outing

She stares out of her window, sitting straight-backed behind the empty passenger seat. The passenger door is open, nobody is sitting there. It must be for her mother – the father would be driving, a car like this. The years on her face outweigh her size, the muscles drawing her brow in, like she’s squinting against the glare of existence, or as if she's seen it all before. Seen all there is before her, already. She seems to be wearing make-up, but isn’t. She seems to be looking past wherever her eye appears to be resting. Though it isn’t resting at all, it’s working, always working. What she’s seeing is not necessarily there.

She’s lost in thought. Not imagination, but reflection, not possibilities for the future, but ruminations on the past. She’s all in black, a crushed velvet, lace trimmed. Real lace. Her hair is a shock of white spilling over its gentle, scalloped neckline, preternaturally blonde, prematurely straightened before it could find its natural curl.

She stares at the spot her mother’s heel last trod, before the glossy green door closed. She’s gone back for something – a scarf, a glove, something they forgot to pack as they went to the car. She forgot it knowingly, aching for the moment to herself. She left it on the dressing table well aware she would have to go back, timing it so they were all in the car but the key hadn’t turned. She knew he would be annoyed, knew he would spend the time tapping on the dashboard and looking every ten seconds at its clock, choking with silent rage, as if that would somehow make her any faster.

She walks up the stairs, not fast not slow. Her breath is so tight, her chest so locked, you could hold up a mirror to her mouth and no mist would appear. She wants to go faster because that’s how she does things, slower because she needs that moment to stretch on as long as it can, as far as it can go before snapping.

He drums his fingers on the dashboard. He looks at the clock again, then checks his wristwatch. Its heavy, gold body gleams against his tanned arm, black hairs curling over its band. The cuffs of his starched white shirt peek out past his coat, the gold cuff-link flashing like toothache.

She looks down at her shoes, their tiny buckles, the rough scuff on the end of the left one where she dragged it over the gutter getting into the car. ‘Mother will not be pleased’, she thinks, not sure whether she herself cares. Not sure of anything. She looks at the freckle just below the third knuckle on her middle finger. She scratches at it, as she always does while waiting for something, anything, to happen, but it doesn’t go anywhere. It never goes anywhere. The skin beneath it whitens and the freckle slides back towards her wrist, but then returns to exactly where it had been.

She is too cold, or too hot, but not quite sure which. Her father drums on the centre of the steering wheel, sucking his back teeth.

She is close to the window, so close her forehead almost touches the glass, yet no mist of breath appears.

She closes her eyes.