Stormy's song

salt and vinegar

Write a chapter in which a character makes a late night journey to the store to satisfy an unusual craving and meets someone special. 

She couldn't fall asleep. Her mind was on overdrive after reading everything that had been said, and was still being said. 

She hadn't turned her phone back on but her mind was racing. Saying that she could handle it and actually doing it were two different things. She pulled her laptop onto her bed and into her lap. Scrolling through the comment section on the video she didn't see as many mean comments. 

The comment thread from the first comment was still on top. She'd been going back and forth with this Ren person since the day she'd posted the video and it had ended up coming to the point where there was almost one-hundred  comments in the thread and other people were starting to get involved. It wasn't that she minded answering their questions, or ignoring them if they were there just to spam her comment section with the typical youtube comment section spam posts, but she was having a good conversation with them. 

They seemed smart. And she liked smart, her ex-girlfriend was on track to be valedictorian of her class, and even if she made Stormy feel dumb sometimes, that was fine. She liked feeling dumb if it meant that she was going to learn something. 

She missed her rambling. 

She sighed. 

She missed her late night texts when she had too much going through her mind to sleep. She missed... her. 

She debated giving whoever this 'Ren' person was her snapchat, but with the amount of times that she had accidentally sent inappropriate Sawyer snapchats meant for someone else she figured that adding random people was not a good idea. 

Even though giving out more of her social media tonight probably wasn't the best idea, she did it anyway. 

my instagram is stormyst hit me in the dm bro. 

The reply was almost immediate, as if he'd been staring at his email waiting for a notification from her the entire time that she'd been typing her response. 

I don't have an instagram do you have kik? 

She had no idea what that was, but to avoid looking stupid she turned her phone back on, her twitter notifications off, and looked it up. It seemed innocent, and safer then giving this person her phone number, or letting them find her on facebook, so she downloaded it. 

She thought, maybe, that this wasn't a good idea. 

She knew it wasn't a good idea. 

They'd been training her generation her entire life that giving out information online wasn't right. They'd spent hours upon hours warning her that if she met someone online that they could be an axe murderer or some kind of internet pedophile. They'd even gone so far as to round up all of the seventh graders into the cafeteria for an assembly in middle school to show them PSA's about giving out their identity online. 

She would never forget the one they forced them to watch where the girl sent a picture of her butterfly tramp stamp, tastefully done of course, to someone that she was chatting with online who turned out to be her father. 

Although, she was pretty sure that her dad wasn't hiding behind a computer screen sending her messages pretending to be someone with a dog icon. He had better things to do with his life. 

He'd divorced her mother when Stormy was very young. He'd finally admitted to himself that his marriage was fake, not because he didn't like her mother, no she was his best friend, but because he'd never wanted to settle down and have a child and work at nine to five and because he was interested in men. 

After that she hadn't seen him much. 

He'd spent most of his savings and quit his job in San Francisco, his dream city, to stay with her in the hospital in Vermont, and then, spent endless nights sleeping on the waiting room benches and chairs when her mother had been forced to go back to work or lose the only job they had between them which was paying her medical bills. 

He'd spent the next year living with them again as she learned how to walk. He came to her physical therapy appointments and he carried a picture of her first steps with her first prosthetic leg in his wallet with him. 

He was far from a bad father, he just had his own life. 

The last time she'd seen him was at his wedding at 2012 - on the day the world was supposed to end, because he was that kind of guy. He'd asked her to walk him down the aisle and give him away to his new husband and although she didn't know his husband well, she'd only met him three days before the wedding, she could see how happy it made him so she did it. 

He'd gotten a job working as a character actor at Disney and was living his dreams. 

So needless to say, she was pretty sure her father wasn't catfishing her. But still, she couldn't get that bad early 2000's PSA out of her head. 

She replied back to the comment thread telling Ren that her username on kik was also stormyst 

As soon as she felt her phone vibrate and saw the notification from the app she set her phone down and deleted the comment. She didn't need to give anyone else any other forms of social media to harass her on. 

The first message was a simple 'hello'. 

She was about to respond when she saw that they were typing something else. So she watched the top of the screen where it read ren was typing ... 

She stared at it for a while. It felt like forever but it didn't change to anything else, and she wondered, if he was typing her a novel or something. 

Ugh. She threw her phone down on the bed. Tempted by the twitter app to check out what people were saying about her once again she stared at the alarm clock next to her bed. She should be asleep but she couldn't. 

Her stomach grumbled as if to agree that it was pointless to sleep. So she sat up and dragged herself across the room and put her prosthetic on. Her mom and grandmother were heavy sleepers they'd never know she was gone if she just went to the store to get some chips and came back right away. She knew from experience that they'd never notice. 

She picked up her phone one more time to see if there was a response from Ren and when there wasn't, she set it back down on the bed and headed outside to the car. 

She didn't turn the headlights on until she was all the way out of the driveway and a little bit down the street, not facing the house. The gas station was only a short drive away and she wanted to comfort eat not be forced to eat kale and seaweed chips. 

The only problem? 

Apparently her ex-girlfriend also shopped at the corner store gas station at almost four in the morning, and, she'd literally run into her on her way into the store. 

an; ok so i'm failing pretty hard at this but don't worry I'm gonna get it i'm gonna catch up tomorrow so be ready (for anyone that's actually reading this, which is probably no one I'm probably talking to myself) for a couple of updates tomorrow to make up for the ones that i missed while i was moving.