Nagging Nichole

[NOTE: So Nichole has been nagging me all day. Honestly, please leave me alone, you. Even after writing this, she and her story are skipping across my brain wrinkles, leaving footprints in all mental terrain. Thanks, you. It's not helpful during finals.]

Nichole was walking. Her bottom was sore and she felt a bit self-conscious about her legs, but didn’t think about it too much. She concentrated, rather, on feeling the gold necklace pirouetting around her collarbone - jangling with every footfall. It was a heart locket. Inside was one of her Father's curly hairs. She loved him. He loved her too.

Her mother had been calling lately - crying tears and snot into the phone and sniffling out pleas to return and whispering desperate flatteries, trying to toady Nichole into going back home. But Nichole didn't want to go back there - to her multiple-sclerosised toddler half-brother that ate all of the food and money, to her family's silly games (feeling the cold cubed ice in the bowl of water, pressing between the pen- and ultimate toes and transferring to a cup before time ran out), simple silly things that her mother and stepfather laughed their eyes out about.

So Nichole was still walking, and she realized that the necklace was the reason. She had been living with her father for a month now. So that was why she could not go back to that other place. Besides, he gave her his hair. What is a thirteen year old supposed to do? Can she really recognize the truthfulness in hospitality? Can she really feel through gift-giving hearts and love-giving ones? Can she distinguish that hair-thin-fine line? Especially when she is blinded by a thin-fine-hair? Inside a locket? And it’s harder to remember loving hearts when you’re surrounded by lustful ones and thumped in the chest by metal lumps of ones.

“Aloha!” Her stepfather would bellow. Was he Hawaiian? Nichole didn’t know. She demonstrated disdain through pretended indifference, and her mother had worn braces on her teeth for the past six and a half years, since Nichole was seven. They should have come off after two, but the divorce had gone through then and the insurance policy had expired. So she continued to suffer them, they were opaque and only slurred some words: “Shtop and lishen, pleashe Nichole.” But they made her shy of sharing things, as if once things passed through braced teeth they were akin to fugitives from state penitentiaries. Any words that escaped those metal bars could not be convictable, or at least had to be able to survive a mental court of third person appeals. The honorable judge of Nichole did not favor any stepfather, so the subject never passed the lips/braces/bar of Nichole’s mother. They never talked to each other about Nichole's stepfather. And so all Nichole saw and heard was suddenly a stepfather. And he bellowed “Aloha!” into her life and he helped Nichole's mom with the insurance, but it still wasn't enough to cover orthodontia and Nichole still did not know if he was Hawaiian. But he was always saying hello and goodbye at once, dropping his Aloha!s like rice at a wedding, and that always made Nichole uneasy. And he was Jack Sprat, or at least the maybe-Polynesian version. He was thin and his loud voice didn’t fit any better than his always-loose-clothes did. He had black hair and squinty almond eyes. Maybe he was part Japanese and had just grown up on one of the Hawaiian islands. All of the Aloha!ing disconcerted Nichole, also known as: Miss Unaccustomed-to-greetings-and-goodbyes . She had trouble enough working on greetings and goodbyes disparately; both at once were disparaging, overwhelming and altogether too much too handle, whether stepfather was Hawaiian or Japanese or seaweed or jigsaw or whatever.

Nichole thumped her hands on her thighs in time with the golden heart’s beats, which were synced with her steps but out of time with the fleshy heartbeats. Of course, Nichole didn’t know that exactly, as she couldn’t feel her heart beating within her. Most people can’t in general, unless they’re taking pulse or pledging allegiance. She thought she was in rhythm, taking the romantic view of building rapport with that inanimate, hair containing object. But she was just sort of foolish. If she had been running, then maybe it would have worked - if she had been exerting enough effort to force her blood to pound oxygen to her heart, to require a sort of thrumming or heart-humming (not murmuring) that echoed enough to let her feel her heartbeat without searching for it, with hands at sides. Maybe if she had been running her thoughts might have raced enough to harmonize with reality. But as it was, they were a bit cacophonous, dissonant with truth and fact - just a hair off-key and therefore all the more grating. But as it was, she was just walking and strumming her thighs and feeling the sways of the locket. It was still dancing around, probably as antsy as the person whose hair was inside. A sort of reverse voodoo.