Perfume

Chapter Two - Deceived

School, school, school. That's all that happened the rest of the week. Long classes filled with lectures that just dragged on and on and on. It might be stereotypical for a teenager to abhor school, but, seriously, it sucked.

     Every day, though, I would wait for period five. That's when I had newspaper. I would sit behind a computer or around the long, scratched, brown table that sat on the middle of the room, discussing our individual pieces or planning the layout for the week's issue. That was the only class I had with Mandy. She focused on school events and movie reviews, writing articles about the Winter dance or a review on the latest Saoirse Ronan science fiction thriller. Meanwhile, I focused on what was going on not only around the city, but around the world. The news.

     My article for that week was about some new method to chemically recreate plants and trees that were long extinct, such as the Belladonna. The chemically created clones wouldn't have much of the same  properties as the real ones, but they would help with the creation of Oxygen. This method was still being tested, though, and wouldn't be able any time soon. 

     I had most of it done, but I still had to add a few more things, finishing touches, one or two extra paragraph, and then edit it. I was currently at 1, 368 words. I was almost done. 

     Still, though, I had to meet the Saturday at midnight deadline. I had to send my revised article to the school's newspaper editor, Angus Phillip, by then or my article wouldn't be featured in the week's issue. This wasn't the first time I'd had to deal with deadline issues, and it certainly wouldn't be my last, but I had always in the past managed to meet it one way or another.

     "You need to write faster," Mandy said to me all the time. "It takes you so long because you think too much about what you're writing, about the words you're using."

     But I was a writer. I had to each word I used in a precise manner. It was like painting. A painter had a while spectrum of color to choose from and he had to choose just the right shade, not a color that looked similar like the one he wanted, but an exact one. Because through precision was the only way he could get his message across the way he wanted it conveyed. 

     It was Saturday morning. And because of that deadline, I headed to a coffee shop that was just a few blocks away from my building. I carried my satchel on my shoulder, my laptop inside of it. It was around nine, and so there was a flutter of activity as I sped through the crowd, paying little to no attention to the faces that whirred by. People were talking, gossiping, texting, hailing cabs,  yelling, crying.

     I got to the coffee shop. The barista smiled at me when I walked in.

     "Hey, Linden," she said.

     I grinned. Every time I'd had one of those deadline rushes, this coffee shop had served as my save haven. I would come in early in the morning, order a mocha latte and a chocolate chip muffin, and type away until my article was finished. And that was what I would do that day. I sat down around my usual table, one that was near the window, and set my satchel down on the table.

     The coffee shop wasn't particularly full. It was rather empty, actually. Like it always was. That's what was nice about it. The small number of people really made the space quiet. 

     There was a girl by the back, red hair, blue scarf, sipping from a steaming styrofoam cup. Two girls sat around a table near the counter, both of them texting, their mouths pulled up in overly zealous grins, not glancing at each other once. I had a burning suspicion that they were texting each other. And then there was the group of boys - five of them - who were by the table next to me, talking about some football game that had been on last night, and how some guy I didn't know had totally screwed it up for the team.