[Summer 2014] The Sound Bodies Made/I Not Crazy Am You Are

The boots marched en masse to the beat of the drums, a sea greater than the browned grass that surrounded them. They were looking for a fight, so I gave them a fight even if the good fight had been fought out of me.

The first shots rang out. Maybe my friends wouldn’t have stood there and took them if their minds weren’t so clouded by puffs of acrid black smoke. The lines quavered and quaked but stood strong and fast.

Our training kicked in. Spots were filled and muskets took aim, muscle-memory guided. The return volley cracked through the air, was heard †˜round the world. They dropped like men too tired from burdens too heavy.

Bayonets affixed, we met their charge. We did not break. No, we were simple men, but we stuck to our guns. Steel bit bone, cut swaths of fury through fear.

The cylinder of my revolver turned like clockwork, but I fumbled the hammer and let the grip slip through my fingers.

“Slapped by words with more sting,” the joke flashed through my mind. But the campfires were gone and their warmth along with them.

A house, ramshackle yet comforting in all the right ways. A goodbye, a pretty smile. The spill of beer on scratched, worn down wood. A life, gone by in the blink of an eye. Mine? It hardly felt like it, and I didn’t care. Why should I under the press of stinking, sweating bodies, or the heat of the overbearing sun?

Heat. I shuddered involuntarily at the sensation. I started at the realization. I wasn’t dead yet.

I swallowed precious breath in the swell of the melee. I pulled my saber free from its sheath with a rasp that could have spoken of death. I’ll never know. The battle was too damn loud to hear such a singular noise.

Summer. The end of school once more, the herald of sneakers treading the path home, never to take it up again for the following three months.

Summer. A boring, monotonous--and not to mention hot--stretch of days that dragged on mercilessly.

Maybe Victoria would have been relieved having no more essays hanging over her head if she hadn’t minded doing them in the first place. If only she had friends, she told herself, time would not be so sluggish. Somehow she doubted it even as the thought crossed her mind.

Life had always been like that. Unfair, if one were to sum it up in a single word.

Work flew by in a well-organized but nevertheless tumultuous whirlwind. When the dust settled, she was left with nothing to do and only the scorn of others to bask in. As if it were her fault they moved so slow.

Victoria was sweating freely by the time she made it home. Heat waves buzzed around fresh, black asphalt like flies around a carcass. She grabbed her key chain by its charm, a bow-wearing skull.

Her parents met her with habitual greetings she returned in kind. She set her backpack at the foot of her bed and pulled out the paperback she had been reading when the final bell rang. A couple hours later, she bent a page to mark her place so she could answer the call of dinner.

“Another year down, eh?” her mother said.

Victoria scarcely stopped eating. “Yep.”

“How do you think you did on your finals?”

“Well enough.” She aced them all, and she knew it, but there was no point in saying it. Her parents knew as well. The real question was why they bothered asking. Their praise was a foregone conclusion. And if there was one thing that annoyed her more than undeserved hatred, it was undeserved adoration. They may as well tell her †˜good job’ for remembering to breathe. It was that simple.

“Victoria,” came her father’s stern voice. An easy smile crossed his face. “Go easy there. You don’t wanna choke do you?”

She swallowed and felt the chewed up spoonful of meat loaf glide down her gullet. Too much salt. She reached for her glass and took a gulp of water. “I’m fine.”

“She is a growing girl,” her mother chimed in. That got a chuckle from her father. If there was a joke in there, Victoria missed it.

---

When the time came for a shower, Victoria was glad to seize the opportunity to peel her clothes off. She sighed audibly as she undid her bra and let it drop to the floor. The wretched thing had a tendency to chafe terribly. Why women had to subjugate themselves to them was another mystery that wasn’t likely to have an answer. One day it was fine to go without one. The next, her breasts had gotten bigger and all of the sudden her mother was nearly yelling at her when she tried to slip outside bra-free.

She pattered out of the bathroom on bare feet when she was done, clad in her pajamas. Her parents had long since stopped forcing her to bed at whatever arbitrary time they deemed suitable, but she didn’t see much reason to stick around, so back to her room she went.

Night had arrived, but it would be some time yet before full-on inky blackness descended. Even then, it would never be truly dark. There were no street lamps by her house, but there were plenty further into town, and their glow would carry into midnight and beyond.

She opened her window and let the slightest of breezes roll in, too light to ruffle her damp hair.

The paperback remained where she had set it last, at the edge of the bed, but she didn’t have the slightest inclination of continuing it at the moment. So instead she sat, back to the wall, with only her thoughts for company.

Several minutes later, a grasshopper landed on the ledge of the window just on the other side of the screen. This wasn’t the first time it showed itself, though Victoria couldn’t say how she knew it was the same one. The pattern on its thorax looked just the same as any other grasshopper’s, but it had a familiarity about it that was hard to place.

She wouldn’t have cared about it if it weren’t staring at her. She returned its gaze, but it was a fearless bastard.

“You’ve got me at a disadvantage,” Victoria said. “You know where I live and can bother me any time you wish. On the other hand, I don’t have a single shred of information about you.”

It blinked, or whatever the grasshopper equivalent was of saying, “So?”

“You’re absolutely right. A pointless observation. Life isn’t fair in the least, but the sword cuts friend and foe alike. For instance, you don’t even have school to occupy your time.”

“Neither do you at the moment,” she imagined it saying.

“Touché.”

“Why not do whatever it is you honors students do in your spare time?”

“The thing is, an honors student isn’t an honors student if there isn’t anything to gain honors in. Likewise, you could hardly be called a grasshopper if you didn’t have grass to hop around in.”

“I’d make do with windows.”

“Then you’d be a windowhopper, wouldn’t you?” It sounded so absurd. She would have laughed if she wasn’t talking to a grasshopper. It didn’t laugh either, which was better and far less awkward than laughing at something that wasn’t funny.

---

Summer. If only Victoria’s town had more to offer than a public pool and a movie theater, she wouldn’t be so bored. Somehow she doubted it.

She lazed around her room, determined to finish the new paperback when the urge for ice cream crept up on her. As it happened, they were out. She recalled her father eating the last of it the day before.

“I’m going out,” she called as she made for the front door.

“Have fun,” her mother said. Evidently, she forgot it was summer.

What would have been a short drive turned into a 30 minute trip by foot to the local ice cream parlor. The place was predictably packed, but it wasn’t as if she had anything better to do than wait in line. There were--again predictably--people she recognized from school. They paid her no noticeable attention.

When Victoria’s turn came, she ordered a cone with two vanilla scoops. It was hard to not take the sight of it in with awe. The ice cream had yet to be touched by the heat of the day. To an untrained eye, it might seem a tantalizing mirage. Her eyes were anything but untrained as she took in its beauty. She elected to devour it on the way home as opposed to eating it at the parlor.

The first scoop was packed away in her stomach when the little boy fell on the other side of the street. He took a nasty cut on his knee and stared dumbfounded at it. Victoria froze, unsure of what to do. Surely an upstanding citizen would see if he was okay.

The boy broke out crying. Victoria watched, and all she could think of was the time she had accidentally sliced her finger with a knife. There had been pain no doubt, but what she remembered most was curiosity. Prodding at the line of parted flesh, waiting to see what would happen next. She was disappointed when nothing did.

A woman came running from around the corner and swept the boy in her arms.

The second scoop, now thoroughly acquainted with the heat of hellfire, had begun to drip down the hand that clutched the cone. Victoria licked it up, unwilling to let a single drop escape.

She was halfway home if she wasn’t mistaken.

---

Greetings.

That sensation that one only gets when they place their fingers over the crisp paper of a mass market paperback.

An intake of fish minus the chips.

Water--lukewarm--running through her hair, down her chest, her back, butt, and thighs.

The grasshopper did not show its face that night. Suffice to say, Victoria wasn’t about to talk to herself.

---

It was a couple sharp knocks on the open door of Victoria’s bedroom that started it, but it was the sound waves booming out across the room that got her attention. She looked up from her fifth paperback of the summer to find her mother standing in the doorway. She conjured a cough into her hand.

“Victoria, a girl your age shouldn’t stay cooped up in her room all day.” She coughed again. “It’s unhealthy, um, what I mean to say is it’s a scientific fact that people need a certain amount of sunlight everyday to lead healthy lives.” Her mother started out strong as a steam engine and ended with all the grace of one that had run out of coal before reaching its destination.

Victoria blinked. Her index finger held the word she had left off at in the book.

“It would mean very much to your father and I if you hung out with friends and did . . . whatever it is you do.”

“Would it hurt your feelings if I said no?” Victoria asked.

“Er, no.”

“Then no.”

---

It doesn’t matter how well you know someone or even how long you’ve lived with them. No matter how in tune you are with their routines, they will surprise you. Victoria pondered that very thought as she walked along the sidewalk. It was a small consolation that the heat was not as fierce as it had been the previous week. It no longer tried to tear her head apart. It was merely suffocating.

She could find some hideaway guarded in shadows to whittle away an hour or two, but when she left home, she did so under the understanding that she would spend time with a friend. To not do so would be childish, and Victoria would rather stride across the burning asphalt barefoot than have someone call her such.

The house she strode up to was just as she remembered it. The lawn remained a bright, healthy green in defiance of the season. A fountain stood to the right of the door, water spewing forth from an abstract statue that was all slanted angles. Victoria rang the doorbell.

“Just a minute!” a voice shouted from inside, unmistakably feminine. The door opened moments later, revealing the familiar face of a classmate. “Can I help you?”

“Kimberly, you remember me from math, don’t you?”

Kimberly looked her over, uncertain. “Victoria?”

“Yes, let’s . . . hang out.”

“But I was about to take my little brother to see a movie.”

“That’s fine with me.”

Before Kimberly could reply, someone called out from behind her. “Who are you talking to, Sis?”

A boy of no older than the one who’d scraped his knee a week ago materialized at Kimberly’s shoulder. She smiled. “Victoria, this is Jacob. Jacob, Victoria. She--“

“Your sister invited me to join you today,” Victoria said. She fixed Kimberly with an icy glare that wiped the smile off her face.

“Yeah, that’s it,” Kimberly said hesitantly.

And so they set out. It could hardly be said the three of them inspired fear, courage, or anything for that matter. But they had heart, and surely that would see them through the day.

---

Victoria hated crowds, which was unfortunate considering the theater was, well, crowded. If only that was the least of the problems that plagued her. The movie they saw was titled The Uncelebrated Master and more importantly was based off a book. One particular book she hadn’t read yet sitting at home on a shelf in her room. Still sitting there no doubt, seething at her betrayal. She gripped the armrest of her seat until the knuckle turned white. It didn’t help much.

“Are you alright?” Kimberly asked from beside her.

Victoria’s first impulse was to strike. The bitch had planned this as a form of petty vengeance. No, that was silly. She was letting her emotions get the better of her. Victoria was many things, but she was not emotional. She breathed in and out. “There’s nothing wrong,” she said with more venom than she had intended.

Kimberly looked away and refocused on the big screen. It faded to black as the previews came to an end. The movie would start any second now. It was the moment of truth. She could do this.

---

When Victoria walked from the shelter of the theater’s air conditioning, she did so dejectedly. Jacob, who had run out ahead of them oozing boundless energy, came back to a halt at her sister’s side.

“That was amazing, especially the big fight at the end!”

“That death was unexpected though,” Kimberly said. “What did you think, Victoria?”

Victoria was trying her best to put one foot in front of the other, a task made all the harder by the assault of the hot afternoon. After basking in the cool atmosphere of the theater for so long, it hammered away at her lungs.

“Victoria?”

Something tapped her on the shoulder, and she lurched forward. She turned, ready to pounce, but it was only that girl from her math class and her brother. “It was one of the most horrible experiences I have ever had to sit through.” She wanted to say it, but the words stuck in her throat. Instead she said, “It was unexpected.”

“That’s putting it lightly. What do you say we do know? How about a stop at the café?”

“Okay,” Jacob said, still entranced by the magic of the movie.

No. “Sure,” Victoria said. She stopped where she stood as Kimberly and Jacob continued on. Why couldn’t she just say no? She had already done enough “hanging out.” For reasons she couldn’t fathom, she couldn’t bring herself to speak her mind. There was an undeniable desire to be polite.

She followed them to the café, as helpless as a fly stuck in a spider’s intricate web. Ten minutes later, they shared a table with iced tea.

“You don’t have very many friends, do you?” Kimberly asked.

“No, and I fail to see why it matters. Most of us will move away for college. It’s more than likely we’ll never see each other again. Why should I go through all the effort of building relationships that won’t last?” It was, Victoria realized, a question that had been on her mind as of late. No one had a satisfactory answer, only vague stabs like, “Doesn’t everyone have friends?”

“It shouldn’t take effort. If you have to try to be friends with someone, then you’re doing it wrong. Or maybe the person you’re trying to befriend just doesn’t have the same tastes as you.”

What if no one had her tastes? Did that make her a freak? It wouldn’t be the first time Victoria confronted that possibility. The conclusion she arrived at hadn’t changed either. If she was, then so be it. She’d take it in stride.

Kimberly giggled, small and almost soundless. “I think I know what's going through your mind right now. Don’t worry about it. There are several billion people on earth. You’ll find someone with similar tastes eventually.”

Jacob, who clearly had no idea what they were talking about, did his best to put on a thoughtful look as he slurped at the remnants of his tea.

They parted ways at Kimberly’s house. “I had fun. Maybe we could do this again some time,” she said.

Victoria was already back to the sidewalk when it occurred to her that she should wave goodbye. She turned to do so, but it was too late. Maybe they would see each other again before the summer ended. She doubted it.

---

Greetings.

The feeling of her bottom gradually warming up the spot at the edge of the bed she liked to sit at.

Fried chicken and a baked potato.

A cleansing conducted with ritual-like precision.

The grasshopper was back for the first time in two weeks. It sat at its usual spot on the ledge. It didn’t fix Victoria with its eyes--staring is rude after all--but she had its attention.

“Are you my only friend?” she asked it.

“Depends on your definition of friend.”

“A friend is someone outside your family whom you get along with. Having the same tastes isn’t necessary, but there must be something to form a foundation for common ground. I think we’d both rather if the world left us alone, but we know that’s impossible. So we do our best to fit in even though we could care less.”

“Speak for yourself. I make no effort at all to appeal to others.”

Victoria smiled. “You have me at a disadvantage again. Unlike you, I have meddling parents.”

“No one ever said life was fair.”

“You read my mind.”

Then it hit her, the reason she knew this was the same grasshopper time and again even when they all looked alike. There was, after all, only one grasshopper in the world smart and daring enough to rest on the same ledge on a regular basis above the tangled forest of grass that formed the world as it knew it.

Summer. The end of school once more, the herald of sneakers treading the path home, never to take it up again for the following three months.

Summer. A boring, monotonous--and not to mention hot--stretch of days that dragged on mercilessly.

Maybe Victoria would have been relieved having no more essays hanging over her head if she hadn’t minded doing them in the first place. If only she had friends, she told herself, time would not be so sluggish. Somehow she doubted it even as the thought crossed her mind.

Life had always been like that. Unfair, if one were to sum it up in a single word.

Work flew by in a well-organized but nevertheless tumultuous whirlwind. When the dust settled, she was left with nothing to do and only the scorn of others to bask in. As if it were her fault they moved so slow (Word wants to correct this to †˜slowly.’ This might be more appropriate.).

Victoria was sweating freely by the time she made it home. Heat waves buzzed around fresh, black asphalt like flies around a carcass. She grabbed her key chain by its charm, a bow-wearing skull.

Her parents met her with habitual greetings she returned in kind. She set her backpack at the foot of her bed and pulled out the paperback she had been reading when the final bell rang. A couple hours later, she bent a page to mark her place so she could answer the call of dinner.

“Another year down, eh?” her mother said.

Victoria scarcely stopped eating. “Yep.”

“How do you think you did on your finals?”

“Well enough.” She aced them all, and she knew it, but there was no point in saying it. Her parents knew as well. The real question was why they bothered asking. Their praise was a foregone conclusion. And if there was one thing that annoyed her more than undeserved hatred, it was undeserved adoration. They may as well tell her †˜good job’ for remembering to breath(Breathe.). It was that simple.

“Victoria,” came her father’s stern voice. An easy smile crossed his face. “Go easy there. You don’t wanna choke do you?”

She swallowed and felt the chewed up spoonful of meat loaf glide down her gullet. Too much salt. She reached for her glass and took a gulp of water. “I’m fine.”

“She is a growing girl,” her mother chimed in. That got a chuckle from her father. If there was a joke in there, Victoria missed it.

---

When the time came for a shower, Victoria was glad to seize the opportunity to peel her clothes off. She sighed audibly as see(She.) undid her bra and let it drop to the floor. The wretched thing had a tendency to chaff(Chafe. Chaff means discarded excess unwanted material, like a peel. The bra could be a chaff to her, but it chafed her skin.) terribly. Why women had to subjugate themselves to them(Unnecessary. Who is †˜them?’ Society in general or men? Better left out if just a typo.) was another mystery that wasn’t likely to have an answer. One day it was fine to go without one. The next, her breasts had gotten bigger and all of the sudden her mother was nearly yelling at her when she tried to slip outside bra free(I would hyphenate, personally.).

She pattered out of the bathroom on bare feet when she was done, clad in her pajamas. Her parents had long since stopped forcing her to bed at whatever arbitrary time they deemed suitable, but she didn’t see much reason to stick around, so back to her room she went.

Night had arrived, but it would be some time yet before full-on inky blackness descended. Even then, it would never be truly dark. There were no street lamps by her house, but there were plenty further into town, and their glow would carry into midnight and beyond.

She opened her window and let the slightest of breezes roll in, too light to ruffle her damp hair.

The paperback remained where she had set it last, at the edge of the bed, but she didn’t have the slightest inclination of continuing it at the moment. So instead she sat, back to the wall, with only her thoughts for company.

Several minutes later, a grasshopper landed on the ledge of the window just on the other side of the screen. This wasn’t the first time it showed itself, though Victoria couldn’t say how she knew it was the same one. The pattern on its thorax looked just the same as any other grasshopper’s(I believe the apostrophe is unnecessary for this possessive.), but it had a familiarity about it that was hard to place.

She wouldn’t have cared about it if it weren’t staring at her. She returned its gaze, but it was a fearless bastard.

“You’ve got me at a disadvantage,” Victoria said. “You know where I live and can bother me any time you wish. On the other hand, I don’t have a single shred of information about you.”

It blinked, or whatever the grasshopper equivalent was of saying, “So?”

“You’re absolutely right. A pointless observation. Life isn’t fair in the least, but the sword cuts friend and foe alike. For instance, you don’t even have school to occupy your time.”

“Neither do you at the moment,” she imagined it saying.

“Touché.”

“Why not do whatever it is you honors students do in your spare time?”

“The thing is, an honors student isn’t an honors student if there isn’t anything to gain honors in. Likewise, you could hardly be called a grasshopper if you didn’t have grass to hop around in.”

“I’d make due(Do.) with windows.”

“Then you’d be a windowhopper, wouldn’t you?” It sounded so absurd. She would have laughed if she wasn’t talking to a grasshopper. It didn’t laugh either, which was better and far less awkward than laughing at something that wasn’t funny.

---

Summer. If only Victoria’s town had more to offer than a public pool and a movie theatre(I thought you use American English, so †˜theater’ would be more appropriate, but as long as you stay consistent, it doesn't matter too much.), she wouldn’t be so bored. Somehow she doubted it.

She lazed around her room, determined to finish the new paperback when the urge for ice cream crept up on her. As it happened, they were out. She recalled her father eating the last of it the day before.

“I’m going out,” she called as she made for the front door.

“Have fun,” her mother said. Evidently, she forgot it was summer.

What would have been a short drive turned into a 30 minute trip by foot to the local ice cream parlor. The place was predictably packed, but it wasn’t as if she had anything better to do than wait in line. There were--again predictably--people she recognized from school. They paid her no noticeable attention.

When Victoria’s turn came, she ordered a cone with two vanilla scoops. It was hard to not to(†˜to not’ or †˜not to?’) take the sight of it in with awe. The ice cream had yet to be touched by the heat of the day. To an untrained eye, it might seem a tantalizing mirage. Her eyes were anything but untrained as she took in its beauty. She elected to devour it on the way home as opposed to eating it at the parlor.

The first scoop was packed away in her stomach when the little boy fell on the other side of the street. He took a nasty cut on his knee and stared dumbfounded at it. Victoria froze, unsure of what to do. Surely an upstanding citizen would see if he was okay.

The boy broke out crying. Victoria watched, and all she could think of was the time she had accidentally sliced her finger with a knife. There had been pain no doubt, but what she remembered most was curiosity. Prodding at the line of parted flesh, waiting to see what would happen next. She was disappointed when nothing did.

A woman came running from around the corner and swept the boy in her arms.

The second scoop, now thoroughly acquainted with the heat of hellfire, had begun to drip down the hand that clutched the cone. Victoria licked it up, unwilling to let a single drop escape.

She was halfway home if she wasn’t mistaken.

---

Greetings.

That sensation that one only gets when they place their fingers over the crisp paper of a mass market paperback.

An intake of fish minus the chips.

Water--lukewarm--running through her hair, down her chest, her back, butt, and thighs.

The grasshopper did not show its face that night. Suffice to say, Victoria wasn’t about to talk to herself.

(Did a double-take. This was a unique and interesting way to summarize the evening.)

---

It was a couple sharp knocks on the open door of Victoria’s bedroom that started it, but it was the sound waves booming out across the room that got her attention. She looked up from her fifth paperback of the summer to find her mother standing in the doorway. She conjured a cough into her hand.

“Victoria, a girl your age shouldn’t stay cooped up in her room all day.” She coughed again. “It’s unhealthy, um, what I mean to say is it’s a scientific fact that people need a certain amount of sunlight everyday to lead healthy lives.” Her mother started out strong as a steam engine and ended with all the grace of one that had run out of coal before reaching its destination.

Victoria blinked. Her index finger held the word she had left off at in the book.

“It would mean very much to your father and I if you hung out with friends and did . . . whatever it is you do.”

“Would it hurt your feelings if I said no?” Victoria asked.

“Er, no.”

“Then no.”

---

It doesn’t matter how well you know someone or even how long you’ve lived with them. No matter how in tune you are with their routines, they will surprise you (Heh, classic rapid scene change through conflict, cartoon worthy, really.). Victoria pondered that very thought as she walked along the sidewalk. It was a small consolation that the heat was not as fierce as it had been the previous week. It no longer tried to tear her head apart. It was merely suffocating.

She could find some hideaway guarded in shadows to whittle away an hour or two, but when she left home, she did so under the understanding that she would spend time with a friend. To not do so would be childish, and Victoria would rather stride across the burning asphalt barefoot than have someone call her such.

The house she strode up to was just as she remembered it. The lawn remained a bright, healthy green in defiance of the season. A fountain stood to the right of the door, water spewing forth from an abstract statue that was all slanted angles. Victoria rang the doorbell.

“Just a minute!” a voice shouted from inside, unmistakably feminine. The door opened moments later, revealing the familiar face of a classmate. “Can I help you?”

“Kimberly, you remember me from math, don’t you?”

Kimberly looked her over, uncertain. “Victoria?”

“Yes, let’s . . .(Odd choice of spacing for an ellipsis.) hang out.”

“But I was about to take my little brother to see a movie.”

“That’s fine with me.”

Before Kimberly could reply, someone called out from behind her. “Who are you talking to, Sis?”

A boy of no older than the one who’d scraped his knee a week ago materialized at Kimberly’s shoulder. She smiled. “Victoria, this is Jacob. Jacob, Victoria. She--“

“Your sister invited me to join you today,” Victoria said. She fixed Kimberly with an icy glare that wiped the smile off her face(Wut.).

“Yeah, that’s it,” Kimberly said hesitantly.

And so they set out. It could hardly be said the three of them inspired fear, courage, or anything for that matter. But they had heart, and surely that would see them through the day.

---

Victoria hated crowds, which was unfortunate considering the theatre was, well, crowded. If only that was the least of the problems that plagued her(Word is crying fragment.). The movie they saw was titled The Uncelebrated Master and more importantly was based off a book. One particular book she hadn’t read yet sitting at home on a shelf in her room. Still sitting there no doubt, seething at her betrayal. She gripped the armrest of her seat until the knuckle turned white. It didn’t help much.

“Are you alright?” Kimberly asked from beside her.

Victoria’s first impulse was to strike. The bitch had planned this as a form of petty vengeance. No, that was silly. She was letting her emotions get the better of her. Victoria was many things, but she was not emotional. She breathed in and out. “There’s nothing wrong,” she said with more venom than she had intended.

Kimberly looked away and refocused on the big screen. It faded to black as the previews came to an end. The movie would start any second now. It was the moment of truth. She could do this.

---

When Victoria walked from the shelter of the theatre’s air conditioning, she did so dejectedly. Jacob, who had run out ahead of them oozing boundless energy, came back to a halt at her sister’s side.

“That was amazing, especially the big fight at the end!”

“That death was unexpected though,” Kimberly said. “What did you think, Victoria?”

Victoria was trying her best to put one foot in front of the other, a task made all the harder but(By?) the press(Press?) of the hot afternoon. After basking in the cool atmosphere of the theatre for so long, it hammered away at her lungs.

“Victoria?”

Something tapped her on the shoulder, and she lurched forward. She turned, ready to pounce, but it was only that girl from her match(Math.) class and her brother. “It was one of the most horrible experiences I have ever had to sit through.” She wanted to say it, but the words stuck in her throat. Instead she said, “It was unexpected.”

“That’s putting it lightly. What do you say we do know(Now.)? How about a stop at the café?”

“Okay,” Jacob said, still entranced by the magic of the movie.

No. “Sure,” Victoria said. She looked for the all the world a girl who had been ripped out of all that she knew and thrown into a war zone(This sentence…I’m not sure I understand what you’re conveying by using it. Try re-wording it.). Why couldn’t she just say no? She had already done enough “hanging out.” For reasons she couldn’t fathom, she couldn’t bring herself to speak her mind. There was an undeniable desire to be polite.

She followed them to the café, as helpless as a fly stuck in a spider’s intricate web. Ten minutes later, they shared a table with ice(Iced.) tea.

“You don’t have very many friends, do you?” Kimberly asked.

“No, and I fail to see why it matters. Most of us will move away for college. It’s more than likely we’ll never see each other again. Why should I go through all the effort of building relationships that won’t last?” It was, Victoria realized, a question that had been on her mind as of late. No one had a satisfactory answer, only vague stabs like, “Doesn’t everyone have friends?”

“It shouldn’t take effort. If you have to try to be friends with someone, then you’re doing it wrong. Or maybe the person you’re trying to befriend just doesn’t have the same tastes as you.”

What if no one had her tastes? Did that make her a freak? It wouldn’t be the first time Victoria confronted that possibility. The conclusion she arrived at hadn’t changed either. If she was, then so be it. She’d take it in stride.

Kimberly giggled, small and almost soundless. “I think I know what(What’s.) going through your mind right now. Don’t worry about it. There are several billion people on earth. You’ll find someone with similar tastes eventually.”

Jacob, who clearly had no idea what they were talking about, did his best to put on a thoughtful look as he slurped at the remnants of his tea.

They parted ways at Kimberly’s house. “I had fun. Maybe we could do this again some time,” she said.

Victoria was already back to the sidewalk when it occurred to her that she should wave goodbye. She turned to do so, but it was too late. Maybe they would see each other again before the summer ended. She doubted it.

---

Greetings.

The feeling of her bottom gradually warming up the spot at the edge of the bed she liked to sit at.

Fried chicken and a baked potato.

A cleansing conducted with ritual-like precision.

The grasshopper was back for the first time in two weeks. It sat at its usual spot on the ledge. It didn’t fix Victoria with its eyes--staring is rude after all--but she had its attention.

“Are you my only friend?” she asked it.

“Depends on your definition of friend.”

“A friend is someone outside your family whom you get along with. Having the same tastes isn’t necessary, but there must be something to form a foundation for common ground. I think we’d both rather if the world left us along(Alone.), but we know that’s impossible. So we do our best to fit in even though we could care less.”

“Speak for yourself. I make no effort at all to appeal to others.”

Victoria smiled. “You have me at a disadvantage again. Unlike you, I have meddling parents.”

“No one ever said life was fair.”

“You read my mind.”

Then it hit her, the reason she knew this was the same grasshopper time and again even when they all looked alike. There was, after all, only one grasshopper in the world smart and daring enough to rest on the same ledge on a regular basis above the tangled forest of grass that formed the world as he knew it.(If this is some philosophical exposition, then I wish I could grasp it, but it seems to be taken for granted from my understanding. What's the message?)