a story as endless as the ocean . pjo / allie jackson

0.3 hurricane season

0.3 Hurricane Season Comes a Couple Months too Early 

If I were religious, this confessional probably would've hit a little bit harder, but— y'know. It's never too late to repent or whatever the Christians say. 

I completely ditched Grover the second the bus made a complete stop. His bladder acted up every time he got anxious or nervous and this time was no different. He bolted for the bathroom the second he got off the bus.

He made me promise to stay right where I was and he'd be back in a second. But whatever happened, I had to stay there.

I felt so guilty starting my bike back up. I'd even hoped it would be loud enough to grab his attention and make him come running back out to stop me. But it was New York, and the roar of my engine just blended in with the other loud noises. He didn't come out. So I left.

He was out of sight and he was just freaking me out too much. And I had just finished a school year, which meant I was less than an hour from seeing my mother. The feeling of needing to see her just became too overbearing. 

A few words about her, just before you meet her.

Her name is Sally Jackson and she is actually the greatest, most genuinely perfect person I've ever met. Which, by the way, just proves my theory that the best people have to worst luck. It was kinda sad really. Her parents both died in a plane crash when she was five, so she had to move in with her uncle. He didn't really care for her all that much, so she spent more than enough of her life feeling neglected and unwanted. She wanted to be a novelist, so she spent highschool working to save enough money for a college with a good creative-writing program. Then her uncle got cancer, and she had to quit school her senior year to take care of him. After he died, she was left with no money, no family, and no diploma.

The best break she seemed to have ever gotten was meeting my dad.

I have no memories of him, just this kind of... warm glow, maybe the barest trace of a smile. My mom doesn't like talking about him and she doesn't have any pictures. She said he was rich and important, so for all I know, I could've met him at an A-list party or something without knowing of any relation between us.

The only problem with that was: no one in Hollywood looked like me, which for the record is funny— because I've met almost too many who would pay every dollar they have in order to do so. I've had many plastic surgeons tell me my face was the most requested one for women who came to them. 

RDJ, who played my father in the MCU as our Tony/Celeste Stark father-daughter duo, had once offered to be my fill-in father, once. I'd only laughed him off, but secretly wouldn't have minded. With how much advice I always asked of him, it was like he filled the roll in, anyway. 

But aside from that, it also isn't an odd thing to say because I look nothing like my mother. Everything to do with my facial structure and features came from my father because my mom's features don't match mine and our hair and eye color are both different. And there is also the even bigger point of: my mother said that he'd needed to go overseas to do whatever he did. So he set sail over the Atlantic and never came back.

She'd always said he was lost at sea. Never dead, just lost at sea.

Either way, she worked odd jobs to provide for us, even though I could've done it myself. She always hated it when I spent my money on her, so she didn't let me buy an apartment, at least not one she'd live in, and she didn't let me buy my Harley. She paid for food and everything else because she is a stubborn woman and "doesn't want anyone's charity— not even her daughter's."

She took night classes to get her high school diploma because she'd gotten pregnant right after what would've been the start of the second semester of her freshman year of college (at least, if everything had gone her way). She couldn't go back to actual high school, so she did it during the night and online. She never complained or got mad, which was kinda crazy, all things considered. I was not an easy child, not by a long shot.