The blonde boy sat looking out. His shirt was pretty much ripped. The white undershirt was now more of a brown if honesty was the key. His pointed features looked out at the city below him. Denim covering his legs was ripped at the knee, slightly tanned skin showing through and showing the boy's Italian Heritage.
His look could have been called punk and taken from the pages of Vogue or the like except that his body wasn't the build of a model's. His face might have once been considered pretty, but bruises covered it. Ranging from yellow to a mottled purple his skin was covered in them. His arms, covered by his shirt had holes with eerily hand and finger shaped bruises peaking out from the gray material.
The boy's blue eyes scanned the horizon, startling as they seem to be the only part of his potential beauty not ruined by his life. His eyes catch on the place where the twin towers were. He understands that they are gone, but it is still a shock. He draws his thin knees against his body, wondering when he will no longer know that they are missing. When will the skyline look as similar as it used to. No towers instead there are lights of other buildings. He wonders if they will ever get used to it. The families who lost people. Will the towers always be a ghost to them?
His hands push up sleeves of his shirt and he sighs his arms are scarily thin. He knows this. He knows that when he decides to go to school the nurse looks at him warily and will make him eat lunch. Something he hardly ever gets. She knows that he is not happy at home but can not bring herself to help him.
Sometimes when he is at home and his father passed out in a drug induced sleep he looks in the mirror, peeling his shirt off to inspect his thin and beaten body. He turns, looking over the scars on his back, the new marks, his body, thin as a rail in the mirror, weakness staring back at him through strong eyes cuts on his face further marring what was and could have been beauty.
He wouldn't care, and in fact he doesn't care all that much. He knows that he is only there for a short time. He'll leave not the city because he loves it. But he will leave his family and his home. He'll make his own place in the city, maybe in the Village. He's always loved that. Or in the Lower East Side, because the irony of the Jewish Neighbor hood and China town being next to each other is too funny. And he does want to leave the area he's lived in his whole life.
Sighing he stands up and shakes his blonde hair out, running a hand through it. Deciding that he should go to school, as his father hasn't bought any food for the past week and he's hungry. He sighs taking a cigarette from his packet and lighting it. His chapped lips taking a deep breath in, sighing from the relief it gives. The smoke billows out into the almost autumn air and he turns, cigarette still in his mouth, dangling as he walks down the stairs into his building.