Summoning

             It wasn't as though she ran away. Cassandra properly asked permission to go backpacking across South America with a bunch of college friends. Now that was the lie. She found someone online who was off to South America too. A stranger, A girl with black toned make-up who didn't at all look like she would figure in the Andes Mountains or the Amazon jungle. But, she couldn’t care less. She seemed fun in her profile and was decided to go there with her just as she was.

            Cassandra had just finished college, majoring in Literature which her parents minded but which she was adamant to finish. She was very idealistic even in high school. She was then the editor of their paper and dreamt of building a good foundation from college and maybe move on to law afterwards. She knew her parents could afford to send her to college and law school. They owned a line of pawnshops in Manhattan. She also knew her parents weren't very open with their dealings in business with under the table pay to all sorts of people: in the government, thugs to keep out the louse on the streets, questionable items for sale, the whole lot she really didn't want to get into.

            Her parents wanted her to take a business major but in convincing them she would have to go into law school after her literature major which made them capitulate a bit. In any case college didn't turn out the best of what she dreamt either. She dormed in with the other girls who all thought she was a freak. No, she didn't save trees from being cut by living on them til the cops gave out. But she was part of an activist group who would paint the inglorious traditions of administrative practices in angry, blood red paint on newspapers made into a long banner and strung on walls of the cafeteria, the outside of chapels, by the library entrance.

            They rallied for causes outside college on the streets, under heat, rain or sleet. She was particularly focused on the freeing of a Black American who was unjustly accused of robbing a grocery store. He was obviously framed up by groupie thugs in the street. But the courts wouldn't hear of it and he was kept in prison. She wrote him letters, letters to keep on petitioning for his release but in the end he gave up , and so did she.

            She cried each night, afterwards. She didn't like the world after all. Her parents wanted her to work on the management of all their pawnshop operations, the world was horribly unfair and she was considered a freak, Having a boyfriend could help, she often wondered. She liked someone from the activist group she hung out with but he seemed indifferent.

            As a graduation gift she was given a sum of money for her trip. She couldn't care less if she earned it or not. The days she spent minding one of the pawnshops were days without compensation. So she accepted it without guilt. She promised them instead, to go to law school soon right after the trip. She said she just needed to clear her head for awhile. Her parents often wondered if she had a boyfriend and worried she might find some hippie backpacker in the Andes to bring back home. That, they would not approve of.

            Her name was Andrea and looked every bit the goth she looked in the internet. But she was a real fun companion from Manhattan to L.A., to Mexico. She smoked, she drank, she laughed out loud, her double earrings dangling in her ears. They rode the bus together and stayed in motel rooms that reeked of cigarettes and beer and piss. Andrea liked to tune into MTVs at each stop they had for overnight stays in motels. She would dance on the bed with a cigarette sticking in her mouth and a beer on her hand. Cassandra tried smoking the cigarettes and found out she liked them. She found the beer made her woozy and reckless but not reckless enough to invite some guys over from their bus to come in for the night.

            Andrea introduced herself as the daughter of no one. She worked two jobs as a waitress       and saved enough money for this one cool trip to skinny dip in one those waterfalls they have over there in the South. But truly, she did leave some folks in some suburban town somewhere where life was the end of the line for her over there. She was a drifter and would forever be one, she mused. But Cassandra thought there was more than this girl was saying. She felt she had some ambition, a sort of plan. She just didn’t have money but would eventually find a fortune for herself and emerge from where she was now.

            And who was she? Cassandra questioned herself one morning as she looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. She wiped the mist on the plane of the mirror and watched herself. She felt strangely empty inside, she admitted. Her looks could pass her off as a Mexican mestiza with her long black tresses and fine white skin with nary a pimple and brows as thick as Frida Kahlo's. It made her look as though she questioned everything in the world brought to her.  It was as though she was puzzling over everything, always. Her lips were curved and pursed with a paleness she smudged with red lipstick. She wondered who would be the first to touch them with his own lips and blushed at the thought. Who cares, she laughed inside and for the first

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 20.08.2013
ISBN: 978-3-7309-4471-4

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