The Girl Who Sold Herself on Ebay

[27] Roleplay and Rubber

C H A P T E R  T W E N T Y - S E V E N 

❤

          “Stay safe, okay?” Sydney said worriedly as I stumbled out of Curly’s, still trying to keep my cool and gulp back the tears. I nodded, sweeping a chunk of sticky hair behind my ear.

          “Yeah don’t worry I’ll um, I’ll be fine,” I said with a nod, reassuring Sydney that I wasn’t going to do anything crazy on the way home. I could just tell by the way she looked at me with that repetitive half smile wince that she was harbouring the belief I was mental.

          “Bye,” I waved, stepping carefully through the bead curtains and out onto the footpath. This sense of fear enveloped me the second my foot hit the paving. It felt like all of a sudden I couldn’t trust anyone. Everyone was dodgy. Like that guy putting coins in the parking meter? He had a dead body in the boot of his car; he just needed to pop into the hardware store for a hacksaw so he could dispose of it in convenient little pieces.  And what about that high class woman with the bug-eye sunglasses? She constantly needed to hide her face for the sheer fact that she only had one eye; the other was gouged out while she was strangling her husband so she had the rights to his life insurance. And how about that guy Eli, who was currently driving around town with a freaking passed out girl in the front of his car?  I didn’t even want to imagine.

          “Are you sure you don’t want a ride home?” Sydney asked, interrupting my thoughts. She fumbled with her hands nervously.
Yes.

          “No, no, I’m fine walking.” I refused her offer, even though my mind was screaming otherwise. If I wasn’t already paving out a mission in my mind I would have said yes, but with that image of Eli throwing Jeddah’s limp body into his car leaving it’s prints on my mind I knew there was more important things to do.

          “Alright,” Sydney replied, biting her lip, “I’ll see you later.”

          No I won’t, after Eli’s party you’ll be too busy being dead. I tried to shake that comment from my mind.

          “See you.” I said, before quickly adding, “Oh, Sydney one more thing. Please don’t tell Jasper about what just happened?”

          She nodded, “of course.”

          I forced my lips into a lopsided smile before continuing down the footpath, checking back periodically to see if Sydney had stopped watching me like a worried mother. When she’d slunk back through the bead curtains, I snapped into Kim possible mode, making a quick dash down the alley way between Curly’s and the neighbouring building. The sitch? Blaine. There was no way I was going back to Jasper’s when Blaine was clearly up to something. The way he smiled at me couldn’t possibly have been a genuine, friendly smile, could it? It was awkward and sneaky, he was hiding something I just knew it. I found a spot behind the rubbish skip and sank into it, pressing my back up against the brick wall. The tip beside me smelt absolutely foul, like rotting animal carcass masked in a sickly sweet sprinkling of sugar and chocolate hail. It churned my stomach the more it wafted into my nose.

          Trying to take my mind off the stench, I reached into my pocket to pull out my phone, but of course it wasn’t there. I cursed under my breath remembering I’d left it on the kitchen bench at Jasper’s. Without it I had no idea of the time and for all I knew I could have been sitting there for hours.

          By the time someone emerged from the back door of Curly’s, an orange glow had begun to saturate anything it could touch. The sun was setting, and I’d played tic tac toe wth myself enough times that I’d run out of concrete space. To my dismay, it wasn’t Blaine that exited through the door. It was Jasper. I tried to shimmy further into the corner but Jasper heard me shuffling along the concrete.