Note: What follows is intended to be an intimate look at a work in progress. It is expanding, ever changing and incomplete. So, if you return to pages that you’ve already read, you may find that there are editorial changes. That, I hope, is part of the fun to be had in exploring the story in this form. As it gets closer to completion, I’ll gradually restrict public access to it.
I was frustrated and this trip wasn’t helping. Turnbull still wasn’t speaking to me for reasons she was keeping to herself. I was bouncing along in the back of the van going along for a ride that I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in on. It felt as though I was clocking every bump in this road to nowhere and my mood was starting to feel a little bit roughed up.
I’m reasonably sure that Turnbull was in a rotten mood as well, but I never could tell. The expression behind those glasses was pulled as tight as her hair. Her stoic, all-business attitude carried a whiff of distaste where I was concerned and her distaste felt icier every time she looked over at me.
Just be virtue of being myself, I was a catch-all for most class-related prejudices. In the classroom and the workplace, I was the dirty, unkempt hippy or the sockless, beach buzzed punk. Out on the city street, I was the soft, spoiled white chick, practically begging to be ripped off, dressed down, beat up or worse. When I tried to screw a baseball cap down over my head strong, wavy hair, my girlfriend told me that I looked like a sniper regardless of whether I wore it straight or backwards. I asked her if she knew a lot of snipers in backwards baseball caps. If not a sniper, she said, I definately looked like I belonged in the military and to the teenage gang who mobbed my block, I no doubt looked like an authority figure.
That was good to know. It was comforting that I looked like every flavor of tomboy stereotype. I could pass for pretty much anything except for a career girl packed into a power suit.
I sighed, kicked my shoes off and thumped my shoulders against the wall of the van. Turnbull gave me a quick glance that I imagine put me in the same league as a lab rat giving his all for the good of cancer research. I gave her a lazy, cock-eyed smile of insolence and then rolled my head to stare absently at a corner of the vehicle that didn’t have it in for me.
Turnbull most likely hated me because I seemed like a slob in her eyes. Either that or she had caught me admiring her out of my peripherals one day. She struck me as the sort that always looked to see who was looking and found herself nonplussed to catch the eye of the sloppy hippy dyke.