mermaid 》 alemanda ✔

chapter two.

alesha

I glanced around Amanda’s classroom as I entered it. We had broken up our meeting to go and get something cold to drink. Paula had volunteered and Simon had gone with her. It was a well-known fact in the school and within the staff that Simon was trying to get Paula to be his girlfriend. They were always flirting with each other during meetings but at this meeting, Simon didn’t flirt with Paula once as he knew it was just too hot and trying to flirt would make Paula irritated with him. Amanda’s classroom was looked to be almost ready but there was a giant stack of scripts of musicals and many copies strewn about the center of the circle of desks that Amanda had set up. She was sitting on the cooler tile floor with one of her legs to her side and her left foot touching her right calf. It was a basic dance stretch position that Amanda was in.

I had told Amanda that I was going to help her with picking the Autumn term musical during the meeting and she had replied we could start looking for the musical after the meeting ended. Amanda tucked a strand of hair behind her ear as she flipped through one of the scripts for a musical and scanned the page with her eyes.

“Any luck so far?” I asked quietly, sitting down on the ground next to Amanda.

“Not at all,” she replied, shaking her head. “Some of them I don’t think there would be enough kids to do it or the music is copyrighted heavily and we would have that much money left to buy supplies to do the sets.”

I picked up a copy of the script that she was looking at, Into the Woods. “That one would be tough to stage and get the kids ready to sing the songs. Especially for the boy that’ll be Jack. Castle in the Sky is such a hard song for males to sing.”

“There’s no way we can do it in time,” Amanda complained. She put the script into the pile of scripts next to her, all ones that she had rejected. “Maybe I’ll just have to do a play instead.”

“I promised I would help you with picking out the musical, Amanda,” I countered. We heard a knock on the open door to Amanda’s classroom and Amanda looked up, grinning as Paula came in with two iced coffees for us.

“Your usual, Alesha,” Paula said as she handed me the plastic cup. “And here’s yours, Amanda. They made it wrong twice because you made it complicated.” Amanda grinned and stood up as she took the cup out of Paula’s hand.

“An iced caramel latte with almond milk, two sugars, and an extra pump of caramel is not that hard to make and it’s not that complicated,” Amanda spoke and sipped on her coffee.

“Almost everyone in the arts department has an easy order. Especially Alesha,” Paula replied. “All she drinks is black coffee.”

“As black as my soul,” I joked. I took a sip of my coffee and smiled. I only drank my coffee black as most flavourings were too sweet for me or I just didn’t like the taste of them. I had gotten used to drinking black coffee as there had never been any creamers in my childhood home when I had started drinking coffee. Most of the time, I would drink it as strongly brewed as possible which required me to make a pot in the evening and let it steep overnight for the next morning.

“I’ll let you get back to finding a musical. Let me know as soon as you’ve decided!” Paula called as she left Amanda’s classroom. Amanda sat back down on the tiles and pulled out the next script from a box. She hummed as she flipped through the script and looked at the song lyrics.

I sat down on the floor next to Amanda again and took a script out of one of the many boxes that surrounded her. I flipped through the script and started humming one of the songs from it, singing the lyrics to it in my head. Amanda looked at me as I hummed and she smiled.

“Find one that we can do?” She questioned as she tossed the script she was looking through into the discarded script pile.

“Not yet. I just know the music for this one,” I replied. I remembered that the play was American and it was about American kids. The drama club kids wouldn’t be able to get into their characters that well with this musical. “The chorus students sang Seasons of Love from it last year and it gets stuck really easily in any drama or chorus student’s head.”

amanda

The swimming pool in the rec center on the school’s campus was almost empty. There was only one person in it and she was just swimming lengths. I never usually went swimming but today was too hot to think about doing anything else but lounge around in the water. The woman swimming was missing her left leg above the knee and it didn’t hinder her while she was moving through the water.

I got into the water and swam to the deeper end, treading the water as I watched her. She was familiar to me but her hair was tucked up into a swim cap to keep it dry. Her face was turned from my direction as she swam and she stopped when she got to the deep end to take a break.

“Hey, Amanda,” the woman spoke. She wiped the water from her eyes and opened them. “I thought it was you.” Alesha took the swim cap off of her black hair and tossed it onto a pool bench with her other things.

“Hi,” I breathed. I hadn’t known that the reason why she walked with a limp was because she had a prosthetic leg but she moved so gracefully in the water, like she had been born without her left leg from mid calf down. “I didn’t know that you swim.”

“You haven’t known me for long enough. I usually coach the swim team here during the winter term,” she replied. “I swim almost every day.”

Alesha pulled herself out of the pool and she hopped over to her towel on the bench. She sat down and dried her left leg off first, taking care with the scar on the bottom of what was left of her left leg. I ducked my head when she saw me looking at her leg.

“You’re curious aren’t you?” She asked, putting her prosthetic back on. I nodded and shifted in the water. “I’ll tell you tonight if you want to maybe get together at your place so we can decide on the musical.”

“I need your number then so I can text you my address,” I replied. I swam back to the shallow end of the pool and got out. I dried my face and arms off with my towel and took my phone out of my bag. I pulled up my contacts and walked back to Alesha. I handed her my phone and she put her number in.

“Just text me the address later today,” she said as she got up from the bench, wrapping the towel around her body. “I’ll see you later, Amanda.” She left the the pool area and went back to the lockers. I put my phone back with my stuff and I got back into the pool. At least Alesha hadn’t said anything about my makeup failing because I had gotten my face wet.

I didn’t wear the best waterproof makeup so it tended to rub off when my face got wet and i would dry it off. My towel had a small stain on it from me drying off my face earlier. I swan a couple of laps and went under water again. I sank to the bottom and i crossed my legs, holding my breath. I loved being under water because it could make everything, even my face, look normal.

No matter how much makeup i wore, I could never quite cover the port-wine stain, even with the best foundation that I could find. It would cover my face for the morning but it would always start failing by afternoon and i would have to reapply it if i was at work. It was too hot today for me to bother with reapplying the foundation to my face because it would fail even quicker, no matter how much I would have to cake it on. I came back up for breath and I pushed my hair back out of my eyes. It was almost impossible for my hair to stay where I wanted it to but I didn’t care about it as i had learned to deal with it.

I had learned to deal with the port-wine stain on my face and even though I hated it and tried to cover it up to the best of my abilities, it was still always there and I hated the fact that it was always going to be a part of me. I would have to deal with having a port-wine stain for my entire life and deal with the the stares, the comments, and the hurt caused by it.

[] Hey guys! Sorry for the late chapter but I had to work today. What did you like about this chapter and what do you think is going to happen next? Bye until the next chapter!