Tandy Bowen doesn't have to pick between (cloakndagger) wrote in repose, @ 2020-03-14 23:58:00 |
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Entry tags: | *log, holly nicodemo-webster, tandy bowen |
tandy+holly; the music store
What: tandy and holly
Where: the music store
When: now
Warnings/Rating: nada.
The night in the woods was informative. Okay, so she wasn't a running science experiment, which was the general gist of the conversation with Billy about his ex-roommate or at least Tandy's major take-away with a little shade had layered that over the gist. She knew walking down Main that she didn't look like the chick who played with knives late nights. Since coming back - not home, back, in that mental lexicon she gave the town - she'd checked out mom's place. She was doing fine, or at least as fine as Tandy could ascertain from loitering against a dirty car, watching the outline of her mother against the windows of a double-wide. She didn't stumble, which meant she wasn't so wasted she couldn't walk in a straight line for company, and the second outline said her mom was still turning out the old show, same station. She'd been a small, blond girl in a 'park full of people who were either residents, or restless and she'd grown up here, a transplant that had grafted too well to the roots.
So, knives. She had figured out the basics. Summoning. Putting them away. It helped when the drumbeat of her own fear wasn't high in her ears and okay, yes she'd sliced some other person's shit to ribbons figuring it out but the house was a demo-project anyway. Tandy didn't feel bad for rich people who owned real-estate with a lake-front and let it crumble. It was like buying new cars and driving them off the lot, a waste of dollars Tandy didn't have the luxury of wasting. She'd put away money, in that other-Repose. From a normal job, in a restaurant that if she squinted, she could picture existing, with a tedious boss with a way of looking at her tits through her shirt that made him like any other greasy sleezeball but not, you know, 'gifted' with the ability to do anything about it other than dribble if he'd had too many rum-and-cokes. It killed Tandy that her stash was gone. Carefully, painstakingly, obsessively built, greenbacks folded into an empty can. The apartment, over the ice-cream store, so that all her shit smelled like vanilla. It had taken a year, to get somewhere close to normal, in a place that had felt kinda like a gift after the knife-thing had left her with some guy's blood on her hands and the faint shriek of her own blood in her ears.
So the store. Holly. The music store hadn't always been open, but when it was it was like a tiny mecca for the misfits. She had her sketchbook tossed in the bottom of her bag, an ancient canvas thing that belonged to the guy-before, slung over one shoulder and she'd raided his pencils and didn't feel bad about it. It was a commonality, a comfort-blanket and she stalked her way down Main with the kind of swagger that didn't belong on tiny blond shoulders unless they felt invincible. She didn't, without the knives. But she didn't, with the knives. It had been a year, but there wasn't a statute of limitations on murder, even if the guy tried to rape you in an alley.
It was all kinda fetid up there in her head, the murk undone by the music that filtered out into the street from the windows. Tandy stopped, five-foot-two of blond hair and the kind of heavy jacket, peacoat-knock-off number that kept the cold out, and a flannel shirt that was a little on-the-nose underneath. She pulled, the bag swayed, she entered. "Hey." To Holly. Not to whoever might have been browsing. Her hands were cold, and she rubbed them together, dry-palmed.