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CHAPTER TWO lips of honey
⋆*✧･ﾟ:⋆*･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:
THE SUN WAS GOING down, turning the sky into the burnt amber of a firefly's abdomen, and Nadine Vidal had yet to find somewhere to stay. The issue with being sent back twenty-eight years before she was even pushed out of her mother's womb was that, technically, she didn't exist. There were no birth certificates, driver's licenses, or other pieces of I.D on her person that weren't from the future, which made it exceedingly difficult to go anywhere or buy anything. Although she did have money—though only a few dollars, the rest of which left behind at the collapsed Academy—it, too, was useless. Money was different in 1961 than it was in 2019, which meant that handing over her futuristic bills probably wouldn't be the best idea. This meant that right now, Nadine's only possible means of payments were her looks—and even those were failing.
Although the racist back at Stadtler's had obviously been too busy gaping at her chest to notice, Nadine was looking quite rough. She'd stared into the window of a mom-and-pop store as she'd made her way through Dallas, and found that the bandages wrapped around her head were blood-spotted and peeling. Dirt speckled her cheeks, a cut had opened near her eye (likely sometime during the fight at the Icarus Theatre), and, although Nadine had attempted to wring her hair out and tie into a ponytail, her hair was still a bird's nest.
Plus, she was still wearing those fucking bowling shoes.
People may have been able to bypass all of these flaws earlier, focusing on her creamy skin or wide blue eyes, but now, when it was almost dark, she became yet another creep that haunted Dallas's streets. A limping, wild-haired, eye-bagged (it hadn't taken her long to become incredibly jetlagged—she'd left 2019 in the evening, and dropped into Dallas in the early morning) creep. Someone people would give a wide berth to.
She'd already gone through her pockets in an attempt to discern what had come along to 1961 with her. Other than her clothes, her pickings were despairingly small. She had her wallet, containing the present-day money, her useless I.Ds, and a picture of she and her father on her tenth birthday (Beau was beaming, balloon in hand, and Nadine was spooning cake into her mouth, party hat slipping over her eyes), and her cellphone, which refused to turn on. She wasn't sure if it was because it had run out of battery (though that wouldn't surprise her) or because it simply couldn't work here, as it hadn't been invented yet. Either way, it had quickly become nothing but a piece of junk. It certainly wouldn't help her build a temporary life here.
Now, there was nothing to do but walk. So walk she did, until her legs were as sore as the rest of her body, and her stomach had seized up with hunger. She hadn't eaten all day—nearly two days, now—and she was beginning to regret not filling her stomach up at Stadtler's when she'd had a chance. As for fluids, she'd managed a few sips of water from a fountain, but that had been hours ago. Now, her tongue was as dry as sandpaper.
