A/N: I had some trouble putting this chapter together. I knew what I wanted to do, but I just couldn't put it together into words. It's just one of those chapters, I guess. It's a bit short, too, but it's a pivitol chapter.
Anyway, this chapter will have a bunch of things that you wouldn't expect, so, enjoy and give me a good critique afterwards on what I'm doing wrong... unless you don't want to...
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Chapter 9: Trustless
Amelia:
“You crashed the car?” Bernard shouted at the top of his lungs in anger. The shouting was easily heard from outside of the house, but her friends were gone by that time.
“I told you! I didn’t get in an accident! Someone trashed my car!” Amelia retaliated.
“At Jacky’s house?”
“No! Uh-- I left my car at school, and--”
“Why the hell would you leave it there of all places? And why did Jacky call me and not you?”
Amelia’s lips fumbled around for words, but couldn’t find any excuses or lies to throw back at her father.
“You’re lying to me, Amelia. Tell me what really happened! You did get in an accident, didn’t you?” He paced back and forth, growling in anger, and throwing glares Amelia’s way every time he passed her.
Beads of sweat appeared on her forehead, and she shuddered at the fact that she couldn’t lie her way out of anything at that point. “Okay, okay… I-I didn’t go to Jacky’s last night.”
Bernard slammed his hand onto the nearby dining table causing Amelia to flinch. “Why did you have Jacky lie to me, Amelia?”
“W-we went to the city with another friend. We walked, so our cars were a-at the parking lot all night, and--”
“So it was your fault that the car was destroyed by god-knows-who!”
“No! Dad! I didn’t mean to leave it there that long! I fell down in the city a-and I had to stay at that friend’s place!” She moved her hair out of the way of the bandage on her forehead.
“You actually stayed in that god-forsaken city for the night? That friend could be part of a gang, for all you know! What the hell were you doing with that friend, anyway? Doing drugs, I’ll bet!” He paid no mind to the fact that she was hurt.
“Dad! You know that I’ve never done drugs! Not even medication!”
“You know that that’s not true. For all I know, you do drugs and smoke pot all the time, the way you do whatever the hell you want! Even when you’ve been grounded three times over, you find more ways to disobey me!”
Amelia’s face was red, and tears of frustration started to form in her eyes. “Dad, please! I wouldn’t dream of--!”
“Then how come you came home smelling like smoke?”
Her eyes grew wide. “M-my friend is the one who smokes, not me! It‘s not even pot, and--”
“You can’t trust anyone who smokes! Just go to your room! I’ve had enough of your excuses!” He angrily thrust his finger in the direction of the stairs.
Amelia stared at him with tears running down her cheeks. She closed her hands into fists, and looked at her father right in the eye. “No.”
Bernard glared at her, a bulging vein perfectly apparent on his shaven head. “What did you say to--”
“Shut up, Dad! If you don’t believe me, then that’s your problem! If you really wanted to know what happened, you would have asked everyone else by now! You don’t even care that I got hit in the head and was knocked out for half a day! You’re only shouting at me because you love the power trip!”
The back of his hand struck her cheek with surprising force, halting all efforts of retaliation in an instant. “You wreck your car, I don’t find you home in the morning for the second time in less than two weeks, and you say that I’m bad guy now?”
Amelia rubbed her red cheek and said with hate, “Yeah, I do.”
He held his arm back as if he were about to slap her again.
“Go ahead and do it! It’s not the first time, anyway!” The tears were pouring down her face at that point, but her shouts still managed to crescendo to even louder volumes. “And you wonder why I never come home! It‘s because you‘re never here for me! All you care about is getting your goddamn money at your goddamn company! You‘re just a pitiful little poor excuse for a man whose only way of getting out is anger is to beat his own daughter!”
His hand connected for the second time, this time causing her to stagger to the side and knock down a chair. He panted with anger as she picked herself up. She stared at the floor, half bent over with tears streaming out of her clamped-shut eyes, falling down her nose and hitting the floor. Her arms dangled at her sides as if they were that of a puppet‘s.
Bernard adjusted his tie around his neck in a calming manner and said. “That’s it. I’ve had it with this city. We’re moving.”
Amelia’s eyes shot open.
He walked over to Amelia. “We’re leaving this hell hole by next month, or so help me--”
Just as he was about to grab her arm, she hit it away and pushed another chair at him, making him fall backwards. She sprinted into the hallway, knocking a flower pot off of a shelf with a crash of soil and water as she did, and ran towards the front door with her watery eyes blurring her vision.
“Get the hell back here, Amelia!” Bernard shouted as he ran after her. By the time he got to the front door, she was long gone, leaving the door gaping open with the partially-covered sun shining through it.
Craig:
“I’m goin’ for a walk!” Craig yelled throughout the building to his parents.
“’Kay! Be back by the time it gets dark!” Cassandra yelled back from the bowels of the apartment complex.
“What she said!” Victor sounded from even deeper within the building.
Craig peered through a window in the stairwell, and noticed that the sun was out once again. He groaned in annoyance, and rode a rope down the rest of the flights to get past a collapse around the third floor. He expertly touched down in the middle of the entryway and trudged out the front door with rays of hazy sunlight glaring him in the eyes. As he trudged down the sidewalk without the familiar feeling of rain on his head, he let out a sigh. All he could think about at the time was rain.
“Craig!” A familiar voice shouted from his far left. He turned to see Allen, sans his sweatshirt, running towards him.
“Sup, Allen?”
“Whatever, man. Don’t you think this’s fuckin’ weird?” Allen said with a hint of haste in his voice.
“What is?”
“The rain, man! It’s stopped twice this week!”
“So?”
“It’s fuckin’ weird! It’s been, what, a ten years since this’s happened?”
“I don’t think it’s weird, I just hate it.”
They walked together down the empty roads of the city. The two of them found a nice stoop of an abandoned apartment building. Unlike earlier that week, the sun didn’t seem nearly as inviting. It was foggy and hazy and nothing felt at all right about it. Not one thing. Nobody was dancing out in the streets or singing folk songs like the last time. The odd pedestrian was seen from time to time, but that was it.
“Craig, I’ve been thinkin’.” Allen said as he took out a cigarette.
“About what? Hate crimes again?” Craig said as he lit his own.
“No, man. About the rain. Why the hell does it rain so much in this city of all places? What the hell’s so special about it?”
“Got me.”
Allen let out a puff after he lit his cigarette, the smoke drifting up and receiving a glare from the sun that only added to the haze. “I heard somewhere that the rain is whenever angels are cryin’.”
Craig snickered and said, “So what? You think that God hates us or something?”
“Just somethin’ to think about. It’s been on my mind lately.”
“You always have something on your mind. Usually something that you shouldn’t worry about.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Craig squinted his eyes up at the sun and the dense haze that amplified it’s yellow rays. “I hate the sun when it’s like this. It’s like it’s trying to engulf us.”
“That’s the way it is in a city like this. That damn smog or whatever is always there.”
Craig finished off his smoke and tossed it into the gutter. “The rain needs to come back soon…”
“So you want angels to be cryin’ on us?”
Craig snickered with a smile and said, “As if I’d give a shit. I love the rain either way. Besides, for all we know, those angels up there are crying tears of joy on this little city of ours.”
Allen looked up at the sky, a distant cloud raining down on another area of downtown. “Now that’s somethin’ to think about.” He glanced over at his friend and noticed something. “Hey, you got your trench back huh?”
Craig held up his sleeve and said, “Yeah, that idiot finally gave it back to me.”
“Where’s she now?”
“Dunno. Probably getting chewed out by her dad for staying the night here.”
“She stayed the night here?” Allen said with a laugh. “Man, you’re askin’ for it.”
“For what?”
“For it to happen again.”
“You really think I’d let anyone take advantage of me like that again?”
Allen put up his arms in a defensive posture, with a sly smile on his face. “I’m just sayin’. You gotta be careful around rich people.”
“I know that. If I didn’t, I’d have starved to death by now.” Craig stood up from the sun-dried stoop. “I’m gonna walk around some more. How about you?”
“I was just goin’ home. I gotta go. Later.”
“Yeah. Later.”
Craig walked down the sidewalk of downtown until he got around the same area that Friday Night Music was held. Tune Street. He couldn’t help but chuckle at the amount of garbage left over after the night before. Paper food wrappings, soda cans, and plastic bottles were absolutely littered all over the dead-end street. Most of the papers were dampened and matted against the street from the rain earlier that morning, and most of the cans and bottles had rolled into the gutters from stray winds. Even the makeshift stage was still at the back of the dead-end street.
Previous Friday Night Musics had been less than great for him. Most of the bands were more mediocre than good, and the people there drank and smoked to their hearts’ content. Many fights would break out and people would sometimes get hurt. It wasn’t until Craig requested that smoking and drinking be done outside of Friday Night Music that he began to like Fridays. Some of the people who arranged everything listened, and pulled some strings and added bouncers. After that, every Friday was absolute heaven for everyone under the clouds.
Craig walked towards the center of the street and stopped to look up at the sky with a grin. The area around him had begun to darken from rain clouds. He took a deep breath through his nose, filling his lungs to the rafters, spread his arms to either side of himself, and let out a long sigh just as the first sheets of rain fell upon his body. It wasn’t long before rooftop drains began to fire torrential flows of rain from several stories up. At least a dozen of them let out hundred-foot-long miniature waterfalls onto the sidewalks of the street, after which the storm drains ate up the water so as not to flood the area.
He let out a second long sigh, and just as he turned around to leave with a small smile on his face, the crash of fallen garbage cans followed by the spilling of their contents sounded from a nearby alleyway on the street. Craig whirled around to see someone, a girl by the looks of it, stumble out of the alley. She was completely drenched in rain and had mud all over her shoes and the bottoms of her pant legs. Just as she turned around to look at him, their eyes made contact. It was Amelia. She was crying.
Amelia stopped in her tracks at the sight of the man, water on the street splashing onto her shoes as she came to a halt. The look on her face was that of sheer trauma. It didn’t take long for him to notice that her right cheek was a blood red. With worry, Craig stomped over to her through puddles and wet asphalt.
“What the hell happened? Who did this to you?” He yelled. “And did you just run all the way here?”
Amelia let out a small yelp at his sudden barrage of questions, and stepped back. Tears continued to stream down her face and mingle with the rain. Her vision was very blurry, and she couldn’t tell who it was who was talking to her.
Craig let out a sigh in response to her silence. “Look at yourself, you’re a goddamn mess.” He stretched out his arm, placed his hand on her cheek, and wiped away the tears and rain in that eye with his thumb. She struggled to get away from him, and flailed about with her eyes clamped shut. At one point, her hands grabbed his arm and pushed it away. “Hey! Hold still, will ya? I’m asking you what happened!”
Amelia’s eyes opened in surprise at the familiar tone of voice, and looked up at him. “Craig…?”
“Yeah, anyway, what happened?”
She wiped her eyes so that she could see clearly. Once her eyes adjusted, Craig’s figure could clearly be seen through the rain between them. Amelia remained silent, and slowly took steps towards him, her eyes once again welling up with tears.
She sputtered “You… stupid… asshole!” She buried her face in his chest and beat her hands on his arms and shoulders. “It’s all your fault!”
Craig looked down at her with sympathy, and slipped his unbuttoned trench coat off of his arms, catching it in his right hand. He draped the coat over Amelia’s shoulders, and let her continue beating on him with her fists.
She soon stopped hitting him, and merely sobbed into the chest of his shirt. Craig’s arms remained at his sides, as if waiting for her to stop. She lifted her head towards his to look him in the eyes, “Why were you… and why are you…so nice to me…?”
As Craig gently wrapped his arms around her shoulders, she once again plunged her head into his chest, and continued to cry for what seemed like hours.
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A/N: None.
