My parents signed me up for an after-school archery class. It was only for a week, but it would still get in the way of my part time job. Not that it mattered much to me. My routine will always bleed into itself so that one activity becomes indistinguishable from the next. This time next week everything would be back to normal and I'd forget that there was ever any change.
But that was next week. In the here and now I had changes to make. I switched to a later shift at work, I bought some caffeine pills (for the later shift), and, since this left an extra twenty minutes in my schedule, my teachers increased my homework load, so that solved that. That monday, I rode a jeep out to a field on the outskirts of town along with the rest of the archery students.
The archery instructor, Ms. Barley, had arrived early to set up the range. There were target dummies made of styrofoam, and off to the side was a bow rack full of a variety of plastic bows. "Good morning class," said Ms. Barley as she dry-fired a longbow. "We have a great week ahead of us! Everybody divide into groups of two - there aren't enough bows so we're going to share."
The class mechanically partnered up. My partner was an attractive boy named Gabriel, with dark curled hair and skin like sunlit honey. "You're a fine young lady," he said to me as I nocked my arrow.
"Thank you, but you're distracting me."
"Is there a pretty brain behind that pretty face?" he teased. I think he was flirting.
I exhaled, aimed, and shot my arrow right in the training dummy's face.
Ms. Barley clapped politely. "Wonderful aim, Jess!"
"I had aimed for the crotch."
Gabriel laughed. "Well, whatever you did, try to keep doing it! That was amazing. Very powerful shot, too."
"I felt powerful."
"That's very important in any sport," said Gabriel. "Just keep feeling powerful."
As the lesson progressed, the feeling began to fade and my aim became worse and worse. The only shot I made after that that was even remotely praiseworthy was one that hit the post that the training dummy was taped to. Ms. Barley had to physically yank my arrow out. Several people congratulated me as we rode back to town in the jeep, but Gabriel remained thoughtfully silent.
The jeep dropped us off in the Business District, and everyone wandered off towards previous engagements. Gabriel offered to take me to the library to join his study group, and I declined, though I still had homework to do and there was probably going to be a test in school tomorrow. He left without me as I worked on my paper in an unclean bus shelter, waiting for my shift to start.
After hours of filing papers and writing shorthand, I took a bus home. We passed streets full of carbon copy apartment buildings, ground floor coffee shop after ground floor coffee shop, until the bus stopped in front of a neighborhood with tall, old stone buildings. It was a change to come home at twilight instead of the swelling heat of midday. There were cars stalled in the road.
I stepped off the bus and entered my building. It was an old tenement with the potential to be cozy, though fluorescents whitewashed the interior and the walls were in need of a repainting. Two flights of stairs later and I was in the apartment, having walked in on my family eating dinner without me.
"Hello, Jessica," said my mother, smiling over a still-steaming stockpot.
"Can you teach me archery, Jess?" Karmen, my younger sister, was smiling a little too widely.
"You'll have to wait until you take the class yourself, young lady. Have a seat, Jessica, I'll spoon you some beef."
I slid into my spot at the table as my mother dumped what looked like discolored spaghetti onto my plate. It made the room smell warm, but its taste was either too strong or not strong enough.
"It's a beautiful day, isn't it?" said my father.
"Mmf," I said through a mouthful of mystery meat.
"Were you good at archery?"
I swallowed my food. "Yes. I hit the dummy in the head."
"Did blood come out?" asked Karmen.
"No."
"If anyone could draw blood from a dummy, it'd be you, Jessica," said my dad. I forced a smile.
The rest of the meal was uneventful, and everything was silent until the evening news came on at nine and my father turned it on as background noise. It was clearly a slow news day, since the announcer was saying something about fighting cancer with kindness. "Well, I'm gonna do my history report," said Karmen, disappearing into the family study. My mother followed after, cheerfully berating her procrastination. I went to the bedroom I shared with my sister and fell asleep on one of the beds.
