Harper Key

Harper Key(Patrick) Hi, my name is Harper Key, and my life exploded when a disabled kid came to our school.

I’m a girl, a little shorter than average, with shoulder length blonde hair, green eyes, and some freckles which I really, really HATE. Boys have before thought of me as ‘cute’. For some reason, I’ve always disliked that. To me, cute is a word that should be reserved for kittens and bunnies and etc. Not a 14 year-old girl.

It was lunch when Luth Thomas asked me out. Luth was short for Luther, but he hated the name, so he shortened it. He was what could be called attractive, I guess. Sandy brown hair, blue eyes, one of the many stereotypes of ‘perfect boyfriends’. He never really ‘sparked’ me, but he was an okay kid, I guess.

For whatever reason, kids at our school practically never had a problem asking each other out. It was very rare for somebody to almost die when asking someone of the opposite gender to go see a movie or something. It’s not like we were weird. We just didn’t have any trouble with it. That’s just how it was.

So he asked me to go see a movie with him, and I said yes, and that was it. The movie was on at a little cinema close to the Villas where most of us lived. The Villas were large, white towers (and when I say large, I mean big, not like skyscraper tall) with reasonably sized flats. The cinema was, as I said small. It had one room and only about thirty seats. Even with its size, it was popular with us, as it was way, way cheaper than the big expensive ‘Royal’ one closer to the center of town.

The movie was some sort of superhero film, one I can’t really remember. It was good, I think. The important thing was the man in the third ticket booth. The three ticket booths the cinema had were usually run by teenage men and women as a school time job. But the third booth held an old man this time. He was in his fifties, with grey hair combed backwards, revealing a pale forehead dotted with the occasional mole. He smiled at me.
“That will be one-fifty, ma’am.”
I paid him, happy that he’d called me ‘ma’am’, and not ‘girl’ or whatever. He held the ticket out, along with a small woolen pouch about the size of my palm. The pouch was constructed out of a myriad of colors. He focused his blue eyes, faded with the passage of time, on mine.
“Take it. You’ll need it.”

I took the ticket, and cautiously, the pouch as well. He withdrew his arm back into the booth, all normal again. He beckoned towards the next person in line. I walked toward the theater, talking to Luth and unconsciously slipping the pouch into my pocket. I forgot all about it until that night, when I was home again. I reached into my pocket for the keys, and felt the woolen texture of the pouch. I pulled it out and checked through it to make sure there weren’t any drugs or stolen goods or whatever in it. There wasn’t anything whatsoever. It was completely empty. I shrugged and pushed it back into my pocket, took out the key, and unlocked the door.