To Keep Her Safe is All I Know

Chapter 7

Friday.

Melanie got out of work at an okay time and was able to pick Sadie up from school. Sadie hurriedly and excitedly runs to the car with a huge smile on her face. She opens the door, climbs into the car and shuts the door behind her.

"Hi, Mommy!" She exclaims, getting into her seat.

"Hi, sweetie. Are you excited for tonight?"

"Uh huh! When are we leaving?" Sadie asks, buckling herself into her booster seat.

"Not until six," Melanie says, driving off.

"Aww, man! But that's gonna take forever!"

Melanie laughs, "It'll go by fast, I promise. Do you have any homework?"

"No, it's a Friday. We don't get homework on Fridays."

Melanie snorts, "Wait 'til high school."

"You get homework on Fridays in high school?!"

"Yup."

"So you, like, have to do it over the weekend?"

"Sometimes, if there's a lot."

"Holy moly," Sadie says, looking as if she'd just had a complete paradigm shift. She then changes the subject.

"Did you and Chris go to high school together?"

"We sure did."

"What was it like?"

Melanie remembered hers and Chris' high school years pretty well, for the most part. The first day of their freshmen year was just a couple of days before the first of September, only a couple of weeks before Melanie had lost her sister, Tori...The bus had arrived at Melanie's house and she got on, immediately spotting Chris in the very back. She went straight to him and sat down.

Melanie's red hair was up in a neat, curly pony tail tied on the top of her head. She had a light makeup on - just some mascara and lipgloss - but it was still more makeup than Chris was used to seeing her wear. She had mentioned wanting to start wearing more makeup more often and had played with it a little bit over the summer. She wore a pink, short sleeved blouse and a mid-thigh length white skirt with flowers on it that were the same pink color as her blouse. On her feet were white flip-flops with just a bit of a heel. She'd shaved her legs the night before and was wearing a pretty good amount of perfume - not too much, but enough that it was one of the first things Chris noticed about her when she sat down.

Chris wore a long-sleeved, black and gray striped shirt with holes in the bottoms of the sleeves that his thumbs went through. Melanie couldn't tell if the holes had been there to begin with or if Chris had cut them in himself. He wore black jeans and black converse, as well as a couple of random jewelry items that were also in black. Chris was also in the very beginning process of stretching his ears - something he'd been trying to convince his parents to let him do for months now - so he had very small plugs in his ears now too. In the back of his mind, he'd been tempted to maybe add some makeup or nail polish, but he hadn't quite gotten to the point of wearing those to school yet. He would soon though...

Melanie raised an eyebrow at her friend, "What's with the all black?" She asked. Chris had been in his "emo/skater" phase for a little while now and had started to have a bit of a darker sense of style, but this was when it really started to show.

Chris shrugged, "Just trying something new."

"What are you listening to?"

Chris had a pair of headphones over his head - he'd moved one back away from his ear when Melanie sat down so that he could hear her talking - with a small, portable CD player in his lap. Remember, this was 2001.