"Get out," she demanded in a snarly voice.
✧˖°.✧˖˚▹ₓ˚. ୭ ˚○◦˚.˚◦○˚ ୧ .˚ₓ༺༄ؘ 𝓒𝓱𝓪𝓹𝓽𝓮𝓻 2 ༄ؘ༻ₓ˚ .୧ ˚○◦˚.˚◦○˚ ୭˚▹ₓ˚.✧˖°.✧
My head turned a full 180°, just in case there was someone else in the car that she was talking to. Unfortunately, I couldn't spot any pair of eyes looking back at me, which meant that I was the one that Shaniya wanted out of the car.
"What?" I asked, making sure that I heard Shaniya correctly.
"Get out!"
"Sorry."
"I will NOT be spoken to this way! You know the young man who worked for me before - we never had any sort of problem! He never spoke to me like this. 𝘌𝘷𝘦𝘳. Out."
Shaniya pointed a long, gloved finger at the car door.
"𝘐'𝘮 𝘴𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘺," I said.
She turned her head toward me with snake-like eyes. "Do you wanna work under me, Corlorown? Do you want me to be your chaperone?"
I nodded my head. "Yes'm."
"Then know this: I am not your mate. I am not your teacher. I am not your parent or guardian or anyone that'll take care of you. I am your chaperone, and you are my apprentice, which means you work under me, therefore, you do everything I ask of you."
Shaniya turned back to her original position and stared at the rearview mirror.
"Again, I am K. Shaniya Gardner. You may call me Shaniya or Gardner. You are my apprentice. You work under me and will do everything I tell you. I will call you Corlorown. There is no easy way to train an apprentice, so try not to get me mad and you might learn something. Do you understand?"
"What's the 𝘒 stand for?"
Shaniya rolled her eyes. "Keep asking me the wrong questions and see what'll happen." She looked back at me with the same cold, snake-like eyes. "You probably think you know everything. You are probably very proud of yourself for graduating and managing to run from that group of people you were sitting with. But trust me, Corlorown. You know nothing."
Shaniya turned back to look at her gloved hand which went off the steering wheel and reached for the dashboard of the car. I noticed for the first time a teacup, still steaming. The side read 𝑮𝑨𝑩𝑬'𝑺 𝑩𝑹𝑬𝑨𝑲𝑭𝑨𝑺𝑻 𝑩𝑶𝑾𝑳.
"You probably didn't even notice that I took your tea, Corlorown," she said while dumping the tea out the window. It steamed on the ground, and for a few seconds, we watched as an eerie cloud rose into the air. The scent was sweet but wrong, like a poisonous flower.
"Laudanum," Shaniya told me. "It's an opiate, a medicament, a sleeping draught. Three sips of that and you would've been unresponsive, a word here which means mumbling crazy talk and nearly unconscious."
"I actually think unresponsive is a word here that means dead."
Shaniya turned to glare at me like some type of ferocious serpent once again, which literally made me hold my lips shut with my thumb and index finger.
"You think you're 𝘴𝘰 funny, Corlorown," she claimed. "No one's laughing. You already said you were sorry. Don't exceed my patience."
I said nothing and looked out into the alley.
"Three sips of that, and you would've never caught that train, Corlorown. Your parents would've hurried you out of that place and taken you someplace else, someplace you wouldn't want to be, I suppose."
I kept staring out into the alley, feeling quite lonely, though Shaniya was there. If I had drunken my tea, I would've never been in that car, I would've never ended up falling into the wrong tree, or wandering into the wrong basement, or destroying the wrong library, or finding all the other wrong answers to the wrong questions I was asking. She was right, K. Shaniya Gardner. There was no one to take care of me. I looked Shaniya in the eye.
"Those weren't my parents," I informed, and off we went.