The Recluse

Chapter 1 - Loner Phase

Adeline did not speak of her midnight encounters with the random tattooed man, and nobody bothered to ask why she’d shown up to work in the same outfit as the day before and passed out in the break room. The employees at the record store were used to her unusual antics on weekday mornings at this point, and let her do paperwork for the rest of the day. At the end of the work day, she gathered her purse, still stuffed with heels, and traipsed to the bus stop to make her way home. Everything continued as usual. She thought little of the mystery man she’d managed to bang.

Maybe they didn’t actually do anything together. Maybe they just got naked and crashed on his bed. … It didn’t seem very likely, but she wasn’t going to dwell on it.

The hungover young woman fell asleep on the bus ride home. She fell asleep at the kitchen table after making and stuffing herself with an oven pizza. She fell asleep in the bathtub after a failed attempt to relax her frayed nerves. She then went to bed, after a hard day of mostly sleeping and running away from her problems. Nothing was new, and Adeline was entirely content with this fact.

Her real problems began in the days to follow. Work had piled up for her at the shop, since she’d shirked most of it while nursing an alcohol headache. She’d failed to beat her writer’s block with her promiscuous night out, and thus she failed to write anything new for her demo CD. In general, everything was suddenly falling down around her. And she’d forgotten to tell her little brother happy birthday the previous night. This would result in spending obscene amounts of money on the latest version of Super Smash Brothers and some new styli for his Nintendo 3DS. He forgave her after some latent pouting and an hour of him kicking her ass at the game.

Friends called to ask her where she’d been in the days previous, interrupting any productivity she’d managed to conjure as she explained all her latest adventures. Her mother sent long-winded text messages to her detailing exactly why she was her favorite - and only - daughter. Adeline’s employer emailed her the addresses of several recording studios that she could buy time in for her demo, which she’d barely read, but had thanked him for. The dead-beat acoustic artist thought she was home free after she’d shut off her computer for the day, after her phone had died, after the mail had already came.

Then she remembered she had a roommate.

“Whaddup, Addy?” Greeted her pot-smoking, blonde friend, who haphazardly tossed a seemingly large, dark object towards her as she spoke.

Adeline fumbled to catch the proffered item, barely able to grip the material in one hand while the other was busy cradling a bottle of creme soda to her chest. She stared at the item, a well-worn black notebook that she couldn’t recognize for a lengthy few moments. “Shit, Jenny, I didn’t even know I lost this!” The bedraggled female exclaimed, flipping through the notebook to make sure everything was still in tact, “Where’d you find it?” They spoke of her cheap-ass, dingy, little writing journal. All of her things were scribbled within its yellowed pages - passwords, brief diary entries, doodles - but the most important thing was the entirety of the work-in-progress that would hopefully, maybe, prayerfully be her demo CD. And her stupid ass hadn’t even noticed its absence. Probably the fact that she’d taken up smoking weed with Jenny that week.

Her friend shrugged back at her, grabbing a creme soda for herself from their fridge. “I don’t know, man. Some dude from your work said somebody dropped it off for you,” Jenny rambled in between sips of the nostalgic beverage, “It’s all very suspicious. They probably stole your lyrics or something.”

Still in a weak state from the past month’s events, the dazed lyricist felt the color drain from her face at the thought of anyone taking credit for her months of hard work. She could’ve written more to make up for the lost songs, but with her stubborn case of writer’s block, it was likely that she wouldn’t make any headway for at least a month. “Aw hell no,” Adeline mumbled with disbelief, rubbing at her forehead stressfully, “You don’t… You don’t really think anyone stole my shit, do you?” Typical Addy - being more concerned with her writings than the password to her PayPal account.