Page 27 of Distortion
I stop in the middle of the path at her words. Nothing seems to phase this girl.
‘Why are you being so nice to me?’ I ask.
‘Because I think you’re a good person,’ she says readily as if she was waiting for the question. ‘And there aren’t all that many good people around, you know?’
I nod. I do know that.
Lu takes me along a few roads and through some alleyways until we reach the town of Richmond that I remember from when Shade drove us through it yesterday. There’s a small main street with a grocery store and a diner as well as some boutique-y looking shops I hadn’t noticed. We goinside one calledSecond Love, and I realize it’s a charity shop ...consignment store.
‘Everyone who goes to school at Richmond brings their cast-offs here,’ Lu says with a roll of her eyes. ‘All the rich kids who wear stuff like once or twice used to just throw it out, but there was this big campus-wide ‘re-use, reduce, recycle’ thing by a couple of the sororities, and now everyone brings their shit here. The lady that owns it, my aunt Kath, sells it to us poor kids for cheap. She opens early on a Thursday. And, yes, she is my actual aunt ... sort of.’
‘Sort of?’
Lu walks slowly through the store as I gaze around with wide-eyes. I look at one of the tags and realize that I can probably get a few outfits here and still have a little left over.
When my eyes find Lu again, she’s already walking toward me with a handful of clothes.
‘You need a lot of stuff,’ I remark, and she laughs.
‘No, silly, this is all for you to try on. Now, hurry because we only have like an hour before you need to leave. Don’t wanna be late for your first class!’
She ushers me to the back where there’s a small fitting room. She hangs up everything inside and then practically pushes me in, swishing the curtain closed.
‘Show me everything!’ she orders.
Feeling in a bit of a whirl, I shuck my clothes quickly and try on a pair of faded jeans and a tank top with a sweater. When I show Lu, she looks me over with a critical eye.
‘Not the sweater,’ she murmurs. ‘It’s too light for you.’
She takes off to one of the racks, picks out something similar in emerald green, and nods at me. ‘This will look great with your dark hair and bring out your eyes.’
The next half an hour goes by similarly until I have a small pile of about five outfits that I can mix and match into quite a few ensembles. There are a couple of pairs of jeans, afew tanks, sweaters, and she even finds a pair of short, black boots in my size that are much more comfortable than the pumps I’m wearing. I do look around for bras and undies, but they don’t seem to have any of that. I suppose it’s not really a second-hand type of thing, so I’ll have to make do with what I brought with me from The Heath.
When we’re done, the smiling, vacant-looking lady at the register, who Lu informs me is a friend of Aunt Kath, rings me up. It comes to just twenty-seven bucks. I hand over the money. I’d hoped to have more left over, but I can’t complain. I’ve now got more than enough clothes to last me awhile, and I didn’t even have to ask Shade for a loan, which I’m glad about.
I can tell that he thinks I’m the same girl I was when I left, and I want to show him that I can stand on my own two feet, that I don’t need him sticking his neck out for me like he did back then.
I take some of my new clothes out of the bag and run back into the changing room to put them on, glad that I don’t seem to stick out like I did before.
When I come out in some ripped jeans with a black tank and a blue mesh shirt over the top with my new boots, Lu gives me a thumbs up. ‘Looking hot, Daisy Duke!’
I chuckle, shaking my head a little as I look back at myself in the mirror.
‘I look ... average?’
Something passes over my friend’s face that I can’t decipher and she laughs. ‘Average? Not in a million years!’
I wince, my spirits plummeting as I look at myself again, trying to figure out what’s wrong, what makes me look ‘other’ to everyone but me. But I can’t see it. I never can.
‘Hey,’ Lu is by my side in an instant. ‘Are you okay? What was that?’
‘I just ... want to look like everyone else,’ I say, catching her eye in the mirror. ‘Normal.’
‘Normal is overrated,’ she says quietly.
‘Not for me. Not right now, anyway. I suppose I just want to blend into the background for a bit,’ I try to explain. ‘I don’t want everyone’s eyes on me all the time.’
‘Riiiight,’ she says, but I can see that she still doesn’t really get it. Maybe it’s the theater girl in her.
