All she wanted to do was block out the scream of the four year old behind her while trying to hone in on her nonexistent telepathy skills to tell him to stop kicking her seat. She didn't pay for her seat to be a rejected massage chair.
She turned to glare at the small child but was greeted by the mother's scornful looks.
"Excuse me, but could you tell your son to please stop kicking my chair? I'm trying to get some sleep." There. She was polite enough. She didn't express her yearning to open the emergency exit door and promptly drop kick him out into the cold.
"Sleep? It's 11:30 in the morning..." The woman gritted her teeth as her eyes threw daggers in the girl's direction. She promptly returned the daggers and gave her kid one last look before turning around in her seat. She only had an hour and half before she reached the airport, yet that hour and a half would seem like an eternity. The idea of sitting in her best friend's car and heading off to his apartment was merely a dream because of the nightmare behind her.
She put her headphones back in and turned up Gogol Bordello. So what if her eardrums would be covered in scar tissue when she's older, at least the silence would give her some peace. Her forehead pressed to the cold window as she gazed at her reflection. She looked pale. Perhaps that was the trick of the light. Her blue eyes looked exhausted and had dark circles under them. Her brown hair was in a messy braid with wisps around her face. She looked tired.
She was tired.
That was the reason why she was going to Virginia. Well, one of the reasons. She graduated from college with a total of fifteen breakdowns in the last semester, one nearly landing her in the psyche ward. It was all overwhelming and stressful. Not only that, but her friends decided she wasn't "cool" enough. She would rather stay at home and watch a film to relax rather than go to the local club and get wasted. She was too exhausted for that, and chances are she had to study.
Naturally, after suffering from an overload of emotional breakdowns and finally graduating, she decided that it would be in her best interest if she went away from the west coast...far away. The only place she could think of was Virginia. She knew one person there. Her best friend since middle school and now a professional hockey player.
How could a girl who was so awkward in her own skin growing up, glasses too big for her face, acne covered cheeks, flat chested and quiet, ever be best friends with the popular hockey player who was charming, flirtatious and mischievous all at the same time?
Parents. That and no matter how tough and cool he seemed, John Carlson had a big heart. She could still remember the time when she was getting teased and John stood up for her, even though the culprit of the teasing was someone he was interested in. However, he learned the hard way that calling a girl a "mutant" was a one way ticket to rejection.
"Don't worry about it, Jude" He smirked slowly. "Don't make it bad, take a sad song and make it better."
Whenever she was down, he would always sing that to her. This was because her parents had an enthusiastic obsession with The Beatles. They named her Lucille but most of the time they called her by her middle name, Jude (short for Judith).
At their funeral, they played Let It Be and Imagine. They were both cremated. John and Lucy went to New York to Strawberry Fields and spread their ashes there in the rumored style of John Lennon. They didn't need to say anything while we were there. It was comfortable silence. Comfortable depressing silence. The final goodbye.
The plane finally landed on the tarmac and the nerves set it. "Welcome to Reagan National Airport! It is a cool 89 degrees outside..." The rest of the welcome was blocked out by her own thoughts.
It had been a long time since she's seen John. Four years to be exact. They had kept touch with email and random telephone calls. Lucy would occasionally watch a hockey game if she could find it on the television. Unfortunately she never understood hockey. She went to a ton of John's games when they were younger, but she never learned what was going on. All she knew was that John was a defensemen and that he was good.
"Did you see my goal at the Junior Championships?" He asked on the phone. It was loud and Lucy could barely hear him through the cheers.
"What? John? I can't hear you! But I saw the goal! It was-" Her praises were interrupted by a loud John Carlson cheer and a click.
Lucy waited patiently until everyone was off the plane. She then grabbed her things from the overhead compartment and slung it over her shoulder. It was now or never.