more writing

I have a story I've been working on for quite a while now. It's nothing special, really. Well, it's special to me. I love my characters. I love the things they do and say. I love the way they change as things go on in their lives. I love looking into their memories to find out why they do the things they do. I create them, but they create their own histories. Anyway. I posted the very beginning of this story a longgg time ago, and if you want to (re)read it, here's the link: http://kimberlyanna91.blogspot.com/2010/08/writing.html and I posted a little bit of this current bit that I'm going to post in just a minute in this post: http://kimberlyanna91.blogspot.com/2010/11/bits-of-my-writing.html

And now, here's more of it. This happens later in the story, not right after the beginning. But not at the end. And not exactly in the middle, I don't think. I'm not done with the whole thing yet, so I don't know where this is going to be. I guess right now, it's kind of in the middle. I've got 21 pages (single spaced, size 12 Times New Roman font) typed out so far and this is from the middle of page 12 to about 3/4 of the way down on page 13. What's written in italics is a memory, a flashback. And what's not in italics is the present.

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A door slammed somewhere and I was alone. And late to English yet again. I sank down to the floor, leaning against the wall, staring up at the underside of the staircase. I’d skip English; it’s not like it was the first time this year I’d done that.

My cell phone buzzed, making me jump. Expecting it to be Lexus, but half-knowing it wouldn’t be, I looked down at the name. Jax. I couldn’t ignore him, so I flipped the phone open to read the text message. “Care if I join you?” I looked around, not seeing him, not wanting to see him. Something about his grammatically correct text-messages always bugged me.

“Where r u?” I asked. How did he always know where I was, when I didn’t know the same about him? Sometimes I felt like he had a tracking device on me or something, but it’d always been that way. Our mom used to say it was because we were twins. I heard his phone go off above me. He didn’t bother answering, and half a second later, he was sitting on the ground next to me.

“It’s really gross under here,” he pointed out, looking around at the dust and spider webs. It was pretty apparent that the area under the stairs wasn’t exactly the janitor’s number one priority.

I shrugged. “You’re skipping class.”

“You are too, in case you hadn’t noticed. What this time? English?”

“And everything else this morning.” I saw the disappointment on his face, and hurried to say something else too, something to make skipping the first four classes of the day not seem so bad. “I overslept and just got here.”

“You stay at Lexus’s all night?”

I nodded. “Jax,” I said, trying to make him laugh, “girls have been more interesting to me than school since the seventh grade.”

You’d think at thirteen, the mazes and word-finds on the back of a cereal box would stop being so interesting to Jaxton. We were this close to being late – again – and truthfully, neither of us cared. School wasn’t all that interesting. While he was circling a word, I was gazing down at a picture of the girl who had won the last modeling competition I had been in. I traced the outline of her face with my index finger. She didn’t look like a typical Barbie doll type of pageant winner. Her wavy, flaming red hair came down to just about half way down her back. Her skin wasn’t as pale as mine, but still a couple shades lighter than most of the other girls in the competition. Her freckly face was roundish, but it wasn’t fat. She wasn’t overly tall or anorexic-thin, the way most people would picture a model. And her eyes, oh her eyes. They caught my attention every time I looked at this picture. They were the perfect mixture of an emerald green and light sky blue. I’d never seen eyes that color, eyes as bright and beautiful and perfect as hers. “Emily” was the name, her name, written in fancy print on the top right-hand corner of the photo. I smiled down at the picture, but looked up quickly when I heard Jaxton make a noise that sounded like a cross between a choke and a laugh. “What?” I asked, trying hard to get her face out of my brain so I would be able to focus on whatever Jaxton was about to be on.

“Nothing,” he said. Then he muttered something else.

“What Jaxton?!”

“It’s nothing… I just… It’s like you’re in love with her or something!” The face he made cut me like a knife. I never knew before this moment how much a look could hurt. He was disgusted with me, with something he didn’t know was true or not, something even I didn’t know if it was true or not.

“No I don’t! She’s just… really pretty is all. I wish I looked like her, that’s why I look at her picture so much. I mean, look at her hair! I just… I wish mine was like that, that style. Ok? And the color of her eyes is so… Do you think they make contacts that color? I want my eyes to be that color. And that’s only why I pay so much attention to her. Ok Jaxton? You get it now?” I was getting flustered, and my argument probably made no sense. I was pulling it out of thin air, saying things as they came into my mind.

No, I didn’t want my hair and eyes to look like hers. I just wanted to be with her. She made me feel things inside I’d never felt before. When she talked to me, it was hard to formulate a response. Her voice was quiet, but not quiet in the same way as Jax’s voice. It had a raspy quality that I loved, and I felt butterflies in my stomach every time I was around her. My knees went weak when I saw her, and my heart beat faster whenever I thought about her.

He didn’t look convinced, but other than getting up, slamming his breakfast dishes into the sink, and storming out of the kitchen, he didn’t respond.

“I don’t love her.” I said quietly to myself, or maybe to the empty kitchen walls. I could keep my secrets hidden in the four walls surrounding me, couldn’t I? “It’s admiration or something. I can’t like her like this.” I shook my head, trying to get my thoughts all together, still trying to get the image of her smile out of my head. It was like her face, her smile, her eyes, had been burned into my eyes, like I would forever see her no matter where I looked. “But I do.”

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