11: Outsides
At twenty, Lucy was well-rehearsed with the ongoing clockwork of school. She had an apartment close to her university but closer to her favourite plaza, with a large kitchen she rarely used and an old cedar desk that once belonged to her mother. She finished all her assignments on time. She didn't contact her parents because she didn't have any, not anymore, but she wrote letters to her late mother and called Loke, her family-friend-slash-older-brother-slash-guardian-for-the-seven-months-before-Lucy-hit-eighteen twice a week. She kept herself well-fed and well groomed, chatted up her friends from high school on late nights and maintained a positive outlook for the future.
Loke visited every two weeks and insisted on using the balcony as an entrance even though Lucy's apartment was on the fifteenth floor. He came loaded down with plastic shopping bags: fresh fruit and fish, tubers and vegetables and colourful spice bottles nudging against one another for room. It was a known fact that Lucy couldn't cook anything more complicated than an omelette (baking she could do, using the stovetop not so much), and when Loke came over he would make her a nice dinner and ruffle her hair as if she were ten and not twenty.
Date first published: March 29, 2016