Shadow

Chapter 5 - Black Rain

You are the worst mistake I ever made.

The words circled in Abbie's head like a song on repeat; no matter how many times you pressed stop, it continued to play, while increasing the sound of the playback with each cursed loop.

She had walked for about ten minutes and could see the Barstow Highway from a distance. So much dispersed in her head, and mainly were the figures in her life. Her mother. Her brothers. Tony. And oh, how much she yearned for another line. She was dying for one but knew she only had one small bag of it left and so bit her tongue and tried to think about something else.

The sun continued to assault furious light upon her, warming up her flesh of all sides as she walked along the street. The light summer breeze hardly helped matters; the temperature was well over in its thirties and overnight it would increase she remembered the weatherman saying last night. She used the palm of her hand as a shield to protect her eyes from the blazing light of the sun and wished she remembered to pick up her sunglasses.

You're disgusting. You're trash!

'I'm not,' she whispered back to the voice of her mother in her head. 'That's not who I am at all.' She was suffering inside, just like she had been for the past year. She felt like a little swan with a missing leg swimming gracefully just above the water but paddling frantically down below so that no one could see.

As she walked, Abbie imagined herself sitting somewhere in her house. Ideally, that was her bed. Then she imagined herself standing in the middle of the street in front of the house. Then as if some unseen force pulled her, she was now standing in the middle of Barstow, then in the middle of the US. Now she was standing all alone on planet Earth. All that was left were buildings, sunshine and a warm breeze. Not one living thing around her, unless you counted flowers. Then she imagined herself jumping onto some distant star that took her for a ride. She could see the sun cooking away and all the other planets that made up the universe. She hung out on the star, now not even being able to make out her state or the road her house was located on. Then she found herself thinking: what's the point in all of this?

The answer hit her as quick as an arrow.

Her mother saying that Abbie was a mistake did not represent the way the rest of the world saw her. Just because she had said that Abbie had the belief that everyone thought the same too. Compared to the rest of the world around her, Julie's brutal opinion of Abbie became minuscule.

'You're the mistake, Julie,' she whispered angrily. 'Your own mother left you when you were six. Where's Grandma now? That's what I should've said to her.'

It was true; Abbie still had a lot of fight left in her and had many more choice words for her mother, but when the situation is presented at the time, you don't think of what to say right on the spot, but the moment you have time to reflect on what you should've said, then it dawns on you. But by then, it's too late. What's done is done, and there is no turning back.

She walked north towards the long Windy Pass then turned left onto Muriel Drive, then about a half mile up the road, she stopped at a crosswalk and waited patiently for the green hand to light up.

Between where she stood, and the other end of the crosswalk, were three cars in their own respective lanes. When Abbie started to cross over, the red convertible in the middle lane full of what appeared to be three college boys started to wolf-whistle and whoop. The driver honked the horn at her. Abbie looked at them. Two of the boys both made a peace sign in front of their mouths with their tongues flapping through it. Abbie stuck her third finger up at them and stepped onto the other side of the sidewalk. They all laughed and gave each other high-fives.