Leather Bound ✓

five | fair

five | fair

     When Amanda was fifteen her mother had taught her her very first bodily curse word, and though most would assume it was the middle finger, she hadn't learnt that until a year later. She was sixteen when she first used it, and it was towards a hospital lady that wouldn't let her enter her sick mother's hospital room.

     Never one to feel hate so easily towards another person Amanda was shocked when she found herself rapidly blinking out a "fuck you" with her eyelashes, openly staring at the fair skinned hospital receptionist with hair a cold shade of white and engraved frown lines tugging at her lips. She was young, maybe mid thirties, but in that moment she had looked older than that, worn. Amanda blinked back her tears some more, silently cursed with her eyes, and outwardly trembled, her fist clenching and unclenching in small fist, her hands always having been smaller than her face. She hadn't even gotten the chance to say goodbye to her. Her mom. And that was all she thought when she saw her Father lose his footing on the ladder.

     It was happening to her all over again, she thought, as soon as she heard the startled gasp leaving her Father's lips when his hand couldn't grab hold of anything to break his fall.

     Panic was everywhere as people tried to asses the best way to handle the situation, but inside her head all was calm, and she was not looking at her father who was desperately trying to reassure her that he was fine when he clearly wasn't. He was old, and he had fallen. Those weren't good odds, and she cursed her parents for having her at such an old age with all that love they had shared between each other. They believed they could make it through anything together, and so as old as her mother had been, the two decided to finally try for kids.

     Growing up with older parents hadn't been as much of a burden as people thought. The love her mother and father shared for each other kept them young and often chasing a naked Amanda around the house come bath time. They had even taken her backpacking across as much of the world as they could, and those were the moments Amanda clung to when the ambulance came blaring with sirens around the corner and onto Mayberry Street.

     Memories of her mother taping the corners of her eyes so that they looked like hers and Papa's almond shaped ones was what she clutched in her heart when Easton led her by the elbow into the back of the truck with her Father. Sewing her very first Kimono on her mother's lap at age thirteen though she was considered American just like her mother, was what she held dear and true. And coloring her first American flag purple and green at age three with a laugh from her Father is what she focused on when the tainted memories of her mother's last few days in the hospital came creeping in.

     It was because she hadn't gone to Church that any of what had happened, happened, and Amanda prayed for forgiveness.

     The hospital smelt. It smelt like too much cleaning product and blood, but more than that it just smelt like death, because pine-sol and blood were the only things that accompanied the sick or hurt.

     Amanda turned away from the Ice Queen that kept trying to ask for her father's medical information as they didn't have a set hospital plan, but that was because he wasn't supposed to get sick. Mama's hospital bills were enough to deal with, and he and Amanda both had come to a silent agreement that there wouldn't be any more freak accidents in their lives because one had been enough to witness. Of course it was an impossibly and stupidly reckless fault of her father's for not thinking about some type of medical plan, but grieving sort of took up that extra brain space in a person's head, and things didn't make sense afterwards and never seemed like they would.

     "Maybe you could ask about a payment plan after she's reassured of her Father's status," Easton cut in, just as the Ice Queen pursed to get frank with the young teenager before her. She nodded curtly and left.

     "Thanks," Amanda sighed, slumping down in a seat in the patient's guest's wing otherwise known as a waiting room.

     "Your mother must've had some pretty strong genes," Easton tried for a distraction, and that's when Amanda realized that he was talking to her again. Like, an actual conversation. She touched her frizzing hair subconsciously.

     "Yeah. She was a fighter," Amanda murmured, rapidly blinking though it wasn't to curse Easton out. She was holding back the tears.

     The only noticeable feature Amanda got from her Father was her eyes, but everything else was unmistakably from her Mom. If people were bored enough they could find other things about her that came from her father. Her tastes, were one. The other part were her ears. She had her Dad's thick eyebrows though they were perfectly bushy like her Moms, and the other thing she had were his dark eyes.

     Her Mother used to joke that she gave her daughter all her looks and her Father gave her all his personality, but maybe that wasn't true, because unlike Amanda's Mother and Father, she didn't think she could fight off the misery or laugh it away with a crinkly eyed smile that looked absolutely homie on her Father. If something happened to her Papa...

     "I don't know what to do," she breathed, turning away from Easton's eyebrows raised in a concerned frown. She hated seeing that look on him, but at least it wasn't pity just yet. At least it wasn't the pathetic look he wore when he was finally over the threshold of her Father's bookstore as if he had escaped some horrible nightmare at home. And who knew? Maybe he did and it was just something he hadn't gotten around to writing in his journal yet before he gave it to her.

     "Well, I don't know what you should do either," Easton sat back in his seat, and she watched him in her peripheral.

     "But this girl I met in a really cool bookshop- my girl, she'd take a deep breath and not think such negative thoughts first of all." Amanda's cheek twitched in a half smile. She had forgotten she called herself his, and had sort of hoped he would too if she was being quiet honest. She took a deep breath, just like he said she would, and tried to right her mind.

     "You have a brother," she stated, and turned her knees so that they knocked into Easton's. He rested a hand on them, just for a brief second, and Amanda felt the heat of them through her jeans before he pulled away. Their eyes met.

      "More like a pain in my ass, but yeah," Easton knocked Amanda's knees with his own, just as she had, and from there they kept talking, completely taking their minds off of the fact that they were in a hospital where her Father most likely wouldn't die, but be stuck in a wheelchair or back brace for the rest of his life, maybe even bedridden if he happened to be paralyzed. And every time Amanda's mind trailed off with thoughts of the most unthinkable, Easton's knees would touch hers and she'd blush, drawing herself back into their conversation.

      "Amanda Isamu?" An official looking Doctor came out of a pair of swinging doors. She stood, and so did Easton, taking her soft and childlike hands in his.

      "Yes?"