[IF YOU ARE EASILY NAUSEATED BY THE MENTIONS OF GRAPHIC TRASH, OR VOMITING OR ARE OFFENDED BY CRUDE BEHAVIOUR THEN THIS BOOK IS NOT FOR YOU. I WOULD ADVICE YOU TO CLICK BACK AND DO SOMETHING BETTER WITH YOUR TIME. G' DAY!]
A stink.
Something rotting.
Something wet, boldly soggy and awfully sticky.
Numbness in her nether regions.
Her eyes opened to darkness.
Well, not darkness per say, but a strange dirty yellow.
'Am I in a box?'
'Why is it so uncomfortable?'
'Why don't I feel my feet?'
'Ah!'
The upturned stance, feet sticking against a plastic wall and wedged between two closed plastic flaps. She raised her hands only to spot the white fabric of her shirt stained yellow, blotched green and tattered around her elbows. The space was confined and nauseating. She wanted an out.
Miraculously, there was a shriek outside. Two fingers slotted between the flaps, that engulfed her feet, and pushed them up. A pair of blue eyes, astonishingly withholding the same serenity as the hidden skies, greeted her face.
"Uh…everything alright in there?" his question was genuine, his voice was deep, his concern was evident and his awkwardness was conveyed. His eyes kept wandering around, unknowing where to focus. On the smooth, freckled expanse of legs in his direct line of sight, or the tattered shirt smeared with grease and rotting adversities screaming for a desperate wash or the disheveled mess of hair and limbs lying in a trash can that he found on a Monday morning, on the premises of his new school. Crestmoore Elite.
"Quite upturned of all alright…ts? Is that a word? I can't seem to remember. Could do with a little help."
Another head pressed itself over the shoulder of the blue-eyed guy. He was a brunette with a boxy smile and much to say about everyone around him. "Let the solar eclipse blind me before I unsee this, lord's holy breakfasts, Kai, you found a girl in a trashcan!?" his voice was husky, his thick eyebrows loved merging with his hairline as he slithered his arms around Kai's shoulders and tip-toed to get a better view inside. Whilst Kai looked taller and leaner with a calmer aura and distinctly dashing features, the other guy seemed to be a tad shorter with broad shoulders and muscular thighs. His face reeked of unchecked enthusiasm.
"Yeah, surprise! Now, why don't we relish in the marvels of this strange discovery after I am pulled out of this misery? Is it too much to ask?" the girl questions with thinning patience and growing annoyance. The trash underneath felt turning soggier by the second; the wetness seeped through the thin fabric of her shirt and clung onto her skin. It made her squirm with disgust.
"Why are you in there? How did you get in?" Kai questions curiously, raising his right eyebrow while staying sturdily grounded. No hands moving for help.
"Is that really a point of concern right now?" her left eye twitched unceremoniously.
"Wait, let me just—uh, gotcha!" the brunette behind Kai struggled to find his phone in his pant pockets. When he did, he pulled it out and clicked a picture, eternalizing a memory of a scornful reluctant girl he and his best friend found inside a trashcan. "There! All done, hah!"
"Did you just--!"
"Henrik, that was an asshole move. Will we trend if we post this?"
"Probably, but we will have to blur out her face, consent and rights and such."
"But will we make money off of it?"
"Depends on how we use—"
A slimy banana peel smacked Kai's face with precision, snogging his nose with its overwhelming rotten-ness and slithering down his lips line leaving a rotten trail over his face. He wheezed internally, soul cringing and body momentarily freezing with unfathomable disgust.
Henrik let out a low whistle, sliding lower and hiding behind Kai's back now; his eyes peeking over Kai's elbow enough to spot the angry looking girl inside the trashcan. "Man had it coming, I tell you," he points at Kai's head, "How outrageous of him to not help you! He was lost to all Disney, I tell you, and he has no sense of chivalry or concept of damsel in distress. Talking of damsels, you throw quite accurately for someone in distress, are you a sportsperson?"
But before the girl could open her mouth in reply, a soccer ball swooshed in perspective and crashed against the trashcan with an audibly courageous THUD!
Kai shrieked unceremoniously in shock.
The yellow trashcan wobbled on its circular edges due to unprecedented pressure and eventually toppled over, rolling on the cobbled pathway. The girl inside choked on her words and resorted to screaming, "AAAAHHH!" instead, as her world literally rocked on its axis and was now turning upside down. Over and about. Whatever.
Distant hoots and whistles from the soccer field filtered their way in Henrik's ears as his lips left a wailing exclamation, "The trashcan has a person inside! Stop it!"
The yellow world of litter-glitter heeded no calls of concerns as Kai with his lanky limbs ran after it and Henrik with his more rested stance (having created a distance from disgusting Kai by leaning over a tree trunk as his friend participated in a guilt ridden wild goose chase) and obnoxiously well trained vocal cords screamed it to stop in the name of Law.
It didn't.
And the girl felt her gut spiraling back into her throat, but right before she could even concoct a thought to throw-up, her world came to a standstill against the wondrous miracles of Yasin Hadid's arms wedging the trashcan with his body.
"Crawl out please! Or it would roll off again!" his voice was a tad nasally, cheeky, as if he was talking in a pout.
The girl nodded to herself as she tried to scrape her heels on the cobbled pathway in an attempt to push herself out. Help came in an embodiment of a visibly panting Kai who huffed and puffed between his words, "Wait—," huff, "—I will-ll," cough, "—I will—," wheeze, "—help!"
He grabbed onto her legs and pulled her out in a swift motion, along with some accompaniments of trash in service. The girl coughed ravenously, finally getting a breath of fresh air in her trash congested lungs. She spread herself out on the floor and coughed bitterly and so did Kai but for all different and unhealthy reasons. Yasin picked up the trash can and placed it on the side of the pathway, out of possible stumbling reach, and walks back to them to question, "Are you guys okay?"
The girl opens her eyes to face her knight in shining armor. Morelike, the guy in a soccer jersey with sweat-slick blonde hair, lovely slanted eyes, and plush lips that always seemed to be in a pout. Exactly the savior sort of a person.
"Yeah, obviously they're okay, I was overseeing them. What is the worst that could happen, huh? With me on the watch, absolutely nothing! Though Kai could have busted a lung or two in process, but that's all internal grievances, not my line of expertise, not my concern, right?" Henrik with his boxy grin casually walked into perspective.
The girl, if she had energy enough, would have had poked the guy's eyes out.
Kai, as dying as he was, still had enough life within himself to strike his shoes against Henrik's shin. Vengeance was well served with the pleasure of Henrik's agonized scream. He skipped on one leg, hugging his shin to his stomach and frolicking multiple 'Ouch' and 'ow's before he tripped over Kai's foot and fell.
Face first.
Over that girl's very dirty, very fragile, stomach.
Yasin's hand hung in air due to the missed catch.
The girl doubled over, in uncomfortable shock and puked all over Henrik's suffocated head and fluffy brown hair. "Much better," she rasped out, gargling, as the wetness of her vomit seeped through Henrik's dry scalp and reached the red-hot tip of his ears.
As if diving face first on a girl's belly was not horrible enough, he could almost feel his $250 perm being washed over by the said girl's stomach activities. "Not—my—hair!" he all but shrieked out, jolting up and trying to deny the obvious.
"It's not there, is it?" his husky words were pleading, pretty face contoured into sheer agony as his eyebrows drooped to the side of his cheeks.
Yasin shook his head in affirmative.
Henrik enthusiastically slotted his fingers in his hair.
Lest to say, the result was not the most promising hair he had touched in his life. It was lively, though, for sure.
"You!" Henrik ruthlessly pointed at the girl with his vomit covered hand.
"Oh shut up you dramatic hooligan and let the cats live."
"YOU WILL PAY FOR THIS!"
"I would love to if I knew the currency of incompetence and tomfoolery. Though I am always up for a lesson, can't say I'll catch up to your level of petty…or stupid."
"I WILL!"
Kai rolled his eyes away from his best friend's dramatic shenanigans only to spot the bald Mr. Plod raging his way towards them. Looking absolutely furious with his chubby cheeks puffed, Kai knew it would be a blotch on his annual report if he got caught. He was Kairos Rodrigo, the son of Crestmoore's Minister, for crying out loud, if the words were to reach his father—he'd have his social and physical life hanging by a thread. Quite literally. So, resorting to the best possible option, Kai slowly but swiftly dragged him out of the chaotic scene and ran until he was unseen.
Yasin, intrigued by Kai's peculiar disappearance, spared his eye an investigation. Spotting Mr. Plod, the P.E. teacher of Crestmoore Elite, a notorious gossipmonger of a narcissist, infamous for ratting students out and earning money out of a kid's scandals, Yasin spent no second to fathom rhyme or reason. He was Yasin Hadid, the son August Entertainment's chairwoman, even the tiniest misconduct on his behalf would have the future of a billion dollar company on the line. They were always being watched. Stared at until they break on the verge of a scandal. Make the markets crash and bring shame to the Amity Alliance of Crestmoore. He could not let it happen. So, he jumped over the lanky, spread form of the-girl-from-the-trashcan and ran into the distance as fast his soccer legs could carry him.
Mr. Plod, spotting Yasin's blatant escape, pulled his whistle to his lips and blew so loud that Henrik had to give a pause to his dramatics for once, just so he could snap, "Rude much? We are trying to hold a conversation about my ruined perm, please. It is important!"
Only to realize who he just snapped at. Mr. Plod's chubby silhouette at hand's distance. Henrik's face grew so pale, the girl could almost consider his brown hair go red for a moment. Curious, she asked.
"Who's he?"
"An adult of authority who has power enough to suck our childhood, teenagedom and adulthood into a deflated shell of poverty-stricken misery and incompetence."
"Big words," She huffed out, narrowing her eyes at the bulging stomach threatening to plunge, with every step, out of the blue dress shirt Mr. Plod had on.
"Small word, run!"
For an encounter as cold as December and as random as February, his vomit stricken hand pulled her dirt ridden one into his, almost like the pleasant warmth of May. And they ran, across seasons, through time, unknowing of the places they held in the world and the crossroads they would eventually stand on. Meeting a stranger, holding their hand, one welcomes not only them—but the past, present and future they carry along. The seasons they saw, the summers they felt, the winters they survived and the springs that are yet to come. Holding a hand is accepting someone's life in yours, even momentarily so, you're both one in the present.
And it is the time where all good things happen. Though, they're not always obvious.
Being caught by Mr. Plod's chubby fingers as Henrik blamed her for 'incompetent running' and she blamed him for being a 'conceited hair ranting,' they stood in front of Headmistress Lissy's office. In the strangest of beginnings at the age of eight, in the strangest of September, they stood before the council where he said his name.
But she did not know hers.
"Name?"
"Henrik Stratford."
"Your name?"
"I—uh, um…don't know…?"
--- fin ---