Note to self: Never, ever, edit a story post in the post window. Your computer
will decide to freeze and force you to restart it during that exact moment.
Anyway!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ - “Hey, mum? Look, I- what? Yes, I’m doing all right. No. No, I’m...what? No, I’ve got money left, don’t worry. Look, there’s something really, really urgent I need to speak to you...what!? No, mum, for goodness’ sake! No, I promise! Look, it’s not important – just...yes, yes, of course it’s important, I didn’t mean it that w...look, mum!! Can you
please hear me out, it’s serious business! You have to come over. All right? Yes, if you can; as soon as possible would be great. Yes. Yes, as I said, it’s really urgent, but it’s hard to explain over the phone...so you’ll be here? Okay. Okay, great. See you in a while. Yeah, love you. Sure. Sure. Bye!”
I hung up the phone, lowering my hand which I noticed I had pushed towards my forehead the entire time I had been talking.
- “Geez”, I muttered silently to myself. “As soon as I tell mum something serious has happened, she draws the conclusion I’ve knocked some girl up...like she didn’t know my luck with girls already.”
I looked around. “Now what?”
As on cue, my stomach started rumbling. I remembered I hadn’t eaten all morning, and realized that Crystal probably hadn’t done so either. Peeking into the fridge, I inspected what I had that could possibly be nutritional.
- “Frozen pizza. A carton of milk; need to get more milk. Um...oh, right, there’s the...hmm. This looks pretty old. Maybe not such a good idea to eat it...”
I plucked out a carton of pizza, putting it on the table. A true bachelor, I thought to myself, embarrassed. Really, though, it’s my own fault...I’d probably screw up boiling water if I were ever to try. All bachelorhood bless Percy Spencer, I thought, smiling for myself, as I put the pizza into the microwave oven.
Just as I had gotten the oven going, the doorbell rang. I looked back at the door in confusion, as Tinny started barking from inside the living room and came rushing for the door. Was mum here already? No, no...she’d take at least fifteen minutes to arrive.
I had barely gotten the door open before a curly-haired beast barged inside. It spun around towards me, teeth glimmering like sun reflexes and a pair of green eyes peering at me above a pair of thin-framed round glasses. Tinny barked wildly at it, jumping up at its leg to greet it. I laid my palm towards my forehead.
- “Tommy...”
- “Heeyyyy, Will!” Tommy laughed, poking me in the ribs like I was a fresh piece of chicken. “How’s the life in solitude treating you?”
- “It’d treat me much better if you’d
stop doing that, Tom – you almost scared the hair off my arms...”
- “Hey, Tinny! Good girl, good girl! Oh, you’re so sweet, yes, you are!” he said to the little dog as he went down on his knees and ruffled her fur over. She eagerly jumped to try and aim a lick at his face. “Oh, what would one of my greetings be without some sudden action?” he then said to me, getting up on his feet. “Don’t worry”, he assured me, “I won’t stay long, I just had my way past your house - I’m going to Katherine to pick up a DVD she promised I could borrow. Just thought I’d look inside and see how you fared. Say, you mind if I use your bathroom?”
- ”I guess not...what, you couldn’t take a tinkle in the woods? Afraid a bear might see you and scold you for being indecent?”
- ”Well hey, I guess I could do that…
or, I could swing by the house of my old lone friend in the middle of nowhere who never gets any visitors ever, just to check in, say hi and make sure he hasn’t fallen into the microwave oven and cooked to death. What, do you hate having me here that much?” He pouted exaggeratedly. ”You’re breaking my heart, man.”
- “Yeah, fine, sorry. You mind keeping your voice down a little, though? There’s-”
There’s a little girl I found out in the forest yesterday who has no name, no clothes and says almost nothing, and she’s sleeping in my bed with a fever because she won’t allow me to take her to the hospital, I thought, and my brain automatically locked my jaws before another word managed to squeak their way past my lips. Blending Tommy with gossip-worthy news was like blending Mentos and Diet Pepsi. Too late, though.
- “There’s...what?” he said to me, leaning his head to his side. His eyes gave off a worrisome glint.
- “Ah, uh...I-I’m...”
- “The only reason that I should be quiet in this straight-out-in-nowhere house...dude, you’ve got a sexy babe lying in your bed!?”
- “What? No!!” Well, it’s half true, I thought. The microwave gave off a
bing, indicating heated pizza, but Tommy’s interpolation made me forget all about it.
- “Oh, you
sneaky bastard, you!” Tommy whispered to me, leaning over at my shoulder with a rascally sparkle in his eyes. “You brought something home from the pub yesterday after all, didja? Didja didja didja?”
- “What the hell is the matter with people!?" I hissed through my teeth. "I wasn't even at the pub yesterday, and even if I would've...god, Tommy, you know me better than that. I
know you do."
- “So then...what is it? Something you need to keep secret, I suppose, or you wouldn’t have stuttered like that...”
- “Look, were you going to the bathroom or not?” I muttered, pushing him away from me. “It really doesn’t concern you anyway!”
- “Are you
sure this isn’t about a girl?”
- “I...”
‘A girl’, he said now. If I confirmed this accusation by him, I’d
never get rid of him. My mind went 1000mph at point blank, sorting through my thoughts at a speed I'd never experienced before, and I was just about to pull a stealthy lie up in his face when the doorbell rang again.
- “William! I’m here!” came my mum’s voice from the other side. I twitched, but didn’t bother to get the door; she always stepped inside anyway...so the door swung open, and she came in with a bag that she put on my kitchen table.
- “Some dinner for tonight”, she instructed me. “I suspect all you have for the day is a fridgeful of frozen pizza. Hey there, Tommy.”
- “Hallo, miss Teresa!” Tommy said, flailing his hand out in a strange greeting gesture.
- “So, what’s this you wanted to talk about?” my mother said, having completed her greeting to Tommy and now had immediately forgotten about him, like a lone servant in a corner of the room.
- “Oh, you even called your mother over, but you won’t tell me?” Tommy said to me, acting offended. “So it’s about a girl anyway, is it?”
Tommy, you annoying fuckwit!I sighed lightly, quickly glancing back towards my bedroom, and then back to my mother and Tommy again.
- “Look...”
I searched in my minds for the words to formulate myself with, but understood soon enough that it was meaningless. The sudden drive of thoughts I'd had had passed by the moment they appeared. They’d draw their own conclusions as soon as I opened my mouth...I might as well just get it over with.
- “You have to be quiet”, I said silently, waving towards my bedroom. “She’s sleeping in my bed.”
- “Oh my god...”
My mum covered her mouth with her hand, looking sternly at me. I could hear Tommy barely covering a mischievous giggle.
- “William, I seriously thought you had a more responsible mind than-“
- “Mum...go take a look at her, and I’ll explain to you.”
- “Take a look?” Tommy whispered blithesomely to me. “What, is she dead? Don’t tell me you murdered her, Will!”
- “Oh, you have
no idea how close I am to murdering someone right now...”
I could see my mother’s face turning a vicious red color as she stomped over to the bedroom, not caring about me telling her to keep it down. Tommy followed in her trail, eager to see what was hiding in my room.
The noise toned down, and in seconds, everything was quiet. I snuck away to the bedroom to see if the coast was clear. Well inside, I found both of them, seemingly locked in position, looking down at the little figurine in my bed. She was sleeping soundly.
- “Damn...she’s cute”, Tommy whispered.
My mother turned around and looked at me again.
- “She’s got a terrible fever...who is this?” she said.
- “She’s...um, I’m taking care of her. For the moment.”
- “Taking care of...for who?”
- “That’s the thing. I don’t know. I...um...I found her. This morning. She was out in the woods, where I was walking, and she was lying against a tree...and she was almost frozen solid. And now I took her here, and I tried to keep her warm, and...”
I took a pause, breathing in deeply while waving my arms to try and force my thoughts out.
- “...I don’t know what I’m going to do with her.”
My mum seemed to have slight problems digesting all I had just said. It took a long while before she said something.
- “You...found her?”
- “Yeah. In that nightgown she’s wearing; she didn’t have anything else.”
- “And you didn’t take her to the hospital? Or call her parents?”
- “She doesn’t want to go to the hospital...and she hasn’t said anything about her parents. I...she doesn’t even have a name. She says her parents never bothered.”
- “Okay...so for all you know, they could’ve left her out there to die, since they didn’t even give her a name?”
- “It’s possible...I’m not sure, of course. And...well, I'm stumped. I gotta do something for her.”
- “Dear, you have to get her to the hospital.” My mother looked at Crystal and laid a hand against her forehead, just as I had done before. “It’s not about ‘what she wants’ in this case, she’s-“
A small hand reached out and took my mother’s. Crystal was looking up at her with her shimmering eyes.
- “Oh, hey there, honey!” my mother said, slightly taken aback by the sudden movement. “Are you feeling okay?”
- “They’ll hurt me”, Crystal said. “Don’t take me back to them...they’re mean to me, and they’ll hurt me...”
- “Sweetie, they’re not bad people at the hospitals”, my mum said, and I noticed a slight trembling in her voice. “They’ll take care of you. They’ll fix you up.”
- “I’m fine”, Crystal replied. “I promise. I’m fine. I don’t want to go back...”
Her hand sank back into the bed covers again. Mum looked at me.
- “The way she's speaking...that’s a pickle right there”, she said. “I think I see what you mean.”
Mum had noticed it too - the way that Crystal made statements, sounding so much like clear facts that you almost felt stupid trying to correct her.
- “...her parents. It's the only lead I know. Maybe I should look for her parents.”
- “Maybe you should do that. We only have assumptions so far. Maybe they’re really nice people.”
- “Or maybe they never existed”, I mumbled. “You know, like if she’s some kind of genetic experiment test tube thingie...”
- “Don’t be silly, William.”
- “But still...until I find her parents...what then?”
- “You take care of her”, Tommy suddenly said, having stood quiet all this time and studied Crystal from the bedside.
- “Eh? No, Tommy, no...I’m a bachelor, for crying out loud. I can’t cook, I can’t plan my chores, I can’t focus on one thing for longer than a few minutes! I can’t take care of kids. Really, I can’t.”
My mum smiled at me.
- “So much better to learn soon, then”, she said.
- “But-“
- “If you get any problems, give me a call and I’ll rush over. I’m sure you can take care of it, William. She seems pretty attached to you, eh?”
I couldn't believe what I was hearing. My mother, who thought I was so inept at taking care of children that she had reproved me for playing "House" with my big sister when we were younger. She wanted me to take care of a bruised, weak, extremely dependent little child. A girl, on top of that. I almost thought of the idea to portray myself as a potential molester to avoid this sudden responsibility. My common sense quickly gave that thought a boot in the rear.
- “But-!! Mum!”
- “Will...”
Crystal’s voice came faintly from her bed, and I turned towards her, kneeling down by the bed. I was faintly surprised that she had actually bothered to remember what my name was.
- “What?”
- “Do you...dislike me?”
- “What- no! No, Crystal...it’s just...I’ve known you for a better five hours! I know
nothing about you. I just...I just want you to be somewhere where you’ll be taken care of. I mean, by a person that
can. I...want you to be somewhere where you’ll be happy.”
- “I’m happy here.”
She gave me one of her rare smiles, and I felt warmth sink straight through me. Was this why my mother had suddenly become so easily swayed? I could practically feel my determination melt off and vaporize. Did Crystal use this spell on my mother, too? Is that what suddenly made her so adamant on me taking care of her?
- “I promise I won’t be a bother. Okay?” she said meekly.
- “Crystal, that’s not the thing...”
My voice died away.
- “...fine. If you...fine. I'll do it. You can stay.”
- “It’s decided then!” Tommy said to me. “You lucky bastard, you! Ain’t she just the cutest thing!”
- “She sure is, and I’ll be sure to keep her at a safe distance from you”, I told him with a nod, more serious than I had planned for it to be. Pah, he could take it.
- “I’m sure you’ll do fine”, my mum said to me. “Remember to call if there’s any problems, okay?”
- “Yeah...yeah, I will.”
And so they took off, Tommy completely forgetting his bladder issue. I put mum’s food into the fridge. Remembering the pizza inside the microwave, I picked it out and laid it down on a plate to Tinny, who wolfed it down with blazing excitement. Crystal probably wanted something more nutritional than pizza anyway. Who knows how long she might’ve been without food. I went into my room and leaned over the bed.
- “I guess we’re family now, then”, I whispered to her.
She was already sleeping again. I kissed her forehead and went out to heat up mum’s food.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Also, I made a little doodle.
Edited by Horn, 28 December 2012 - 12:31 AM.
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