Frightened Boy

Chapter One - Knots

1. Knots
A month later.

It wasn't a good day. I had to get my Citizen Card renewed.

If you had a job, you had a card, and if you didn't have a card, you might as well be a Stranger. I did my time diving in dumpsters and drinking from drains; I wasn't going back.

My local neighborhood Banlo Bay City Center was a dismal building, a stout block of bureaucratic order which was slept around, pissed on, and spray painted by the hordes of disgruntled people who wanted to get cards but couldn’t. This was the gate holding back the muddied masses who desperately sought protection in America's last sanctum of civility.

I pulled open the door and was met by a warm waft of stale air that smelled like a hobo with morning breath blowing across his armpit and into my nose. I settled in place behind several dozen other dour faces, a progression of gradually worsening moods that crescendoed with myself at the rear.

An hour into my wait, a foot stepped onto the back of my shoe, pulling it half off my foot as I inched forward in the line. I ignored it politely until it happened again, then again. I half-turned to see the offender out of my peripheral, but something I smelled sent my memory into overdrive. It was that beautifully alien scent on my sinuses again—the scent of lilacs and lavender.

“Excuse me,” she said.

I turned to face her.

“Haven't I seen you somewhere before?” she asked. Soft brown curls, big brown doe eyes, elegant chin, sculpted neck. Young, vibrant, and curious about each new thing. A fawn. My world used to have a place for them.

“I doubt it,” I mumbled. I’d rather her not remember me at all than be remembered for abandoning her. But from her face, it was clear she knew exactly who I was. “Wait—maybe at the opening of the Chapel Hill Orphanage Memorial.”

“Yes, the Strangers! I still have the bruises to show for it,” she said, smiling now and pulling back her sleeve to reveal a slender arm with a yellow bruise which looked at home beneath her skin.

“Shit, yeah. I’m glad to see you got out of there.” No thanks to me.

“Barely,” she said. “So, what’s your name?”

“I’m Clark Horton,” I said, extending my hand. She took it. Oh God yes.

“I’m Erika Bronton. You’ve got a space to fill,” she said, motioning in front of me where an opening had appeared. I moved forward to fill it.

A few minutes passed before she spoke. “So you were at the Orphanage?” she asked. "When it burned?"

"Yeah, I was." Don't like thinking about it. "You?"

"You're next," she said politely, nodding at the line in front of me, leaving my question unanswered.

She was right. I faced the man behind the desk. He looked like someone who was practiced in pretending to be patient but was always on the verge of snapping. It was a veneer shared by most everyone within the confines of Banlo Bay; it was the mortar that held the city together.

I handed him my card; he reviewed, then stamped it.

“You’re done,” the man said and slid my card back to me. I pocketed it. We used to be required to wear them on our shirts, but derelicts kept running by and ripping them off.

I began walking back toward the entrance when Erika grabbed my shirt sleeve. “Hey, wait for me,” she said. “It’s gotta be fate that we met two times like this.”