20-year-old Leah Whiteford needs to get away. That's how she finds herself over 2000 miles from home in the bustling city of Chicago that is the furthest thing from the life she has left behind in Los Angeles.
She fully intends to keep her head dow...
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I was feeling sad, Can't help looking back, Highways flew by Run, run, run away
~ Runaway (Yeah Yeah Yeahs)
The city was perpetually wet. I mean, not that I wasn't used to it by now or anything but I'd spent nearly my entire life in a city that never rained so actually it was kind of calming. Rain was my favourite kind of weather, other than maybe thunderstorms. I suppose I was kind of morbid like that.
"What are you doing?" Amanda, my roommate, stands behind me in her pyjamas, a loose tank top and worn sleep shorts with Animal from the muppets splashed across them. She's eating a yoghurt and staring at me here next to the window like I have my face pushed up against the glass or something.
"Watching the rain, it's really coming down out there." I say even though she can hear it on the windows. We don't know each other very well, I only moved in last week but she's been nice enough so far and I find her easy to talk to. Regardless she rolls her eyes at me in amusement "Again? You're obsessed woman. Just put yourself out of your misery and go for a walk in it already." She's shaking her head at me now, her electric blue bobbed haircut swaying as she does and discards of her empty yoghurt pot in the recycling bin.
"I would but I don't want to get sick and miss orientation." It's a weak excuse but really I just can't be bothered getting dressed, I was also in comfortable clothing in sweats and a crop top since it was just us girls in the house. Mandy was also a student at the University of Chicago, like me, art history if I remember right. She stretches, her back and bony elbows cracking into the silence of our apartment. Other than the soft drum of the rain on the windows.
"Is everyone from California as strange as you are?" She asks but it's clear she's joking, especially considering she was a thousand times stranger than I was. She doesn't wait for an answer.
"Get dressed Leah, I'm starving and I'm dragging you with me to get some lunch. That way we can kill two birds with one stone." She smiles and disappears back into her bedroom and shuts the door. I guess that settles that then.
I go through to my own bedroom and dig around in my drawers, finding my comfiest pair of jeans to wear and a plain t-shirt. I throw the thick, dark green sweater my mom gifted me before I left over it, my most important item of clothing in this city and tug my boots on. Mandy is already dressed and swaying to music from the speaker in our small kitchen/living room when I find her and offers me a warm smile when she sees me.
"Is that the only sweater you own? I love the colour but you can borrow some of mine if you need more warm clothes before you start at Jackie's." Jackie's is a small diner not far from our apartment that I managed to land a waitressing gig in, which was nothing short of a miracle considering I came here with very little in the way of a plan other than confirmation I could transfer my credits to UOC and a meeting with an over-enthusiastic girl about a vacant spare room. If I hadn't been able to get a job then god knows where I'd be sleeping.
