Khera's+Short+Story

 Hey-yo! So, most of this story took a lot of time and effort and blahblahblah. BUTTTT, the ending didn't. It's really rough, that one. So, I'd like you to pay the very most attention to my potentially horrible ending, and feel absolutely free as a bird to hate it. I'm not even sure if I do or not. Thanks, comrades! <3 Also, feel free to pitch your titles to me!

__Khera's Untitled Short Story, Take One.__

By Khera Rufino (Shocker) //Elizabeth's Comments are in THIS COLOR!// The jungle gym was boiling, even at nighttime. The metal seemed to sweat with me. I didn't care; I laid, my hoodie zipped all the way up to my neck. Eventually, I wasn't even bothered. I watched the gray clouds, bright in contrast to the dark sky and thought. Of life, of everything to do with this war we all brave, each day a battle. Death is a win or a loss, depending on how you look at it. My morbid thoughts were interrupted by a sharp howl; Denise. "AUGUST RAE TEIGER!" She screamed my name about four more times. She spoke with a slight Southern drawl, despite her being born and raised in New Jersey. I sat up, shivering slightly. //<take out 'incredibly' // exhilarating hours of life, let's go!" She said this with an incredibly adventurous look in her bright green eyes and flipped her blonde locks to the other side of her head for dramatic effect. "Go where?" "Funky Town? I dunno, but I gotta fresh twenty burnin' a hole in my wallet, and there's a train station not twelve feet from here." She was right. If I spat, and said spit had enough momentum, it would hit the train station. Denise climbed up with me and pushed me off the jungle gym, jumping off and helping me up. We walked, hand in hand, to the ticket window. The decent-looking, ashy-haired guy behind the counter was asleep. Denise tapped with almost unnecessary vigor on the glass. He awoke suddenly and looked around, eventually focusing on us. "Uh. Huh. Where d'ya wanna go?" He said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and clearing his throat. Denise looked at me. "Young August, where does your young heart care to travel?" She said, imitating the fakest of game show hosts. I contemplated the "Departures" board and replied, "Point Pleasant." "You heard the lady, Point Pleasant. Wanna come with?" Counter Guy gave Denise a, "Har-Har-Funny-Joke" look and our freshly printed tickets. She slipped him her twenty, and we sat outside awaiting the train's arrival. Another three AM trip with Denise, I wondered if we would be doing this forever. We were seventeen; would we have the same zest for life at sixty? The trip was the same as all the others; we went to the town, walked around and saw everything we didn't need money for, then hid in the train's bathroom so the conductor wouldn't see that we didn't have tickets home. Our parents weren't concerned, provided we didn't come back with limbs missing or buns in our respective ovens. After pitching a tent in the playground and sleeping for twelve or thirteen hours, our sense of adventure was restored, while our wallets weren't. We made the treacherous trip to my sugar daddy, Howard "Lemmings" Jennings III. Well, he wasn't really as much of a sugar daddy as he was a kid who was young and rich, harboring a manic crush on me and a huge affinity for wangsterism. Lemmings lived two blocks and many judgmental stares away from the playground. Before we left, we stopped in the train station's bathroom so that Denise could "enhance my sexual persuasiveness", which, in plain English, meant that she was going to smooth my spiky, dark hair, apply thick eye makeup to my heavily-lidded baby browns and basically punch my chest until my breasts said a nice "Hello" to anyone lucky enough to pass by. Lemmings was looking in the long mirror on his closet when we barged in. His short legs were occupying an overlarge pair of jeans, the rest of him consumed by a sweatshirt; Mama Jennings was ashamed, or she should have been. The incredible volume of Denise and I entering the room was enough to make him jump. "Oh, hey, baby. Comin' in to give Papa a lil' somethin'? Who's yo' Daddy?" I gave Denise a look of absolute disgust coupled with terror. She returned my countenance with one of urgency, willing me to respond to this. "Uh. Jude Teiger..." "Oh, you just playin' with me, I see. So, whad'ya want?" Just like Denise and I had practiced, I bent over to meet his gaze, accidentally-on-purpose letting him see down my shirt. “We were hoping we could have a little cash,” My voice dripped with honey and I looked to Denise who was egging me on, “…Daddy.” This was a horrific act of prostitution, but if I let him see the smallest amount of cleavage, that kept me and Denise in day trips for at least two weeks. Without another word, still concentrating on my chest, he eased out his wallet and held out two hundred-dollar bills. Denise snatched the money and the back of my shirt and we scurried from the room screaming, "Thanks, Lemmings!" simultaneously behind us. It was four in the afternoon and we were on a train to New York, a treat to make me feel less unclean. We decided to spend the night, so we called up Lemmings and he called the hotel his father owned in Manhattan. We would feel bad about taking advantage, but two hundred dollars and a night in his father's hotel was child's play for Lemmings; his family was about as rich as the Hiltons, if not more so. Not to mention, if someone was going to take advantage of him, it might as well have been us. We spent a good portion of the night jumping on the fluffy beds and eating candy from the mini bar, watching bad late night TV and calling for room service in British accents to give the air of sophistication and intelligence while ordering a jar of mustard at two AM. Once again, Denise and I returned to the tent and crashed for a good half of a day and woke up to the sound of a swarm of angry bees buzzing the tune to, “Stop in the Name of Love”. It was the tent’s zipper; we always kept it locked from the inside with my gym lock. In a groggy attempt at castle defense, I kicked the entrance of the tent and rolled over. The zipping continued, and it wasn’t long until the song was stuck in my head; whoever was out there was definitely in for it. “Whoever you are, your love of 1960’s superhits will not be waking me up today!” Denise squeezed her eyes shut for emphasis, even though the culprit had no way of seeing them. The zipping continued until finally, I shot up huffily and unlocked the tent, unzipping the door. “Who the hell are you?” I shrieked, my eyes still closed. Whoever it was stayed silent. I reluctantly cracked open one eye to see the ticket window guy from our Point Pleasant trip. “Who is it, already?” said Denise, groaning. “It’s the guy from the ticket window.” “Which one?” “Dorian. My name is Dorian.” “The one you said would look like Kurt Cobain if his hair was a little less ratty.” “Ratty?” He self-consciously picked a lock of his hair up and examined it. “Oh, no,” Denise said, sudden authority in her voice, “You are not allowed to speak. You woke me up.” “What do you want, Dorian?” “Can I come in, first?” I looked at Denise, and she looked back, curious. Finally, she said, “…Fine.” Dorian climbed awkwardly into the tent, too tall to stand up without ripping the vinyl or looking like a hunchback. He eventually sat, cross-legged, on the edge of my sleeping bag, looking at Denise and me silently. “So,” I said, breaking the silence, “what’s up?” He considered for a moment. “I was wondering, well. Uh, I was wondering…” “Words aren’t your forte, are they?” “Don’t be a jerk, Dee.” “Well, he’s taking forever!” “I was wondering what the hell you guys are doing!” he blurted out. “Well, we //were// sleeping, but that seems to have ended.” “That’s not what I meant. I meant…why are you in this tent? Why do you spend all of your time on trains?” I was at a loss for words; no one had ever questioned why we lived the way we did, it seemed everyone in our lives just accepted that we didn’t want to be there. Denise, as usual, had a response. “We’re in the tent because it’s close to the train station, and we’re on trains all the time because our hearts don’t belong here, but they don’t belong really anywhere else. It’s kind of like soul searching.” “Nice answer, Dee.” “But don’t you get tired of it? Of sleeping in a tent and hiding in the train’s bathroom and slutting it up for that Lemmings guy and following this bitch around?” He gestured to Denise, as her mouth formed a perfect, “O”. A lump materialized in my throat before I could answer this question that was so clearly aimed at me. Denise spoke for me. “Why do you even know about that stuff? You bastard; get out!” “I may not be very good with talking, but I can hear okay,” he said, not listening to her order. Denise started kicking him. Everywhere; his legs, his chest, and his butt once he turned around to get out of the tent he was no longer welcome in. Extricating him from the tent once and for all, Denise turned around, dusting imaginary dust from her hands and sitting down, fuming. “God, what the hell is his problem? I mean, he waltzes into our home after wakin’ us the fuck up and then attacks you while also attacking me and criticizes our lifestyle and gets a shit load of dirt on the floor!” While I let her rant, I thought about what he said. Was I really just following some bitch around? No, I decided. Denise was no bitch; she was my best friend, inseparable since diapers, restless in this town since Pre-K. Taking orders since then, too. I always let her take the reins and just followed whatever she said. I always got money for us, except when she mooched off of her dad. I’d never had another friend besides her, because I was always just there. Denise’s friend. Not August, but “Denise’s friend, April. June?” “I mean, what do you think, Art?” “Huh. About what?” “August, pay attention! I’m not just detoxing, you know, I need opinions! Do you or do you not think he was right?” “Right about which part?” “All of it.” “Well, I can’t say he’s completely inaccurate, but he was being very…blunt.” “What was the ellipsis for?” “The what?” “The ellipsis. You know, that little triple dot thing.” I rubbed my temples. “How could you possibly know I was using one while I was talking?” “I just know,” she let out an audible gasp, “//y //ou think he’s RIGHT, don’t you?” Denise didn’t come back that night. I sat on my sleeping bag, alone. After she’d accused me of siding with Dorian, she ran out of the tent, telling me not to follow her and got on a train. I stayed up all night, my clammy hands wringing in anticipation of the blowout that her arrival would be and, nothing. I couldn’t stop thinking of the damage I had done. Mine was about as impure a thought as imagining a stripper or something would be for a tight-assed Catholic, totally felonious. I wished I could apologize to her; go to confessional for the Holy Church of Denise and repent, but I couldn’t. A sleepless week later, the payphone outside of our tent was ringing; an unbelievable din. I scrambled out, sure it was Denise. It was her mother. “August? August, is that you?” “Yes, have you seen Denise?” “George, she just asked me where Denise is! Honey, I’m sorry, I was just calling to ask you where she was. You see, we haven’t heard or seen from her in almost two weeks, she normally doesn’t let a full week go by without calling and checking in!” I hung up the phone abruptly after making a phony excuse and assuring the Johnston’s that I would tell Denise to call them once she got back. But she never did. Weeks went by, months, years. The next fall when I went off to college, I had no Denise. By the middle of November, I’d made new friends, but Denise was the only one I wanted. I’d made friends with Dorian, and while he tried to convince me to forget her, I couldn’t. Every day, I would sit in the train station and wait for her. Every day for over a year, then every day on breaks from school, then I just got too busy after about six years of the ordeal. I eventually got over it. I got married to Dorian, and had children. I divorced Dorian, my children left the nest. I’d forgotten all about her; she was clearly dead. It was July twenty-sixth, the day after my birthday, forty-three years since I’d last seen Denise. The phone rang early in the morning, and I answered it, still half-asleep. “Hello?” “August Teiger?” “Yeah?” “Wanna come to Point Pleasant with me?”

I think you could make this flow more and do more show, not tell. There are some simple grammatical changes you could make to make it better. I like the character development but the dialogue sounds sort of fake...that is just the impression i got from reading the story. Thanks, Liz 