars blocking the entire width of the road as they lead up towards the stairs of those large, patriotic like, ochre doors.

"What the hell is going on?!" Elijah says capturing my exact surprised confusion.

I walk ahead, slightly, and he follows. We're weaving around all the cars, which we didn't really need to, but it's just one of those habits. I notice a few vans lined directly at the front with large clear logos that wrapped all the way around their hulls.

"Is that-?" he asks.

"I think so," I reply, addressing his implying.

I grab tightly onto his hand and start pulling him along.

"What are you doing?" he questions frightened.

"Just trust me, okay," I say. "We're only going to walk through the door."

"What?!"

"It's going to be fine. Haven't you ever wanted to do this as a kid?"

I watch him shake his head, "No..."

"Really?"

His answer stays the same, "Yeah, I only ever wanted to fly."

I try to reassure him, "Well, pretend like you wanted to walk through walls, it'll make it easier."

He doesn't even get a word in before I pull him right through the thickness of those two-inch doors.

On the other side, the first thing I feel is a large blast of hot air blowing right past us in the presence of bright yellow lights reflecting off of the large crystal chandelier hanging twenty feet above the mosaicked floor.

There are at least a two-hundred people crammed into this too small hall and half of them are holding these huge cameras on their shoulders. At the very front of the procession the mayor, along with the police, chief stand on a podium taking questions.

Although the space was full to the brim, there were still dozens of people whizzing by us, some familiar like Percy and others who I had never seen before.

Elijah is scanning everything, just as I did, and without even noticing it he disappears from my sight.

"Elijah!" I call his name out, trying to see above the wave of electronics.

He's only a few inches taller than me, but it was still impossible to even tell where he was. I've always hated walking right through other people, it makes me feel incomplete in some weird way, yet I had to find him as quickly as I could and my best bet at doing so was to make my way to the front.

I push my way through the uneasiness and when I'm finally in the clear it took me less than a second to see him. He was taking one step at a time towards a girl sitting in a chair covered by shadows from the second-floor balcony. It was a little ways back behinds the flags that stood as a backdrop for the whole event.

"Alice?" I hear him cry.