Strangers (thoughts)

Strangers

Written April 2nd, 2011

     Funny how the world works.

     Before I lived with my dad, and only visited him on the weekends, I didn't know she even existed.

     After I moved and lived with him all the time, I got enrolled in the local school. That's where I met her, a fellow student.

     We hit it off almost instantly, and now here I am at a sleepover at her house, awake and trying not to make too much noise as she continues to drift in and out of sleep.

     Dad lives in a different house now, one town over form her. But our towns have a joint school.

     So here I am, just up the street from our old house, in her bed, writing. All those years when I came to visit Dad on the weekends, my best friend was just up the street! And I had no clue!

*Named By Fate (a short story)

Named by Fate

“Alice.”

“Alice!”

“ALICE!”

A hand grabbed my shoulder and I jumped violently in surprise. Jessica leapt back from me, not expecting my dramatic response. After a moment she rolled her eyes and tossed her perfect blond hair indignantly, regaining her pristine composure.

“Honestly, Alice, are you ever tuned into Earth?” Jessica sighed, handing me the updated game and practice schedule.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, but she had already moved onto the next person.

I stuffed the schedule into my bag.

As I pulled out my CD player, I wondered if people who had different names were destined to be different. I mean, all the smart kids had names like Edith and Edward. Old fashioned names. They could solve math problems that usually required a calculator easily in their heads.  Then there were the Hopes and Trinity’s, all such nice girls who talked to everyone and stopped to help a kid pick up his books that he’d dumped all over the hallway. And Quinton would be the only kid in school whose name started with a ‘Q’. He would be the class clown, and would probably be a rich stand-up comedian with a show on Comedy Central before he was thirty-five.

            But what about the girl named Mercury who asked to be called by her middle name so she could feel normal? What was my special talent? The ability to be anti-social? I glanced around the bus. As usual, I was the only girl curled up against the window all by her self, while the other twenty-one Varsity and JV girls filled the bus with the awful racket of mindless chatter. On top of that, I was the only one with a CD player, which had been on the endangered species list of technology for at least five years now. Also, there were probably only two or three other girls on the bus who willingly listened to the Beatles. There were the fashionable blonds, the funny brunettes, and the good-time red-heads. Me? Natural black hair. How dreary.

So these are my talents: I’m anti-social (by choice), crappy hair, appreciation of technological dinosaurs, and an eccentric music taste. Great.

Squeaky Shoes (a short story)

Squeaky Shoes

Today, I ran into an old friend.

            It was a strange, how something as simple as going on a toilet paper run could bring you to something as complicated as a blast from the past.  Just a plain old Sunday in a plain old Wal-Mart, and a particularly wet parking lot that made my shoes squeaky.  I hated squeaky shoes, ever since the 7^th grade, when I owned a pair of sneakers that sounded like ducks even when they weren’t wet.  I had often been stared at, and I had relied on the noisy babble of kids to disguise my noisy shoes.

            And then I rounded the corner, emerging from the toiletries isle, and bam. There he was.