Alyssa Benjamin, walking along the narrow street, her hand resting lightly in the crook of Iris Carter's arm, was filled to the brim with rebellious thoughts. They coursed through her body and tingled in her fingertips until she felt sure that they must be conveyed to the man beside her. The sensation was so physical that she found herself compressing her lips into a tight line as if to prevent her feelings from spilling out into words, words that won't only shock but hurt poor Iris.
Alyssa was of medium height, and slender, with the face of a fourteen year old. She had straight blonde hair, not the stringy kind but the type that swayed all in one piece when she moved quickly. She wore all the necessary makeup but lipstick, which added to the teenage look. Alyssa had the sort of mouth that made smoking a cigarette look somehow sinful. She also had a very tender, little girl voice.
Alyssa came from Dallas, from a high-class family. She was the youngest of the sisters, and had spent most of her time in a boarding school, always alone because her nearest sister was five years older and was in college when Alyssa was starting highschool. Her parents had each been divorced and remarried several times. Her middle sister, in Texas, was 28 and starting her third marriage. The eldest was divorced too.
Alyssa's mother sent her money; enough for rent on a tiny apartment, food and clothes, but not enough for the kind spending a spoilt child like her was used to.
Alyssa lived in a second-floor walk-up over a Chinese laundry in a respectable and safe, if rundown, neighborhood. The proprietor of the laundry had a yearning for fresh air and kept the door to his establishment wide and open all day, winter and summer. Walking past it to enter the house you could hear the whoosh of the pressing machine, and on cold days the clouds of steam rising into the air gave anyone entering Alyssa's apartment the feeling that he was boarding a train. There was a tiny balcony outside each window, just large enough for several inches of grit and soot and for Alyssa's stripped alley cat, who uses the balconies for his daily promenade.
She was tired of Iris, the guy she was living with(for no reason other than that they started living together and inertia had taken over) who did nothing but smoke pot and watch television. She was tired of looking for jobs in communications with a degree in communications that meant absolutely nothing at the end of the day. She was tired, tired, tired.....trying to follow one of the roads that lead to what others see as respectable careers. She'd tried sales first. As she had always been good at talking people into things, she went to work in the sales area of some low income housing development and moonlighted answering the phone for the maintenance department. The first clue she had that she was in the wrong place was when a couple of guys refused to fix a certain tenant's apartment. The tenant in question didn't speak English, so she started to give the maintenance guys holy hell about discriminating him. When one could finally get a word in, it was to say "you know what pretty, no one's gonna go there. Two other maintenance guys almost got killed fixing stuff for that creep".
Oh.
The second clue was when the news trucks all started coming and people began shoving microphones on her face, asking her questions about the guy on the eighteenth floor who had just been arrested for running a prostitution ring out of his apartment.
And all of that(those events, those situations that she could single out and point to) didn't even touch the sheer bleakness of working there, in that world with people who had lost every shred of hope they ever had for a better life. Poverty is a grinding daily, hurtful thing and after generations of it, most people cannot imagine a world that doesn't involve welfare or dealing drugs, or stints in prison, or wanting something with the only part of you that hasn't accepted that you'll never be able to have it. Why couldn't she have some fun in life?