. (mote) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-10-01 23:01:00 |
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Entry tags: | remus lupin |
Who: Ping
What: Narrative: Settling in
Where: Around LV
When: Recently
Warnings/Rating: Nope
The RV was hers.
It had cost 2,900 dollars on a card that still smelled of plastic and the strip of glue that held it fast to the paper that declared her credit limit to be 3,000 dollars at 23% APR. The RV was filled with a life; pictures stuck, pillows strewn, a colorful old quilt tossed. She'd been ten, and she'd wanted something colorful to detract from her black eye and blacker cheek, and the blanket still smelled of the ocean, brine and salt, and sometimes she licked it at night, before shoving it deep into her mouth like some kind of oceanic pacifier.
Small, the RV, and she could walk it in 20 paces, her hips banging into edges that were also hers, and she told them so in a small voice that rumbled like the ocean and sounded like fishermen. They had their own language, the men who trawled the lady, and the children were taught not to emulate it, lest they never escape the cauldron of roiling seas and catches that grew smaller and smaller each season. Squeal `im up! became throw something at him, and brush became hair, and stompers became boots, and a throater became a knife. Everything was she at first, until the language was cast off. She was the boats, the moon, the sky, the cart and the net. She was the ocean, and everything was hers, and she was everything. But the children were taught different, even though different fit wrong on their shoulders. But she still roiled as she moved, and midway she began tapping things intentionally with her hip, because hers.
In New York, she'd had no hers. It had been a loft full of other girls, ones she'd been careful of. Shirtless, that was fine, she could pass, but everything else was careful, careful, not wanting to stand out. She'd had enough bruises to cover her three times over in her youth, and she avoided them now. And Charlie. Charlie had been in New York. Charlie had been New York, but Charlie hadn't been hers either, and now this was. This metal thing that wasn't rooted in any earth, and she thought that fitting.
She made coffee. Bitter and strong, and just like she liked it. She dressed for work. The bag she slung over her shoulder on the way out held black-on-black, clothing for after, not so very different from the black-on-black she wore to the discreet storefront off the strip. Three buses and three blocks, and she hopped in a truck with a crew that had been cleaning for years. Work was five hours, hands and knees and scrubbing until everything shined clean beneath the blacklight. She left with the pervasive scent of bleach in her nose, voice unused, not a word spoken for her entire shift.
Rain, the internet had told her, was reminiscent of the rave party clubs in New York, and she headed there after changing. Eighteen+, and she was just old enough to get in. The lights thrummed, blue and purple and red, and the bodies packed together tight enough to look like waves. She stood against the wall, a Coke sweating between her fingers, and the thrum felt like crashing, and she breathed in the salty sweat of too many bodies, and she breathed.
She didn't talk, but no one expected it over the trance dance music that blared loudly enough to make the walls bounce. She kissed a boy, and he tasted of mints, and she couldn't see his face for the shadows the glowstick painted on him. She stared at a girl in the bathroom mirror, one with pupils wide-blown and an upturned nose that made her think of Charlie.
She went home, and she peeled off layers as her hip bounced those almost-familiar edges of things. Silent, and her bed felt big and empty and lonely, and she fell asleep in a pair of blue pajama pants that had belong to her father, the hems crinkling with a build-up of salt and memories. Her long, dark hair tangled up in her arms like a caress, the waves caught perpetually between knots and curls, and the moon that streamed through the window onto her bare back was still and quiet. There was none of New York's raucous, and none of the island's sea life. It was a new nothing, this desert.
It would take some getting used to.