I needed to get my life back together.
Entering the small green and white coffee shop, I glanced around until I saw a girl, dressed in all black, with a beanie and headphones on, who resembled Thea.
“Selene?” I waved my hand in front of her face.
“Oh, hi,” she said, taking of her headphones. “Please, sit,” she said motioning to the chair in front of her. “Sorry, I got tired of watching the door like some love sick school girl. People were staring.”
“How long have you been here?” I asked taking a seat.
“About an hour.” She shrugged like it was nothing. “I was already here when I called you.”
“Why did you call me?”
“Can I get a name first? I just keep calling you blue and white stripes in my head.”
“What?”
She smiled, and it sort of looked like Thea’s. “The boxers you left at the house,” she said as if it were obvious. “They had blue and white stripes.”
“This is certainly one way to start a conversation. I’m Levi Black. I’m guessing your sister hasn’t spoken much about me?”
Not that I cared.
“No. But don’t take it personally, it’s just who she is. She tricks people into thinking she is opening up about herself because she rants about the most random things, but she never really talks about herself,” she said, taking a sip of her coffee.
“Selene, I’m a little confused as to why you called me.”
“Because I’m leaving town,” she replied and I waited for her to go on. “She’s sending me back to Maryland to stay with our grandmother. She’s studying law because—”
“Because of your father, I know.”
Her eyes widened in surprise.
“Yeah. I’m sorry for calling you out here, and I don’t even know if you’re really that close to her, but I just had to ask someone to look out for her a little, and you seem to be the only person she knows, or the only person she cares to know.”
“Your sister is a big girl Selene, she doesn’t need someone—”
“No, she does.” She dropped her head, gripping on to her coffee. “She’s one of those people that will give up everything for people without caring or noticing what happens to her.
“When she caught me trying to sneak back into my room, she said that there was no one in her lif
e, and that she only cared about making sure dad and I were okay. She was sad. For the first time since I came here, she was sad.”
I didn’t think that I was supposed to hearing any of this.
“Maybe because you’re moving away—” I started.
“You really don’t want to accept that it’s you, do you?”
“She rejected me,” I said, calling over the waitress. “She rejected me not even twenty-four hours ago. I’m sorry if I’m a little skeptical of Thea’s feelings… if she has them at all.” I turned to meet the gaze of the waitress who looked decidedly unimpressed with her life. “Coffee, black, please,” I told the waitress, before turning back to Selene.
“Fine, then let me make it clear.” She sat up. “We are black rainbows.”
“That’s not clear at all.”
“When we were younger, our grandmother used to say that everyone was born with all the colors of the rainbow, and depending on the people around us, our colors either brightened or darkened. Thea and I are black rainbows… every once in a while we get brighter, but we always end up black again. People don’t stay around us long. Especially after they realize the life we’ve had, they slowly withdrew themselves from our lives because they feel uncomfortable or they don’t know what to say.”
“Again, she pushed me away.”