Roots ; s.mendes

A L O N E

Piper always liked to sit alone. Some poetic nonsense that I never really understood about getting to watch your surroundings and think to yourself. 'Your mind is your only true sense of honesty' she always told herself, which lead me to confusion because I had always found the mind was your greatest enemy. Like people who think badly of them self. Yet she merely laughed and sipped her drink whenever I dared doubt her 'wise' thoughts. Looking back they weren't so wise as my naive little mind had pictured.

The girl, however, was not one of lonesome. Well, if she was she didn't enjoy sharing it. She didn't enjoy sharing a lot.

On august twenty-fifth of our year of spontaneity- a New Years resolution we had decided one night on our hill, most likely influenced by alcohol and whatever other influential substance we could find, I found piper sitting alone.

A white mug against a black table, smudged windows and worn out paint, a girl and her coffee. She sat alone, her cold fingers clasping a hot mug and a black hat hanging from her fragile head. There was no cigarette in her mouth which struck me as odd and she didn't recognise my presence as I walked through the cold glass doors and into the empty coffee shop. It was always empty.

"Can I sit?" She peered up at me, her brown eyes meeting my own. Her brown hair was scraped behing her shoulders hiding beneath her hat and a large black denim jacket hung from her shoulders.

"Of course, kid." She nudged her head towards the seat opposite her and I slid my skinny legs in it. "How've you been?"

I contemplated what exactly to tell her; that after I went home last night, I had to coax my fifteen year old sister from our roof and into bed without disturbing my mother and whomever was in bed with her and that after the man who was in bed with her had left, me and Gregory had to stop her drunken self from crying or choking on her own vomit until the sun rose and she finally slept, but i didn't. or I could fabricate a lie.

"Ok, I guess." Three words, three lies, three oh-so-obvious lies. Piper could tell I was lying, maybe it was the bags beneath my eyes or the way my hair was hanging over my forehead, sticking to it, or how I clasped my sweaty palms together in fright.

"What really happened shawn?" She sipped her black coffee and tugged at her black hat while she drummed her fingers against the black table.

And so I told her. And she didn't say anything, she only spoke when she wanted to not when she felt guilty or felt she had to. She knew everything about me, everything she could want to know. Waiting for a reply from Piper was like waiting for the sun explode, it takes so long that by the time it actually happens, you won't be here to see it.

I looked from the smudged windows and out onto the street outside of them, the neighbourhood I had a bitter sweet relationship with, the place that lay in front of me, a car park with rusty old cars and graffiti filled walls and broken glass bottles that lay in pieces on the sidewalk. Behind the car park was more houses, each conjoined and broken- inside and out.

Some days I loved our small town, it's imperfections suited me and my imperfect family and my imperfect friend, but on other days I despised it; I hated the way people would scream at eachother or how frequently people were hurt. I hated how everybody who lived in one of those goddamn houses had a problem that fucked with their mind or their body. I hated how nobody ever spoke, how when going to get groceries with the small amount of money we had the cashiers were always so rude. Sometimes the cashiers wouldn't give Piper her cigarettes and boy, nobody wanted to see Piper when she didn't get her cigarettes; you'd receive a slap round the face and a middle finger after it and after such a mighty slap the cashier would almost always give in, and if they didn't?Nobody had gotten that far.

A cold touch against my warm skin snatched me from my conscience as I found Piper prodding her bony fingers into my arm.

"You know, I feel bad for El." She spoke of my sister using her nick name, only piper called Eloise El.

"So do I, she's only fifteen and she has to deal with all of my mother's shit." I looked up into piper's green eyes and she looked past mine and into my thoughts- something she often did- whizzing around my mind and making me feel exposed and naked, I was unsure how she did it but she pulled my own insane thoughts from my own insane head and secured them in her own like a captive hostage in a cage made of tulips. Though, tulips were the incorrect description for what I imagined to be Piper's mind. I thought Piper's mind to be a tangled jungle, a mess of thoughts.

"Where is she now?" She pulled the stained mug to her lips and eagerly finished the last parts of her sour coffee , slamming it back down onto the dirty table afterwards.

"At home I assume, Ben's looking after my mother." I pushed my overgrown hair out of my forehead and eyes and chewed on my chapped lips like I was starving.

"why don't we pay her a visit?" Piper asked me innocently as if she didn't know how fragile my dear sister was, as if she didn't know that Eloise wanted to be alone, the fear of turning into mother constantly screaming at her, as if Eloise wouldn't have pushed Piper far far away.

Though, I was wrong. Piper insisted we visit her and when we did Eloise did nothing but wrap her skinny arms around Piper's skinny torso and bring her into our paper house.

Our house was indeed a paper house, the walls were thin and floors would creak and the slightest of movement upstairs would trigger symphonies and avalanches of dust below it. Privacy did not exist in our paper house, anything said was heard by everybody present, and most likely to those who lived next door as their own paper houses were conjoined with ours.

Although you would imagine a house so flimsy would be a house that was affordable, this house was in debt, just like it's habitants, rent hadn't been paid for months- but the owners seemed just as lazy as us and hadn't yet chased our fraud up.

Both Piper and I, were greeted with a surprise as we found mother downstairs on our paper sofa rather than upstairs in her paper bed.

A raised eyebrow was shot in my direction and another was shot back.

"She sober?" I spoke in the quietest of whispers, bending down to Eloise's height, my lips a few inches from her ear. She looked up to me, her brown eyes looking naively at me as though they were saying: 'how could you be so naive? Of course she isn't.'

She simply shook her head side to side, her brown hair shaking too, whipping around to slap mine and Piper's shoulders.

"We should go?" Piper told me, her words escaping as more of a question than a statement yet i answered as though she had asked it.

"Yes, yes we should." My breathe shook and a lump arose in my small throat, impossible to swallow. My nerves kicked in and I looked down to the black hand-me-down pants I always wore, my index finger lodged into one of the pockets. I loved the pants, I wasn't sure where the admiration had come from but it had come at some point, so strong that I barely removed them. They were like another limb, nerves engrained into them I was sure i would feel it if ever they were broken.

And so me and my friend exited the house with the fear of the monster who's womb I had escaped but hands I could not, Eloise trailing behind.

Piper spoke up as we left my paper house, looking at me as her green eyes glistened with delight of what she was about to share. She shared something that was normally kept so secluded, inviting me to the darkest depths of the place i never dared explore in my 8 years of knowing Piper Hughes.

"El, do you want to come to my house?"

And Eloise's little eyes lit up and so did her little soul, and in that moment I was happy, yet also contrastingly scared.