Reclaiming the Sand(5)
Author: A. Meredith Walters

Then I had been a punk teenager who dyed my hair a new color every week. I had worn my makeup thick, particularly the eyeliner. I had worn baggie clothes and a face full of metal. I had done everything I could to make myself as unattractive as possible. It had been my only defense.

Too bad it had never worked.

I stepped out of the shower and wrapped a towel around my body. I raised my hand and wiped the condensation from the mirror and looked at my reflection.

Yeah, I had changed a lot. I wasn’t sure Flynn would recognize me now. Long gone were the nose, eyebrow, and lip rings. My hair was now its natural blonde and I wore it long, hitting the middle of my back. I didn’t wear makeup anymore. I had stopped bothering just after going into detention. Having my ass beaten for my mascara made me less than worried about my appearance.

I had gone au naturel after that. And it had stuck. I never went to the trouble again.

I wasn’t a bad looking girl. I didn’t hate myself enough to deny that. I was even sort of pretty. Though I would have given anything to get rid of the freckles on my nose and cheeks. They made me look like some innocent prairie girl.

And I was anything but innocent.

I was just on the side of too skinny but that had everything to do with not being able to afford food as opposed to choice.

So yeah, I was pretty if you didn’t look me in the eye. Because my eyes always gave me away. They were a cold, hard blue. There was nothing warm in my gaze. If it’s true that eyes are the windows to your soul, I knew that mine held no possibility for goodness.

Anything good had been killed a long time ago.

There was a bang on the door. “I need to piss!” Stu called out from the hallway. My hand curled into a fist and I bit my lip, closing my eyes.

I couldn’t stand Stu. Or Reggie. Or Shane. In fact I hated most of the people I called friends. They were selfish and inconsiderate and at times downright cruel. But they were all I had. Just like Dania, they had known me for years and they were like stuck to me like crap on my shoe.

I tucked my towel firmly above my br**sts, which were entirely too large for my liking, wrung out my hair into the sink and opened the door.

Stu didn’t bother to look at my barely covered body. He didn’t leer at my cle**age peeking out above the towel. He didn’t roll like that. I might as well have been a block of wood. He wasn’t a known lover of the female form. Sure he f**ked when he felt the itch, but it wasn’t something he seemed to enjoy doing.

I had often wondered if his overt aggression concealed latent homosexuality. It would have explained so much. But hell if I’d ever question him about it. I liked the look of my teeth in my mouth, thank you very much.

He pushed passed me and slammed the door behind him. Like I said, my friends were dicks.

I walked back to my room and turned on the overhead light. Dania was still passed out cold and I could see the line of bile from her mouth down the side of my comforter.

“Dania, I’ve got to go. You need to head home,” I said a lot more nicely than I had been with Reggie and Stu. With Dania you had to tiptoe carefully. While I was known for my quick temper, Dania was known for ripping your guts out with her bare hands if you looked at her funny. She was volatile and completely mental. Add a dose of pregnancy hormones on top of her already scary personality and you had someone closely akin to a psychopath.

Dania opened her eyes slowly and brought her hands up to her eyes, covering them. “Turn off the light, Ells,” she moaned.

I shook her foot lightly. “I’ve got somewhere to go. You need to head back to your place. I can give you a ride if you need me to,” I said gently.

“I feel horrible,” Dania whined, trying to sit up. She glared down at her belly as if it were the unborn baby’s fault she felt like shit.

She gingerly combed through her long, black hair with her fingers. Even hung over and with dried saliva on the side of her mouth, Dania was beautiful. She always had been. With black, shiny hair and light blue eyes framed with thick lashes, she looked like a movie star.

When we were in foster care together, Dania talked about running away to New York. She said she’d be discovered and begin her amazing career as a world famous model. Back then, she both loved and hated the way she looked. She thought her face would be her ticket out of Wellsburg. That it would give her a better life. But she hated it because of the attention it brought her. Particularly from our foster dad.

But since leaving the system at eighteen, her dreams of leaving Wellsburg had dwindled away. Pummeled by real life. She stopped dreaming. She stopped thinking big. She accepted. Like we all eventually did.

They say misery loves company. And we were the best company each other had.

“Where are you going?” Dania asked, slowly swinging her legs over the side of my bed, making sure to avoid the vomit on the carpet.

“I promised Jeb I’d help Melanie with the inventory this morning,” I lied effortlessly. What a load of shit. And if Dania were feeling half way human she would have called me on it. I hated Melanie Stanton, the other female clerk at JAC’s. To be fair I hated most people. But I made it a point to never willingly be in her presence. Jeb had learned early on that it was not a good idea for Melanie and I to share shifts.

Melanie was a forty-year-old woman who, up until her husband was laid off work, had been a stay at home mom. And she was everything I disliked in a person. She was perky. She was always put together. She talked endlessly about her perfect f**king family. And worst of all, she smiled all of the goddamned time. She made me want to slide down into a warm bath and slit my wrists.

“Oh okay. Is Reggie still here?” she asked, pushing her feet into her three inch spiked heeled boots.

“She should be. She and Stu were half naked in my living room when I went out there a little while ago,” I commented dryly. Dania’s eyes narrowed and I wished I had made more of an effort to filter my comments.

“Did they hook up?” she growled. Why had I said anything? I had no doubt Reggie and Stu had screwed on my lumpy couch after I had passed out last night. Our group of friends was incestuous. It was disgusting really.

We should have been way passed declaring ownership on one another. We hung out. Some of us screwed on occasion. No biggie.

But Dania was extremely territorial of Stu. They had dated for almost a year when we were fifteen. And even though I was pretty sure Stu didn’t possess the ability to develop feelings for anyone, Dania had been crazy, head over heels in love with him. When they had stopped dating (which had everything to do with her jealousy and possibly due to his sexual orientation), she had lost it. In true Dania style, she had gone raging psycho bitch and had egged his car and smashed his bedroom window with a rock.