In the Arms of Stone Angels - By Jordan Dane Page 0,3
only one in a weird collection I carried with me. I liked the anonymity of me seeing out when no one saw in.
The overall impact was that I looked like an aspiring bag lady. A girl’s got to have goals.
In short, I didn’t give a shit about fitting in with the masses and it showed. I’d given up the idea of fitting in long ago. The herd mentality wasn’t for me. And since I made things up as I went, people staring came with the territory. Mom picked a spot by a window and I shuffled my boots behind her and slid into the booth.
I grabbed a menu on the table and pretended to look at it while I played with my split ends.
“Do you have to do that here?”
“Do what?”
Neither one of us expected an answer.
I seriously hated my hair. It was long, thin and stringy, like me. A washed-out blond color that bordered on red. In the frickin’ sun I looked like my damned head was on fire.
“You ready to order?” The waitress didn’t even pretend to smile.
I asked for nachos with chili and my mom ordered a salad and coffee. Neither of us had a firm grasp of the term breakfast. It was one of the few things we had in common. While we waited for our food, Mom opened a valve to her stream of consciousness. Guess the quiet drive made her feel entitled to cut loose. And her talkative mood didn’t change after we got our order. She jumped from one topic to another with her one-sided conversation, spewing words into the void like people do on Twitter.
Me? I scribbled in a spiral notebook while she talked. I always had a notepad stuffed in my knapsack and a collection of old notes piled in my closet back in North Carolina. Whenever I got an idea for clothes I wanted to make or a line of poetry or a lyric that got stuck in my head and wouldn’t come out until I wrote it down, that’s what usually went on paper. All I was working on now was a layered hoodie skirt thingee that was beginning to look an awful lot like a Snuggie. It looked like crap, but I probably wasn’t drawing it right. Maybe Dana would wear it.
My only real friend in NC was Dana Biggers, who’d been texting me. She was okay, tolerable even. I hadn’t written her back. She was asking too many questions about my trip and I didn’t want to explain it, thinking I might tell her too much. I’d worked hard at keeping my old life in Oklahoma a mystery. I had wanted to reinvent myself and start over. Texting her back might ruin that, so I didn’t. She’d get over it.
Dana was Wiccan and she practiced magic 24/7. Because of her, I got a B-in biology this term. It was the only class we shared, so I figured she had the goods if she could deliver one shining moment in a lifetime of my underachievement. We both needed extra credit, so after we dissected our frog, we took the teacher’s challenge and removed the brain whole. I used a blade, but Dana got her Wiccan mojo on and chanted her part. The frog’s brain squished out in one piece. The teacher shook his head, but gave us the credit anyway.
Dana swears that I was a witch in another life. Who am I to argue with that? I know she’s full of shit, but she lets me make clothes for her and she doesn’t laugh when I read her my old poems. Like I said, she was okay. Kind of cool, actually.
Since I’d left Oklahoma, I hadn’t written anything. I missed it, but I had a hole in me that I couldn’t fill with poetry or music or making clothes. And unlike Mom and what she was doing now, words didn’t come easy for me, not after what had happened two years ago.
Although I couldn’t be certain, I figured Mom’s talking was her way of making an effort to bond. And I had to give her props for timing. I was captive in a moving vehicle for two days. And if she didn’t give me a brain bleed from the ritual, she had a pretty good shot at nabbing my attention once in a while. Picking at my nachos, I’d only heard every six and a half words as I scribbled until she finally got my full attention.