Thousand Paper Cuts

Seven : none will remember you

Skye :

Something about looking up at the sky always made her feel so free.

Under the sky with clouds that looked like her cigarette smoke (cleaner, though), she and Adam made their way towards his old apartment.
"So, " she said, "is the party at your place?"
Adam looked at her and replied,
"Yes, and no. I mean, the drinks and stuff are at my place, but the actual party is at Ben's."
Skye had met Ben before last year, and he was also the vocalist like Adam.
Incidentally, his band comprised of four members, but she'd only seen Ben.
As they arrived at the top floor, Adam plucked a flower from the vase nearby and placed it in Skye's hair, above her ear.
"Okay", she smiled, "now I'm totally under-dressed."
Adam shrugged. "It's fine, love. You look pretty like summer."
She laughed and replied,
"Yeah, but not sexy as your pop fellas."
Adam turned around, like some street, and placed his hands on her shoulder. He just looked into her eyes, as if he wasn't sure why he'd turned in the first place. Just like some pilot, saying 'hey um, I guess I really forgot how to land. So maybe we'll wait for a while until some miracle happens'.
Anyway, Adam spoke,
"Are you nervous?"
She shook her head, pursed her lips and replied,
"No, but it's just that I don't belong with these cool people, you know? Like they're completely different, while I'm an insane redhead florist."
Adam smiled, like it was his last, and said,
"If that's the case, I wouldn't have fallen for you either...Because I'm so cool, right?"
She rolled her eyes and Adam said,
"Don't worry. People are just people."
People aren't just people, she thought. There existed people as interesting as nineteenth century American poets, while there were also people who were complicated and callous like that stupid boy. (Stupid boy, with beautiful eyes')

The door opened with a jerk, and out emerged a smiling, muscular, already drunk Ben.
"And so Adam Hemsworth unpredictably drops in this tedious argument to save me." He said to someone in the room, and then turned towards her.
"Hey, the 'skye' is blue, right? I'm Ben. Nice to have you here."
She smiled and they all went inside a small room occupied by dozens of instruments.
Inside, a girl with tattoo and a belly button ring was arguing with some guy wearing faded jeans and a cardigan.
"No!", that girl shouted in thick American accent, "I can't appreciate the fact that C chord fits in this song. Try something new!!"
That guy was tuning his guitar, and Adam said to both of them,
"Hey, I brought a guest. Violet and Simon, meet the love of my life, Skye McLaren."
They both got up from the centuries old couch and hugged her. It was like they had known her for a lifetime.
"So", Adam spoke, "what's happening here?"
Simon availed the chance and said,
"Violet ain't letting me choose the chords for the song 'Heaven needed an angel', even though C chord sounds heavenly amazing."
Before Violet could mustard out Simon's opinion, Adam said,
"We'll decide what to do tomorrow. Right now, it's party time!!"

A spark of excitement flashed in their eyes, and soon all of them brought beer from the whole universe, and turned off the lights except for the one in centre that looked like some club light.
At first, she felt like someone from Mars, but soon over few minutes, everything seemed fine and everyone felt like home.
They drank beer like water, even though she didn't like it that much. When she was little, she had taken a swig from her father's beer, and she hadn't liked it like others did. It was that simple for her.
But tonight, she was invincible.
And all that made her forget that stupid boy.
After laughing and eating hell lot of brownies ( as you are older, you must know which kind of brownies they were), they all started to ask her questions :

"So what's your age?"
"I'm about to be twenty after few days"
"What's your favourite song of our band?"
She thought hard and finally said,
"You are my Skye, for sure."
"Why?"
"Because it's about me."
They all laughed and then Violet asked,
"What do you do for living?"
"Umm" she said, "I'm a florist, and uh, I'd also published one book back then. Though it didn't get me much money."
They all seemed to understand and then Ben asked,
"What's your favourite book?"
"The Catcher in the Rye."
"Why?"
"Because it's the recent one I've read."
It was partially true, that whenever she read some book, it would become her favourite until she read the next one.
It made all of them laugh harder, but in a friendly way.
"I like your hair. Honest."  Simon commented.
She smiled, because they were nice enough to ask questions about her interests, even though they weren't the kind of people to read books. It made her happy, because none of them were ingratiating her.
And in some way, she finally got to know all the band members too :
Ben had a beautiful voice like Adam, and was a huge fan of Star trek. Simon always wore sunglasses that were pushed up on his head, was a drummer, and had a weird fetish of collecting all the newspapers from the past. Violet had mastered the act of playing all kinds of guitars, and she was a Buddhist. She even told Skye about "Zen", that was part of their religion, in which you are connected to everything in the world, whether skies or tall mountain grass. She even explained how her tattoo symbolized that, which was some upside down dragon.