Valerie blew a cloud of smoke up into the air as she laid on the back of her motorcycle. Her head rested comfortably on her arm, which in turn was resting on the gas tank. The black GSX-R was her most prized possession, one that she had saved up for since her fourteenth birthday. A day her mother would forever hold against her father for taking her to the bike shop. She shared her dad’s free spirit and his love for fast moving things on two wheels. And she promised her mom that she would always ride safely and wear all of her protective gear.
A strand of her red hair slid off the side of her bike and she turned to see if it was going near any parts that it shouldn’t. While making sure she wasn’t about to have burned hairtips, she caught sight of a blob of yellow in her peripheral vision. The senior sat up and swung both her legs over to one side of her bike.
Valerie watched a small blonde girl wearing a pale yellow summer frock wander back and forth around the university plaza. The redhead flicked her cigarette into the ashbin three feet away with expert precision and hopped off her bike. Her plated boots hit the pavement with a thud, causing a small cloud of dust to swirl around her ankles.
She crossed the plaza with a few strides of her long legs and tapped the small freshman girl on the shoulder. “Lost?”
The blonde girl whirled around in surprise and then looked up. The top of her head only came up to Valerie’s neck while she was wearing her riding boots. “I think so.”
“Where are you headed?” Valerie asked, giving the young girl her best reassuring smile.
“My dorm, the Ellis building.”
A flash of recognition shot across the senior’s eyes. “Ah. Come with me, young one.”
Valerie started walking along one of the paths leading away from the central plaza. The lost girl quickly fell into pace beside her.
“Thanks.”
“Name’s Valerie.”
“Floy.”
“What are you here for?” The senior tried to collect some standard information about a fellow student. That was what she told herself anyway.
“I dunno.” The blonde girl shrugged.
Valerie laughed, “What’s your major?”
“Oh. English, I guess.”
Valerie led the two of them past a row of grey concrete boxes that served as the Math and English buildings. The modern mass production architecture was abruptly interrupted by a large Victorian era mansion with large double doors as its main entrance. In front of the door was a set of wooden steps. And on those wooden steps were a group of fellow seniors that Valerie knew quite well.
A thin girl with dark curly hair nudged her friend when she saw familiar red hair. Her friend looked over and locked in on Valerie immediately. She narrowed her eyes and watched the college senior walk a small blonde girl towards their dorm building. She scowled when Valerie looked over, the redhead responded with a grin and her middle finger.
“Here we are, Ellis building.” Valerie stopped outside earshot of the girls on the steps.
“Thanks again.” Floy gave her guide a wide smile, her eyes were bright and her cheeks were slightly flushed with just the faintest hint of pink.
Before Valerie could stare too long, her phone buzzed in her jacket and she quickly answered it. “Hold on.” Then to Floy, she gave the new student what she thought was passable advice. “If those girls give you any trouble, hit them back twice as hard and they won’t bother you again. Sorry, I have to take this call.”
Without giving the young girl a chance to protest, Valerie tore herself away and retreated back to where she had parked her bike. The image of Floy’s upturned face smiling at her was still stuck in her mind no matter how hard she shook her head.
Meanwhile, on the front lawn of the Ellis building, the freshman steeled her resolve as she took one step after another towards the small posse of seniors at the entrance. When she got close, one of the girls stood up. She wore a jean jacket over a green tank top, a pair of black jeans and heavy boots. Boots that now blocked her way into the dorm.
“Be brave little bird,” Floy whispered to herself and then took a deep breath. “I will cut you.” She looked the girl towering over her in the eyes. “I will skip all the escalation and go right to the ending, so don’t even start.”
The older girl looked stunned and was at a complete loss for words, that was not what she had expected from the small freshman wearing a yellow summer frock. Floy took that opportunity to quickly wedge herself past the senior and the door into the Ellis building.
Safely inside and away from the unexpected confrontation, the young girl began to explore her new home. “That was probably overboard,” she mumbled. “Worked though.”
Several trips up and down the spiral staircase later, she got her fill of mapping out her new environment. The freshman eventually found her room on the top floor. Inside, her luggage had already been delivered a week before she arrived. A thin layer of dust coated the familiar cardboard boxes that she had mailed out a month ago.
Floy began tearing off the tape on the boxes closest to her, hoping that unpacking would take her mind off the adrenaline-inducing experience she just had. As she absentmindedly pulled her drawing canvas and pencils out of the box, her mind drifted to the pretty redhead that had led her here. A small smile crept onto her lips without her notice, but it was interrupted by a noise outside her room followed by footsteps leaving.
The freshman got up and waited a whole minute before slowly opening her door. She held her breath, not knowing what to expect. She saw that the hallway was clear and let out the air in her lungs. Black scribbles on her door caught her eye and it took a second to realize what it was.
‘Cunt’ was written in large letters on the lacquered wood surface.
“Definitely overboard,” Flow mumbled as she went back into her room. She tore open several more boxes, searching for something before finally finding it in the fifth box. She grabbed a small whiteboard in a blue frame and a box of push pins from within and went back out into the hallway.
The freshman hung up her whiteboard over the recently applied graffiti and returned to unpacking inside her room. A droplet fell onto her hand while sorting through the open boxes and she sighed.
“Great,” Floy gave up on unpacking for the time being and flopped onto the bare mattress on the floor. She rolled around on it for a while before pulling out her phone.
Floy dialed the first number on her favorites list. A few rings later, her boyfriend picked up.
“Hey…”
“I’m having a tough day and I just wanted to hear your voice.” Floy said.
“I’m at work right now, I can’t really talk.”
“Then can you just listen?”
“I’m in the middle of my shift. Can I call you back in a couple of hours?”
“I just need you to listen,” Floy begged. “Please?”
A long silence followed, and then he finally spoke again. “Alright look, I know we talked about this before you left, and we said we would try to make the long distance thing work, but uh, I don’t think I can do this. Not if it’s going to be like this.”
The air caught in her throat and she lost her voice for a moment. She forced herself to breathe, one, two, inhale, exhale. “Okay.” Floy hung up and tossed her phone away. It landed with a plop onto the mattress.
“Okay.” The small girl rolled off the bed and grabbed her sketchbook out of the third box and then looked through her case of colored pencils. The ends of each pencil was marked with the first letter of their color and the grieving artist picked out the orange and red ones from the case.
The college freshman began to take her frustrations out on a fresh page of her sketchbook. She drew large waves of red, adding in orange at the edges. Strand after strand, pressing her pencil hard into the page while tears flowed down her chin and dripped onto her lap.
Floy wiped away her tears with one hand and continued to draw long strands of fiery red hair. As the portrait began to take shape, the girl’s movements slowed down from the frantic venting of anger and sorrow to the practiced and methodical movements of an artist.
On the page, Valerie’s hair flowed in the wind, framing the senior’s terse but kind face. As she filled out more of the redhead’s features, Floy began to hum to herself with a small smile on her lips.
ns216.73.217.93da2
and then Add to home screen.