The Silver Plated Earphones

Chapter 1

Gold glistened around people like shiny eyes twinkling in mockery. And the smell, that stench on every man and woman of crisp processed paper.

Money.

Astra swung her legs over the backless park bench and almost tripped a man as he ignorantly brushed past her. 'Good morning,' she called after him cheerfully.

He was looking down at his phone, a rose-gold plated iPhone, and continued to do so like whatever was in the phone was currently his life and anything outside it could drive itself off a cliff. The sweater he wore was moss green, an ugly, dark colour, obviously a Christmas gift from his Mum. But then there was a chicken stitched on the left sleeve, and it was definitely baggy and loose, so no, his grandmother had made it for him. He was going to meet his GrandMum, or he never would've touched it at all. His shoes were not business-neat, but polished nevertheless. Watch was a dull shade of wooden brown, strapped on in haste, the end of the ribbon not tucked into its case. He was meeting the GrandMum he hadn't met in a long while.

Weak, a voice hissed in Astra's mind, her bugging conscience. There's so much more you could've seen, he was practically exposing himself with his head bent and face so clear. 

She scoffed back in reply and ran her eyes through the deserted park before her. She didn't always have to be perfect, right?

Trees were drying, she noticed, the footpaths flooded with yellow leaves. A woman wearing pink glossy boots scrunched by, talking loudly on her phone, clearly to a friend, maybe close, describing with superfluous language her new pair of earrings, probably from a loved one, but not family; she wouldn't be talking about family to a friend. A long distanced friend at that; too odd a time in the morning to be talking to a local friend about earrings; a couple of hundred kilometres away probably, judging by the time zone, or maybe more, since they appeared to be childhood friends but hadn't met in a while, so neither of them would've bothered to call in the morning. Since it was morning now, Pink Boots definitely couldn't have called, so the other friend who called was at a time zone more than 12 hours away. Pink Boots seemed to work in a serious job, probably not business because pink definitely wasn't a formal colour, and a person who works in a serious job is clearly not free in the morning so for a person to call at this time of the day they probably didn't know the person very well, or the profession they work in, so Astra was looking at a conversation between two high school friends, probably best at the time but hadn't kept in touch since, unlike childhood friends.

Or Pink Boots could've been talking to her sister. Astra let it drop.

The area fell silent. Clouds were scattered today so there was a less likely chance of rain, which meant Nanny Annie would let her out for longer. The park was a familiar place, more than home or school to Astra. She was sixteen, completed her sophomore year but had decided to drop school, it just hadn't worked for her. She was smart, she knew, from all the advice she'd heard from friends' parents about wasting intellectual resources when a world at this stage was craving for it, but in her opinion such resources could be put to better use than the standard rat race and she'd decided to back down from the spotlight for a while and see where her footsteps took her. In other words, she longed for adventure.

As she always had. Adventure, that is. Her parents were rich and financially stable more perfect than most people but they were also journalists, and hadn't stayed in the same house Astra lived in for more than a few months in a year, not more a week and a half at a time. When that happened it was nothing more than a burden to Astra, having to show them her grades, reports, violin progress, where half the time she was lying about being psychologically fine with everything when she had no idea who her parents even were. They'd left her in the care of her nanny, named Annie, nearly all her life. She couldn't remember a single person from her life before Nanny Annie. She juggled friends a lot, never growing close to any of them. There were always attempts from others, even requests for dates, but they were all turned down or dropped in little time; nobody could stay on their feet for as long and enthusiastically as Astra could. There was nothing legitimately wrong with her but home was prison and 'living' to her meant never letting your feet off the ground, always doing something you'd never done before. This time she was doing pick-pocketing, which had stuck with her for nearly three to four years now. It was never anything serious or against the law since she always returned the stolen items, but this made her brain race and adrenaline pump, which was what she defined 'living' as. Reading people, it was her specialty. People were books to her, living stories, and figuring them out with the minimal screen of habit that she saw was the challenge that became the best thing that ever happened to her. It taught her more than anything at school could have, and putting what she'd learnt to use took the form of petty thievery and she loved how it included all the tools she'd ever crafted in her mind.