• Do you call yourself a fucking hurricane like me? •
• I let him climb inside my body and held him captive with my kiss •
• You taught me why hurricanes are named after people •
They meet at a motel, and they're together ever since. She isn't sure...
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"I'm hungry."
She says it as if Storm isn't aware already, as if she hadn't heard the other seven times the statement had been spoken.
Storm reckons she'll bang her head against the wall the next time.
"I know, Hun," Storm tells the little girl in the seat beside hers, "Your Mummy will be back in a minute."
Storm hadn't got on this bus thinking she'd end up playing babysitter. Of course she's far too nice for her own good, so she agreed to watch the five year old, blonde, pig-tailed little girl while her mother ran to the loo.
She's terrible with small children. She always has been. Her step sister, Mary, despises her (although, in all honesty, Storm despises her too).
"Where's Mommy gone?"
Storm resists the urge to punch herself.
"To the toilet."
"Is she coming back?"
Fuck, Storm thinks, I hope so.
She tries to ignore the child's insistent complaining. That's the thing she hates most about small children; the complaining. How does someone with such a small body, and head, and brain, manage to find so many things to complain about?
She feels a sense of relief as the kids mother appears, walking towards the two of them with long strides: well, as long as her pencil skirt will let her. The woman looks flustered, but grateful, and Storm almost feels sorry for thinking about how much she hates her child.
Almost.
"Thank you ever so much," the Woman says, "She can be such a nuisance, I hope she wasn't too much trouble."
"None at all." Storm says, because, in the kids' defence, it's hardly Little Miss Pigtail's fault that Storm has no patience.
Both mother and daughter don't linger after that, disappearing into the crowd quickly. Soon enough, it's as if they never existed.
Storm remembers wishing for that; invisibility. Her family has always been under scrutiny, due to her father's business, but she's always hated it. Everyone wanting to know where she was, what she was doing, who she was with, all the time. It drove her insane.
So she'd done what she'd always promised her parents when they'd been at each other's throats. She'd packed her bags, hopped on a plane, and fled England the second she turned eighteen.
She's never regretted that, not even now, two months later: penniless, hitchhiking, no roof over her head, and sitting outside a block of public restrooms. She's living her dream, travelling, without anyone following her every move.
Now she just has to figure out where she's going next, and how she's getting there (but that's never the important bit). She's only gone as far as Washington, since arriving in America.
