Kinesthesia

He looked like a soldier's boot, but his taste...well, she didn't know, but she guessed it was like a soft mist on sweet spring grass, she was sure...

Daydreaming. Again.

Elliot Bane had that effect on her. He seemed, well, almost ugly, a scrawny young adult with freckles and hair which seemed like a weathervane, always standing up on end but...somehow...the sound of his voice was something like cream, the thick fresh kind you pour on your good old-fashioned cuppa on a cloudy day in Portland when it's raining, like back in the day when you still lived with mom and watched black-and-white arty films from the rental place on Clinton Street.

But now she was a young adult herself, and had dropped out of school, and had become something of a slut. They said. Who said?

Everyone, Lucy thought, everyone and anyone. Even though she told herself not to be paranoid, the paranoia was everywhere. Whatever she thought, she saw. It was clear.

On the bus, in the morning, trying to find a seat, the faces, the glances, of the old people, of the drunk people, of all the different colours and shapes of people glared out at her from their dirty seats with a crumpling sound of garbage, as if they were throwing her in the trash. She wondered how ugly she might be, and when she looked in the reflection of the bus window, she saw an old woman with death in her eyes, white hair. She tried to sit up straighter.

Those old sayings, of Nadine who used to sit next to her on the ride from North Portland to Pioneer Square, near the Mall where she worked in Sweet Thing, a candy shop near the entrance and the sparkling pool to which they had added a collection of inflatable mermaids.

Those old sayings really disturbed her, and Nadine had a new one every day.

"It's now or never!"

Nadine was an elderly woman with a mole right on her nose, not a bad looking lady, clean and only sllightly disabled (part of her foot had been shot off in a drive-by in the 90s), who wore her own hand-crocheted sweaters and carried a handkerchief.

"Now or never..." It echoes in Lucy's mind. What had she done with her life?

Honestly, she was a disappointment to everyone in her family, as they were all college graduates, well-adjusted, with families. She was the black sheep, the one who had gone off the rails. It had happened the summer after high school graduation, when suddenly Lucy began to hear others' thoughts, loud and clear. And had trouble understanding what people actually said to her. The problem was, she was usually right about their thoughts.

Nadine was one of the few people she got along with, because what she said with her mouth usually matched up with what she said with her mind.

"Poor girl. Poor little girl!" Nadine at least had kind and loving thoughts about her. As the bus screeched to a stop and the driver began chewing out the kid on his bike who had almost caused an accident, Nadine squeezed Lucy's cold hand. Such a young girl, she thought, so pretty but so thin, so sad.....