001 - December 19th. 2019 (Before: Snake)
I remember waking to a great sense of foreboding.
It's a wonder Soren M. Saxon hadn't turned out worse. Those words echoed in the isolation of my skull. I heard them many times. The words of adults can linger within children for the rest of their lives. The most unfortunate truth is that we have no means of understanding what will remain. You could tell a child something delightful and only the bad sticks; vice versa, you could tell a child something heinous, and by the next morning, has forgotten it all.
I was far too young to comprehend the meaning of these words. Instead, I sauntered about for nearly fourteen years believing them to be a compliment of sorts. As haunting as it may seem, learning harsh truths early is the best way to promote growth. It wasn't until my third and final year of Junior High that I uncovered the true meaning of their words.
I was a troublesome child: always disrupting class with untimely jokes, ditching school to try and catch the attention of older women, and fighting in the bathroom because everyone else around me did it.
"It's a wonder you haven't turned out worse, Soren."
I sat in the vice-principal's office for what must have been the ninth time that week, with this smug look on my face, which made both the vice-principal and guidance counselor grimace with pursed lips. The kid I was called into the office with for bashing his eye swollen with a textbook I slung across the classroom for no apparent reason other than not having moved in the last ten minutes, sat next to me with a disapproving face.
A pallid-faced child.
He was only thirteen with a thin mustache and long brown hair. An easy target to pick on. His clothes were too large, and his shoes were both gigantic and filthy.
"This isn't a good thing, you know," he told me.
Looking back, I understand now why he was so awkward. His family was too poor to afford fancy clothes or shoes. He wore nameless shoes so worn down they became open-toed, and the school was forced to give him an oversized pair from the lost-and-found.
At the time, I dismissed him. I understood him. But I was well-read, articulate, never drunk or smoked a day in my life, and was acutely aware of every decision I made. The bare minimum. It hadn't occurred to me. I was doing the bare minimum.
My guidance counselor, a woman whose name I have forgotten, shook her head whenever I made eye contact with her. I remember her as a disagreeable woman; short and stout, with long hair, dyed blond, and a long, crooked nose.
"What does that have to do with anything?" Simone asked.
I looked down at Simone as we pushed through the drifts. "You're still young," I told her, "Just thought you needed to hear it."
I trudged with Anastasia stuck to my back. Our boots sank into the snow. Simone marched alongside me. A beautiful nineteen-year-old girl, wearing the violet coat I bought her last winter, and thin yellow gloves hardly protecting her from the cold. She shoved her hand inside my coat's pocket, desperately clinging to my warmth.
"How much longer?" she asked.
The building was just ahead. The red and yellow bricks were barely visible behind the white veil that blinded us. "If you cut those bangs, you'd see it."
A cold fist burrowed against my hip. It shifted my balance. I took one, two, three steps to the side, and swayed two steps closer to Simone until I regained it.
For as pretty as she was, Simone hid behind messy bangs. She wore it well, for I cannot lie, the messiness of it was purposeful and healthy; however, my concerns weighed outside of her physical appearance.
A dull ache rested in my back and shoulders as I let Anastasia down. Simone's voice was weaker. A whimper in the howling wind. She took her hand from my coat's pocket and held the feverish Anastasia tight and offered me a nudge in the direction of the store.
She growled this time. "Hurry the hell up!"
The establishment was a low-end service center. Family-owned. Polished tiles and the bare interior lacked anything aside from a neon sign that read: "Welcome To Discount Wheels" above the waiting area.
A man in a red and black uniform, with a garish race track emblem sewn black across his chest, glared at me with the impractical contempt reserved for customers who interrupted his precious slow day.
"I'm here to grab a 2011 Toyota Corolla."
The man rolled his eyes, smacking his gum, as he tapped three times on the glass counter. My name was printed in the top right corner of the display screen.
"Soren?" he asked.
I nodded my head.
He looked at the screen, chewed his gum slowly, and smiled. He rolled his jaw, letting out a brief huff of air. "Says here you owe ₢2,400, Soren."
I reached into my back pocket for my wallet, took out a silver card with my name on it, and I inserted it into the machine.
The machine let out a long beep. "Approved," and the man walked away from the counter, dug into a brown bin labeled "stuff," and slid my keys across the counter.
"Your car will pull into lot A."