I watched out as a weak red glow marked the fading horizon. Gentle warm waves washed through the air, whilst hidden between them came icy whispers of winter frost. Summer was dying. The darkened sky tinted the leaves pink and orange.
Days of basking on the beach where draining and the prospect of school looked ever more grim. What had first seemed like an eternity had washed away with the footprints in the sand. Soon I would be back to running errands in the bitter rain to pay the rent of my one bedroom flat and surrounding myself with people who would dance in lockstep around my life like a masquerade ball. I was the host, always the host. I would talk to many, hold on to more, always juggling other people’s stories and secrets whilst enjoying being center stage.
Never would I be an onlooker, always in the middle, perhaps that's why sunsets like these bored me. I walked slowly across the main room, couch in the middle. TV, metal stand. Kitchen joining on, always clean, always stocked. A huge metallic bookcase lined with Cd's, music to suit a thousand needs and ten thousand moods. Books that were classics, that almost everyone has heard of. A shy teddy bear on the corner of the top shelf. There on the shelf below, the one thing that didn't fit.
A wooden picture frame, inside which sits a child grinning, with short, tattered red hair, brown eyes that glimmered like embers. An over-sized checked yellow shirt and baggy trousers patched at the knee. Most of her clothes where the same. She wasn't like anyone else. Whilst other girls drove round in their friends’ cars and braided their hair, she was clearing a thin silver path up the mountains on horseback. Most girls have teddy bears to sleep with, she had wolves.
Why am I spending so much time describing this girl who lives a lifestyle completely opposite to mine?
The reason is that on that almost-winter evening she turned up on my doorstep with a huge hikers backpack and windswept hair. Thirteen years old, bordering four foot high and staring up at me as if already tired of seeing my face.
'Ai?'
'Mum left again.' She shrugged and walked past, straight into the flat, dumping her bag by the door as she went.
'Wait, why are you here then?'
'I wanted to say hi and could only afford the one way ticket.' I stopped to think over her predicament before she turned round with one eyebrow raised. Idiot.
'Oh. Right. Well, if you want to stay on the couch for the night, there's food in the cupboard if you want something-'
'Still not much of a 'you' person, are you?'
'What?' She reached up and prodded the teddy firmly.
‘The teddy bear, it's still got two eyes and no juice stain, of course it's been on that shelf since you bought it. And what person living on their own goes out of their way to have cushions accommodating a crowd. And what about-' She froze in front of her picture, running her thumb along the battered wood. 'This is the only thing that seems like it should be here'. Carefully she tipped it face down. 'You need to get rid of that, it doesn't fit'
I didn't know what she meant by that, but the way she glanced back at me, as if she was reminding me of something I didn't know. Much of the time she had a double-layered veil across her eyes as if everything she said was a simple version of what really went through her mind. Every once in a while, like this particular instance, a dark shadow crossed the crimson gleam. It was the kind that made me desperate to find out what secret she knew.
'You're just like dad was'
'You,' I struggled to carry on. 'You've seen him lately?'
'He stopped by our house last week. He told me where you where living, in case anything went wrong.'
'That was nice of him,' I snorted.
'It was.' She nodded sincerely, still browsing through the shelves.
‘So, what makes you stop by for a visit?’
She stopped with her fingers half way up a new candle and stared at me, searching again, expecting more.
‘You don’t understand, do you?’
I shrugged mockingly and shook my head.
Her hand waved over the candlewick, which exploded and crackled into a large flame.
My heart fluttered.
‘I’m just like you’
Extra notes: I’ll probably do a follow up to this at some point, but it was spare of the moment so I don’t really have an in depth plot ready at hand.
