The Secret Rules Of Walking

1

"Come on, I promise he won't bite!" Ky thrusts the evil-eyed python at the bridge of my fat nose, her own grin ditto with the snake's. "If anything, he would probably strangle you."
"Yeah, no, thanks for that." I flinch, pushing the creature away from my face with a shooing movement. Ky's thick, boisterous smile subsides, and she curls the snake close to her chest defensively. A hurt look shines in her marble grey eyes, and a sick feeling begins to well within me. "Erm, what did you name him again?"
"Leonard." Ky replies coyly, rubbing the snake's snout. In response, the snake, who is apparently a know-it-all businessman as Kyan had described him over the phone, flicks his tounge. His deep caramel-coated eyes seem to stare intently into mine, that oily snout of his drifting closer to my face with each passing second. On impulse, my curious fingers begin to twitch and tremble, and soon I find my hand stroking the beast's neck-back-whatever. Oily and slick to the touch, he feels somewhat like hair gel. A small, shy hissing sound erupts from the little creature, and my old, friendly smile falls once again back to my lips. Snakes give me the willies-well, this one doesn't. Leonard is seemingly different, and I know why. He belongs to Kyan.
  "I just knew you would love him," Kyan disturbs the calming silence, her glaring smile  bright enough to make me squint. In the heat of the moment, my eyes disobediently drift up to find her face, but quickly shift back down as I regain control of them.  It's too late now, however, for she notices and flicks her own eyes onto mine testily. The moment is gone, and I am sure it was nothing, but for that split second that it was, it had meant the world. Ky always does that to me, she gives me those "moments", where my heart races and my world flips all the way around. I never can figure out what to give her in return.
  "Where will he live when he gets too big?" The nervous question pops into my head, and it only leaves curiosity left to motivate it out of my lips. Obviously, Ky hadn't thought about that bit, for she begins to bite her nails. She always does that when she is thinking. "Burmeese pythons are considered the third largest snakes in the world." Ky makes an "o" shape with her mouth.
  "The sewer! It will be perfect! No one will-oh, right." Pursing her lips tentatively, Ky wraps the  snake on her girth. The sewer had been Ky's hangout for years. Every secret she shared, every nasty thing she did, it died there. She had posters hung up there, signatures engraved in the walls, clothing and time capsules and oaths all locked away. At one point, she had even managed to smuggle an old rifle down there. She could go anywhere she wanted, and she had access to almost every building within a citywide diameter. Granted, it is possible to just walk to any building between a citywide diameter, but this is Kyan. She lives for that sense of living that walking the old fashioned way just doesn't offer. In fact, if I am correct, the fourth rule for doing things according to our rule book from eighth grade is:

If there is a different way to do something, do that instead.

   So Kyan did just that during her time in the sewers. She went everywhere with those pipes, and several times I would find her filthy, sewer-smelling self standing giddily at my doorstep, inviting me to flee the state with her for the day. She trafficked homeless people through there, too. For the most part, though, it was just the two of us, although she did invite other friends at one point. Those were the good old days.
  Soon enough though,  as all good things end, the police found out about her dwellings during a reconstruction and banned her from ever again settling there. Not at all good for her permanent record. Ironic too, for that was the place I had told myself I would confess to her my feelings.
Ky had taken the sewer thing really hard. It had severed one of the only remaining ties between Ky and her old dad and tore apart one of the only places in which she felt free to be herself and destroy what she wanted. I didn't know how else to make her feel safe, so we shifted our hangout from that old sewer to under the park bridge, where the other kids wouldn't find us. Ky hates the others. They don't understand.
"Maybe Sealie will have a place to put him," I suggest, adjusting the ruffles in my black Brandy skirt, "Like the supply closet, perhaps."
  "Right. Speaking of which, her shift should be over soon, and I gotta pick her up. Wanna ride home?" I am hesitant, and my eyes flick eagerly towards the door. She was right; as soon as her sister's shift was over, my mother's would be too. I'm supposed to be at home doing homework after school, but Ky always meets me halfway there and convinces me to hang out with her.
  "Sure."
  "Oh goody." Ky stands, brushing off her bright red knee socks and cracking her knuckles. Leonard coils himself around her shoulders, hissing. She lends me her hand, and I wince. I know my fate. Sure enough, as soon as I take it within mine, Ky yanks the bejeezus out of my arm, practically dislocating it, sending me stumbling for balance. I cry out, startled, and a dry cackle erupts from Ky.
"Never gets old. You should work out more, though. Strings for arms do you no good." She mutters, inspecting my pale left forearm. I twist free from her, snarling, and gather my things from the ground.
  "Let's go, we're already late. Five minutes and three seconds exactly. Let's start walking now, who knows how she will react to the snake." My dirty fingertips leave a wet smudge on my watch, which I curtly wipe off before Ky sees. It was her watch before mine, and it is one of her most prized possessions. She went through a steampunk phase back in the ninth grade, and she loved fiddling with watches. So, one night, she snagged her grandmother's old gold watch from the cellar and seriously screwed it up. I don't know what she did to it, but I know she did something seriously wrong, because now, instead of telling time, the watch freaks out whenever any slight vibration in the earth happens. However, when it does so, the hour arrow places itself at the time it really is for about two seconds.  Then, everything just stops, as if the battery has died.
    The day Ky had given it to me was the first day she had introduced me to the sewer. It had been on her wrist and I had asked her about it. As a token of her loyalty, she said she would pay me with it. She showed me how to work it, and our faces had been so close to touching...
  She told me never to take the watch in for battery replacements, as the mechanic would probably fix the watch. I remember her telling me that he ,"need not fix it if it isn't broke", as if she had just altered it. So then I had learned how to fix watches and replace batteries. A great skill, if I was asked.
"When I said 'wanna ride', Kitty, I meant it. You haven't seen my new toy yet!" Yet another one of Kyan's cinematic grins spreads on her face, and she disappears behind a bush, leaving me stranded under the bridge alone.
  "What the Hell, Ky!" I frantically fling myself after her, scratching my legs on the shrubbery. In the distance, her figure disappears into the undergrowth, hiding from my view. A thorn stabs at the underside of my foot, piercing my old, blueish-grey flip flop. It sends me stumbling, then hopping, then falling to my knees in a spray of autumn leaves. Cursing, my numb fingers swab the wound, delivering a shock of pain right to my toes. Gingerly, I pluck the thorn from the foot, then the flip flop.  Yuck. Pushing myself upwards, I find my balance again and test the ground, mashing my toes into the crinkly autumn leaves.
  "Come on, I'm disowning you if you run that fast. The snake can run faster than you, and he isn't even running!" Ky's beady eyes find me from her hiding spot behind an oak tree, Leonard slowly making his way around her arm for his third loop.
  "I got stabbed by a thorn."
   "Pussy. Make a better excuse than that."  She whistles triumphantly through the wide gap in her front teeth, curling her lip up. It had been last year that Ky had gotten the bright idea to try parking lot trick-boarding. It had been a terrible idea to begin with, not to mention way too costly to fix for poor Sealie after Ky slammed face first into a lamp post. She had worked overtime and double shift for two months to make enough extra cash to buy Ky reconstructive braces, which Ky then denied. For the most part, Ky was happy though; with the missing tooth, she had just enough room in her New York City style mouth to fit in two wisdom teeth. As for her other two, there was a good chance she would do something about those teeth as well, and soon. "It isn't even that far away. "
   Now I am curious. Here we are, stranded in an undergrowth near the park and the freeway bridge, searching for this "toy"my deranged friend supposedly left in the woods.
   "Hey, you know, I hate to bother your little game of Where's Waldo here, but we really need to get your sister and go home, so, if you wouldn't mind telling me what we are looking for.."
  "You're no fun, you know that? And we aren't looking for anything. You are just slow. " Ky retorts,  huffing her warm breath into the sharp air, creating a smoky illusion. "And if you didn't get the hint, I found a car."
   My eyes grow wings and pop right out of my head.
  "A car?! Ky, are you crazy? There are like, a billion things wrong with hiding a car that, frankly, I don't even think you own, in the middle of the woods! Do you have any idea how much time you could get for car theft? Think about your permanent record!" Ky puts her hands up, as if to surrender.
  "Jesus, chill. I found it here. The keys were in the ignition. It was begging for a drive."
  "Well that doesn't mean you just take it! Even so, you are fifteen! You can't be driving cars! Also...what the Hell were you doing in the middle of the woods?" Sometimes I wonder why Kyan has so much free time. In her case, it is very bad for her.
  "Who said I was alone?" A wink slips through Ky's disguise, and a smile bursts from my lips to meet it. I don't want to fight her; I am not in the mood, and time just isn't on our side right now. I like to think that she would keep arguing given the chance, for it offers me the opportunity to compliment her. My maturity is much greater than hers, I like to think, so when we go together as friends, I can balance her out with my mature and logical thoughts. Not now, though, there's really no time.
  "Okay, fine, you win," The words burn my tongue as I force them through," let's just get out of here and find that car."