No One Watching, 2

The second chapter of the novel I started 2 years ago to fill in the space of someone I missed (still miss?). 

As Frankie made her way to her car, she realized that a black t-shirt had been a poor choice. It was a typical summer day in New Orleans, replete with stifling humidity. Getting inside her decrepit Honda, Frankie scorched her hand on her seatbelt. It seemed to be at least twenty degrees hotter inside the car, despite the fact that neither of the windows in the backseat rolled up all of the way. On a good day, Frankie could beat her dashboard until the air conditioning kicked on, but on this day, she was not so lucky. After eight minutes of banging her fists against the dash with all of the ferocity a skeleton could possibly muster, Frankie gave up and cranked the windows down as far as they’d go.

Twisting the volume knob on her car’s stereo, she found that Garbage’s “I Would Die for You” was skipping in her CD player. She instantly recognized the CD as one of Luly’s mixes and remembered how long it had been since she’d driven her car. Her mind flashed to a memory of roughly ten weeks ago when she’d spent three hours sobbing hysterically in her car and mouthing the words to the songs on Luly’s mix. Tim had been forced to remove Frankie from the car forcefully when a woman from their apartment building became irritated with Frankie’s refusal to quiet down and threatened to call the cops.

Pressing the eject button, Frankie banished the memory from her mind and tossed the CD out the window as she pulled out of her parking spot.

The art supplies store that Frankie liked to go to was a twenty minute drive from her apartment. There was one within walking distance of where she lived, but it was overpriced and she disliked the snobby atmosphere. Unlike Tim, Frankie found driving to be cathartic. Typically, she did not enjoy driving in silence but felt that it was somehow fitting on this particular occasion. The wind whipped her greasy black hair in and out of her face as she sped along the pothole-pocked street. She arrived at the art store and parked clumsily on the street in front of the store. Frankie walked in the front door, setting off the tinkling of clay wind chimes atop the door as she entered. She hadn’t been in the store in nearly three months.

As soon as she walked inside, Frankie remembered the scent of incense mixed with turpentine that filled the shop. She hoped that the old man who ran the place would remember her. Though she wasn’t usually the chatting type, Frankie loved talking to the ex-hippie. He had good advice and even better stories, which usually involved what he called “the gifts of Mother Earth.” Frankie was pretty sure that “the gifts of Mother Earth” was either a code name for heavy drug use or lots of promiscuous sex. Maybe both. The hippie would tell a story about his hazy past that would go something like: “I remember back when we sat out in the woods for days just making art, making music, and making love. Love was everywhere in those woods. You could just see it in the air, like a rainbow or the sun. No need to wear clothes; we had the gifts of Mother Earth to keep us warm.”

Unfortunately, Frankie was not greeted by her misty-eyed, patchouli-scented friend. Instead, a feminine voice called to her from the back room. “I’ll be with you in a minute.” At first, Frankie wasn’t convinced, but as the voice’s owner emerged from the day-glo painted door to the storage room, she was able to steal a glance, confirming her suspicion.

Eloise Constance Clark. To her friends, she was known as Luly. To Frankie, she was known as Evil Succubus Shark. The void inside Frankie’s chest that sucked up all of her inspiration was Luly’s handprint. The stone in her stomach that anchored her to her bed and made her feel too sick to finish her breakfast was just a charm on Luly’s bracelet. The parasite feeding off Frankie’s insides that left her a bag of bruised skin and aching bones was Luly’s favorite pet. And at the moment that the Succubus came floating around the corner of the back shelf, Frankie would’ve ran if she could've, but the parasite growled. The stone felt more like a boulder, tethering her to the store’s colorful welcome mat. Then, the void sucked up all of Frankie’s will to move.

Frankie stood dumbfounded in the doorway of one of her favorite places, as the she-devil who had devoured her heart and left her for dead, crept towards her, the heels of her black boots clicking with every step. Luly’s hair was blonde now. It had been red before—dragonlady red, not I Love Lucy red. She looked more innocent as a blond, but the treacherous air of sex was still about her. The hourglass swoop of her torso and the dark curve of her almond eyes couldn’t be covered. She looked like a pin-up costumed as a slutty angel. Luly looked up from the ground and right into Frankie’s blushing face. Her eyes looked wider, bluer. They had appeared green before. Luly instantly recognized the girl standing in the doorway. She came to a deer-in-the-headlights halt, unsure whether to bolt or charge forward and catch her old friend in an embrace like a bear trap. Frankie tried to think of something clever to say, perhaps a crippling insult or an excuse to leave, but all that came out of her mouth was, “Hey.”

 Luly was feeling dizzy. “Hey,” she said back.