Flicker

VIII

Breakfast the next morning was not quite as eventful as the day before's, but Sophie assured me that the rest of the day would be a good one. Diamond did not sit near me, thankfully. I really doubted I could handle his attitude today.

After breakfast, Sophie drug me by the hand outside the front door. "Where exactly are we going again? I think I was half asleep when you told me," I said with a yawn. Despite the fact she was pretty skinny, Sophie managed to pull me around with ease. To be fair, she is fairly tall for a girl (at a shocking 5'10"), so maybe that gave her some kind of added strength. Too bad she never thought to use it when we were fighting upstream in the halls of school.

She turned me around so we were facing the old hotel. The brown and white paint was peeling, revealing discolored wood underneath. The letters on the sign read "Pit Stop Motel", but the "p" was barely hanging on by a nail. Clearly, this place was a dump and had seen better days.

"Welcome to the Pit Stop Motel!" Sophie said with a squeal in her voice. "I know it's not much, but it keeps us off the radar pretty well. It used to be a pretty popping place before the new highway was built, but now it rarely gets visitors."

"So do you guys own this or something?" I asked skeptically. Nothing like living on a property that's not yours.

"Of course! Izzy's family owns this property, but honestly I doubt they know that," Sophie said this with a "no biggie" tone, but I had a hard time believing that someone could own property and not know about it.

"Mhm. Right," I mumbled with skepticism. Sophie grabbed my arm and pulled a reluctant Amber in the front door over to the lobby-turned-hangout. She pointed to the very tall, very large guy sitting on the bean bag. "You've met Gar, and the skinny pale one is Jasper, whom you also already know. The girl sitting beside Jasper on the couch is Amy. I don't believe you met her yet. Amy!" Sophie waved her over, and immediately I got mixed emotions. Amy was a fairly average height like myself, but she was also super curvy. Imagine the perfect hourglass figure. That's Amy. She had nice toffee colored skin, and long black straight hair. None of that was what threw me off. I'd seen Hispanic people before. It was what she was wearing, well, more like what she wasn't. It looked kinda like she was wearing a bikini top and very small, very tight denim shorts. Her manicured nails were longish and bright pink, and on her face was lots of makeup even though I suspected she was just as beautiful without it. After she gave me a hug, she went and sat back down beside Jasper, placing her hand strategically on his knee.

"So Jasper's power is speed, and he has a jasper stone in his ring on the right hand. Gar's is strength, and his garnet gem is in that leather cuff around his left wrist. Amy's power is invisibility. The amethyst is in her nose piercing," Sophie said, then she leaned over and whispered in my ear, "Personally, I don't think she likes her power. She spends a lot of time and effort trying to be seen to make up for the fact that her power is the opposite."

I shrugged. It seemed to make sense, in a weird way. I wondered if I had that power if I would start trying to get attention from people more. I somehow doubted it.

The hallway in front of us contained a library, an office,  the hospital room, and a gym with a pool as well. The other end of the hall was all of the rooms we were staying in, with some of the doors painted brightly with the name of said person. My door at the end of the hallway was not painted, and there were two other rooms further down from mine that also were blank.

"So there's, what, eleven of us now? Wouldn't that make 13 rooms total, and that's kinda unlucky, don't you think?"

Sophie let out a nervous chuckle. "Yeah it is, but every time we almost get thirteen residents, something always happens to where we don't."