My Mania Ended The World Peace. ★

⋆ 5 ⋆

Later that day Adrian's mom took him down to the shop because she needed someone to assist her in carrying the weightier plants to her slam-door van and then from her van to the shop.

When Adrian walked into the lobby of his apartment building and pressed the button of the lift, the doors were just sliding open and she was coming out underneath the delicate ding-sound, her gloved hands half in the air, pointing delicately towards the exit. 'I'll need you with me, Adrian.' She said briskly.

On the way to the van she asked how school was. Fine. How he himself was doing. Fine. And if he met Hyde after school how he was doing. Fine, he's got a new boyfriend so maybe he's even good, great, can you feel just fine when you're in love?

'That's nice.' She said.

She sent him around the building to the side yard, which was littered in trash people had thrown off the windows, to where the delivery man had unloaded yearlings of apple trees on the grass, ten in total. All of them were wrapped heavily in plastic, and under the plastic they stood inside orange plastic pots.

'Why didn't they just drive it a little farther to the shop?' He asked her once he came over to the van with two yearlings, one in a half embrace on his side, the other he pulled after himself across the pavement. They weren't heavy to begin with but the grip on the pot itself was awkward.

She simply shrugged. 'I'll wait in the car. Make sure you don't get any dirt in the back.' Then she added painedly, 'Don't scratch up the plastic too much. They're sold like that.'

After all the yearlings were safely stored in the back, Adrian spent a whole minute smearing some disinfectant gob into his hands on his mom's request, then stood there,  holding his moist hands in the air, in front of the opened passenger door till his skin was dry, feeling slightly taunt.

He held one hand towards Debora, she drove two fingers breezily along them, then nodded. After he sat inside he slammed the door shut and they were already undocking from the parking side.

'There's a new volunteering program not far from here, just a fifteen minute walk.' She said after a while. 'Would you be interested?'

'Isn't this volunteering already?' It must be, Adrian wouldn't do anything to do with nature voluntarily. He didn't understand why people even valued nature so much, if it were for him the whole world could be tarred down and the sky covered by the view of a million skyscrapers.

Almost all suffering was caused by nature, after all, diseases, natural catastrophes like tornados, comets coming literally out of nowhere while everyone's minding their own business for the only sake to put a stop to everything.

Technology on the other hand brought medicine and safety with it that came like a blessing to human race.

To him it almost seemed like there is a war on Earth between technology and nature and while it seemed only logical to support the first, everyone was fixated on the latter's beauty so they're blindly painting landscapes of it, feeling repelled of the car noises in the distance but when nature decides to strike up a lightning it's nature's way, and it's beautiful, because everything apparently is as long as it's not manmade.

Adrian's mom was one of those people, she constantly complained about modern things that are being invented, phones, planes, whatnot. But she was also being the hypocritical one, because she closed the windows on the rain, hated dirt and gave you the cold shoulder if you acted on natural impulses.

She finally said, 'Yes, but in the program you'll be around kids your age. You could make some friends. Isn't that what you said you were struggling with?'

'I have friends!' Adrian blurted. 'Hyde? He's my friend. And List-up boy too, as of recently. That's plenty plenty much.'

'Who's him?' She rose a neatly plucked brow at the windshields. Her blouse faded in perfectly with the creamy seats, she must be having a good day if she's wearing white for a change.

'I don't know his name, doesn't matter either. He knows a lot of others's to make up for it.'

'Okay, see for yourself.'

They were heading towards the red-bricked shop, when Debora stopped sorting out the keys. Her face suddenly scrunched up. Her focus of attention was a generously filled-out woman who struggled bending forward so she could pick up an etiquette of a rose bush which Debora kept displayed in front of the shop. Her belly restrained her from moving, as if she was wearing a life ring underneath the thin and long shirt.

Adrian came up next to Debora. She muttered, keeping her voice sneakily low, 'Those fat people...how aren't they ashamed walking around like that. I'm already self conscious wearing this opposite to black that forgives a little hip gold.'

Natural impulses. She hated them. And wasn't that pretty much what filled the people up? Their impulse for bread, that was almost as scary as an uncontrollable hand that slaps you out of its own way.

'Like a whale.' Adrian chimed in halfheartedly. He was still kinda bummed about her attempt to get some help for him like a teacher once recommended her to do when his grades slacked the first time.

The thing was, she gave up really quickly if Adrian didn't show any interest, and Debora had her own struggle to understand what was wrong exactly. Adrian seemed fine, mostly, but lazy to study.

'There's another one of them, eating bread as well! Huh' She sneered, which looked more like a little smile on her liver-red lips. 'Whenever you see fat people around you see them with bread in their hands, tearing away at it with their teeth. Is that a coincidence? Tell me!'

'I don't think so.'

'Freely so!' She uttered another soft, 'Heh!' before her heels pattered around the van, opened the backdoors for Adrian to start unloading the trees from there, then she went over to unlock the shop doors where she greeted the two larger women heartily.