Tweetie

8

"Not this. I thought you'd be uptight or a little big-headed. I really didn't think you'd just be eighteen." He shook his head again, his face falling at the last fact, "with the way the media writes about you, I had thought you were thirty at the very least, luckily I already knew you were young because of Roderick. It's still hard to remember that, seeing your name in the paper most Weekends."

It was true. The media talked about her constantly. Most of the time they discussed who she could be, trying to uncover the mystery of Hazel White. Other times, they would complain because she made a difficult choice that not everybody agreed with. She understood, she knew they focused on her because she was so unknown and known at the same time. But the way they wrote about her, it dehumanised her and stripped her of the essentials. Her age, her work, her commitment. All they wanted to know was her name, her face and whether she was good or bad, no matter how grey good or bad was.

"Mentally, I'm a seventy-three year old lady."

"Seventy-three," Archie scoffed, "more like seven and three months."

"That's it, no more coffee."

"No!"

She laughed, already knowing it definitely wouldn't be his last coffee. Then her smile fell as she noticed movement from the corner of her eye. It wasn't much, but it was enough to make her turn to the glass door directly ahead of the counter and squint.

Those five boys were back.

Only two of them carried a bag slung on their shoulder and not full enough to have all of their textbooks for school, their black uniform blazers were gone and the blue ties they also probably should have been wearing were either missing or hanging from their pockets. It seemed none of them were planning on going into school, instead, they looked as though they had left their homes with the pieces they needed to make it seem as though they were, but during their trip, they removed them, uncomfortable in the things they were forced to wear.

She felt her stomach twist.

She knew Joel was nice, but their hardened faces and the smiles that said more than 'I'm really happy' and instead said 'I'm happy so you better not piss me off' made her wary to keep trying to watch them. She wasn't going to become their friend, obviously, that would only end badly. But, even watching them made her feel the oddness of knowing she would never learn much about them. They built walls around themselves with locked doors the others had keys for but nobody else did. She was going to need to find a copy of those keys... maybe even a skeleton key, if such a thing existed.

"Those boys are back," Hazel said, knowing she had time before they actually arrived to hear her talk about them. "Do they skip school a lot?"

"Yeah. Sometimes they'll have better weeks and spend more days at school, but that's rare. Typically, they'll be here three days out of five."

"Three out of five," she gasped, feeling her head spiral as she lost track of what she was supposed to be thinking about. "but the school day starts at 8:45 and ends at 4pm, that's a whole seven hours and fifteen minutes, so that would be 435 minutes of learning missed each day, and if that's in three days that would be 1305 minutes! Do you know how long that is in seconds-"

"Hazy, quit it with the maths."

"...Oh, sorry." She stopped upon hearing Archie call out to her, her unintentional thoughts crashing as she realised that right now, the numbers were irrelevant. Truthfully, she didn't even like maths. But, it strangely kept her level headed so long as she didn't spiral too far into time management. The thought of those boys missing so much education bothered her. She couldn't go to school, and while that was because of her own doing, there were times when she missed it. She still barely knew how to use a comma.