Dec 14 2009
A snippet
Here’s a snippet from the writing that I did today. There is some course language.
Turner didn’t come in for another two hours, so Dane busied herself stealing a breakfast sandwich and inhaling three coffees with the super-caffinated cream put in them.
Steve whispered jabs about all that being no help at all and she tried to ignore him. At least focussing on that would better enable her to avoid the mounting pull to get into the next person’s car that pulled up and drive it to Florida.
Not going. Not going.
She changed filters and coffee pots while she was over at the station making the various cups of coffee.
“Man,” someone nearby said while he was waiting for the coffee to finish, “I’ve had it with this weather.”
“Hm-mm,” his friend said, “It’s supposed to snow today, what say we move down south it’s much warmer.”
“Yeah, I talked to my sister in Florida yesterday she said that they’re in shorts right now.”
She slammed the coffee pot on the grill slopping scalding coffee up her arm. It took a moment to register both the pain and the shocked faces of the two customers. She narrowly avoided knocking over several other coffee pots as she tried to get away from her own arm. As the pain hit she tried to tear the sweater sleeve off by pulling at the cuff.
“Dude, is she alright?” one of the men asked.
“What do you think?” Steve retorted as he took hold of Dane and started to pull her towards the rest room.
It was this point Turner arrived. As he burst through the door Steve froze halfway through saying, “For Fuck’s sake, calm down.”
Dane was shouting, “I don’t care! I’m not going back!”
Turner pushed Steve back towards the counter to check out the observant customers and then he drug Dane back to the restroom.
“You swore to me you were clean! Don’t even try. I know what you’re like. I know cops, okay? They warned me! But you’d promised me you were clean and now I look like a fucking idiot. What the Hell were you trying to do?”
It was a bit of a ‘duh’ figuring out that the character of Dane would work at a gas station. I’ve heard from my boss and co-workers issues they’ve had in the past with people of similar background coming to work for them. In fact while I was on hiatus due to health someone else was let go for using drugs while at work, while it wasn’t such a violent an interaction as Dane has with her boss, Turner. It was still rough on both parties.
Dane just isn’t the sort of person though who could work in data center services, or at a school. She’s very dark emo sort of person, and is on the run from a lot of things in particular herself, and the main point of the first part of the book is that all her avenues are being whittled down until her only option is to go back to Florida and meet up with those she’s left behind. She wouldn’t even look for a job somewhere that’s not a good temporary place in case she has to start running again.
