A Work in Progress

Five-59 Days

I just accepted to let a total stranger take me to lunch. I don't even know if he's taking me to lunch, to be completely honest. But for some odd reason I trust this total stranger. Maybe it's because he's hot. I get up from my chair in the library at the same time as him and close my notebook, shoving it in my purse along with the mechanical pencils. We walk through the building in unison, earning glances from other bodies as we pass the wooden shelves of the library. He holds the door open for me as I leave the library and feel the cold Autumn air enveloping me, attempting to penetrate my hoodie as I hug my body tightly.

"Come on," Max tells me, waving his hand towards the asphalt street. I pull my hoodie sleeves over my hands as we walk together past my street, Overview Drive. "So, who are you, Miss Anna?" The stranger asks, looking at me to his left.

"I told you, I'm Anna." I tell him, confused as to why he would ask a second time. We pass a tall woman, maybe in her thirties, digging up vegetables from her chain-linked garden. She has a nice two-story house, and a large Oak tree in the yard, naked and withered with age.

"No, I mean, 'who are you?' What's your story?" He replies, obviously curious. Or rather obliviously curious, to be correct.

"My story? It's a boring one, to be honest." I look to my tall right, into the stranger's eyes, and his handsome face looks back down at me.

"Ah, come on. It can't be that boring," he locks his gaze on my eyes, and I look away. "Not if it's your story. We're all stories. Some are terribly ugly, and some are wonderfully beautiful. I can tell already, you're one of the latter."

I laugh. A small one, though, and it feels good. As if laughing will take away all my pain, but it won't, because laughter is a form of happiness, not a form of medical painkiller. "I don't think so. I'm boring. This is literally the first time I've left my room for two days."

He keeps walking, and isn't looking at me anymore. "Come on." He says. "It's just around the block." It is. I know this part of town well. We pass a North Valley Bank, sitting on the corner of the block, and the restaurant comes into view. It's a small, anonymous burger joint that calls itself . My dad used to take me and mom here all the time, before he divorced her. Well, she divorced him. I haven't thought about it, or wanted to, since the day he moved out.

* * *

Five minutes later, we are seated across from each other in a booth with a black and red checkered table and badly matching brown leather seats. Our waitress is a young black teen, maybe seventeen, wearing a red uniform with a white, pocketed apron from which she produces a pen and a small notepad. I read her name-tag, pinned to the pocket on her left breast. Anita.

"What would you two like to drink?" Her voice is soft and kind, like my mother's.

Max looks up from the small menu, which only has about eight or nine choices on it, all of which are either burgers, hot dogs or salads. "I'll just have a tea, please." Anita writes something on her notepad for a few seconds, then looks to me questioningly.

"Same as him. Could you give us a couple minutes to order, please?" I notice the tattoo on the underside of her wrist. In type-writer styled letters, it reads, Keep makin' trouble 'til you find what you love. I recognize the lyric from a Fall Out Boy song. I can't think of the name, something about skeletons. She casually walks away to another table, where an elderly couple is waiting for their orders to be taken.

"So, what about your story?" The stranger brings it back up, and I groan.

"I don't even know you," I sigh, but I give him a brief summary anyway, about everything, my dad, his leaving, and the monster.

By the end of my story, I'm sobbing, my eyes are watery, and I can't see straight. I notice that people are looking at us, and Anita is awkwardly standing next to the table with our food, shifting from one foot to the other. Max tells her something I don't bother to listen to, and she quickly puts the burgers down before walking away. I hear the stranger shift in his seat, and a couple seconds later, I feel his weight on the leather to my immediate right. I wipe my eyes with my hoodie sleeve and look at him, into the stranger's deep blue eyes, as I close my own eyes and bury my face in his chest, the smell of his cologne defining the thin, thin line between reality and nightmare.