Author's note: Marissa Tomei is how I envision Leila, only a bit younger. It's hard to tell she's 52, but she still looks older than Leila's 29. Also, Leila is much curvier. But the way she smiles, the mischief in her eyes, and that beautiful auburn hair are just like Leila.
**********
Odessa turned the conversation with Mina over in her mind as she traipsed slowly back to the medical center, trying to ignore the tightness in her chest. Are James and Tai really 'babysitting' me? She thought with unease. She knew they were both really busy, but she never pushed them to spend time with her, and she had gotten really good at memorizing the town and how things worked so she wouldn't need to rely on anyone, especially them. But maybe it wasn't just her need for guidance that had them checking on her all the time. She didn't really know anyone in the camp other than James and Tai. Well, Leila and Liam, she thought. Could either of them have asked James and Tai to befriend and watch over her? Probably.
If that was how things really were, then she would put a stop to it. She didn't want to be a burden on anyone, and she certainly didn't want friends out of pity. While Mina's words had stung,they'd also made it very clear what she needed to do: give the boys some space and remove herself quietly from their busy lives.
She left the school at 2:00 the next afternoon, having passed the Junior High curriculum. She had utterly failed Algebra and the Germanic languages. She sighed at the prospect of beginning high school testing and Asian languages review the next day. The instructor planned to only test her for one grade each day for the rest of the week. How hard could it be that she needed 4 hours of testing for one year?
She looked up at the building. The overcast sky allowed her to see into the lit windows. She scanned them, trying to learn something about the school, when James' bulky silhouette appeared in one of the windows. She squinted a little, but it was unmistakably him leaning against the glass. Odessa looked down at her watch; they wouldn't get out for another hour – plenty of time to take a nap before she had to call Tai. She stopped herself at that thought. She had to call? It was like she was checking in with her guardian. No, she wasn't going to force that responsibility on him anymore.
She turned away from the school and walked back to the dormitories. When she arrived, she entered her one-room apartment and looked around at its emptiness. The only furniture it contained were a double bed, plain dresser, coffee table, and a small television sitting on an end table in the corner. An old-fashioned telephone hung on the wall near the tiny closet.
Odessa sighed at the cold blandness of it all as she tossed her jacket on the coffee table, then took off her shoes and crossed to the bed. She badly needed some decorations or something with some personality. The problem was that she didn't know what sort of 'personality' she could display. The troubling thoughts faded away as she lay down and quickly faded into a deep sleep.
An hour later, Odessa was making her bed and trying to figure out what to do with her first paycheck, three days later. She went to her closet to change into her medical uniform, and looked over her small collection of clothes. Everything was too big, which was understandable since Leila was 3 inches taller and much curvier. She needed new clothes, but her paycheck wouldn't be very large. Then it dawned on her: she could get her clothes tailored to fit her better. Surely that would be considerably less expensive, and if she only got a few of them done, she'd definitely have some money to take to the city with her this weekend. Maybe even enough to buy something new while there.
She decided to have her shirts tailored first, since those showed the biggest difference in sizes. There's no way she could ever hope to compare to Leila's endowments and even with the brace she'd been wearing for her broken ribs, the shirts swam on her, making that painfully obvious. So she folded them, put them in the duffle bag Leila had also given her, and went to the coffee table where she kept a map of the town. She memorized the location of the Tailor where Linda worked, then grabbed her duffle bag and left.
YOU ARE READING
Dark as the Night
Mystery / ThrillerShe doesn't know why she was in the woods, broken and dying. She doesn't remember her past or what happened to her. But because of two boys and a camp full of refugees, she's learning about who she is - possibly for the first time. There could...