[part two.]

She went into her room, touching her wooden wind chimes as she did. There were six of them in all. The oldest of them all was delightfully worn, looking as though it could fall apart at any instant, but it had a warm smoothed surface and a heart of its own. The others were younger and brightly painted. One of them had ladybugs crawling over every inch. Another was a plain yellow all over with no variation. The rest were "abstract art," paint spatters decorating in haphazard arrangements of purple and orange, two colors that should never exist in close proximity to each other.

She sat down at her metal desk. A familiar crushing sound echoed when her legs indented it on the side. On her desk there sat an ancient monster of a computer. It was a sickly white color like old milk or the insides of eggshells. It churned to life when she pressed a button on the side. With every click of the mouse, another groan choked through. All she used it for was to check her email. No one ever emailed her, but it was the principle of the thing, the act of checking. It was almost a habit.

She clicked an x on the screen and stood up. The desk was in front of a large window. Half of it gave her a fairly decent view of the city. The other half was blocked by a building with dark red bricks and sprawling patterns of graffiti. It was ugly, but it was the city too. It gave her more of a realistic view than the other half.

Right now it was still considered the summertime. School was to start in one week. She would have to return to deadlines, to checking out creased books in the school library and teachers that piled on projects in the same week. The summer had been like a fleeting mist -- humidity and tanktops and nothing particularly exciting. She'd been invited to Ashley Windon's summer blow-out a few weekends ago, but she'd caught her usual summertime cold and couldn't attend. Not that it mattered. It probably would have meant temporarily smashing into a tangle of bodies and moving lights, unnoticed and (for the most part) alone.