I knew she was coming. Her shift started at this time every day, and she was never late.
I heard her before I saw her; the clomp-clomp of her feet clad in more duct-tape than actual black boot. I saw only the thick soles remaining below every neon color I knew existed. Never before her had I seen so many colors on one person, yet they were all perfectly in place and still shrouded in darkness by her leather jacket and black angel tatoos. Still, what caught my attention about this girl, time after time, wasn't her devil-may-care attitude or the way she always had her hands on her hips, no, it was that amidst all the color and devil-may-care manner, her eyes lined thick with black never crinkled, and there was never a trace of a smile on her red-painted lips. Ever.
"Hello!" I said, completely unsure as to why. I believe that my toungue was forced to move by the secret powers hidden within its new painfully acquired peircing.
She just stared. Well, why shouldn't she have stared? Here was some strange dungeons and dragons nerd that got his toungue peirced because he fancied the goth girl that worked at Starbucks just walking up and saying "hello". Hell, I'd stare at that, and I am unable to make eye contact for more than five seconds.
What had I been hoping for? I don't know. Maybe she'd think it was cute. Maybe she'd think it was the stupidest thing she'd ever seen. Maybe she'd leap across the coffee counter, knocking over foamy cappuccinos and smearing her elbows through customer number seventeen's espresso con pana, just to beat me up for being so dumb. I'd be okay with all of those things, as long as she looked at me.
I don't know what I had been thinking when I got the peircing. All I knew from the first time I saw her long black and purple hair flick across her shoulder as she handed me my vanilla-hazelnut steamer was that I had to do something. The peircing was just the first something that came to my mind.
So, the next thing I knew I was walking into an innappropriately dark and smokey shop and signing a release waiver saying essentially that if I died, it wouldn't be their fault. Shortly, a big, surly, grey-bearded man with arms covered in naked-mermaid tatoos was strutting out and saying in a gruff voice, "I hear 'yall's wantin' a peircin'!" I could have sworn his smile was mocking me. Oh, well, no use backing out now, I thought, so I followed him into a back room that appeared to be sound-proofed and sitting in a leather chair. "Stick'er out!" tat-man ordered, so I obeyed, and too-late closed my eyes after catching a glimpse of a needle thick enough to give Shamu his shots. Her shots? I don't know. Why was I even thinking about a stupid whale when I was about to be skewered by Dog the Bounty Hunter?
Sweating bullets, I'm sure, I whimpered, "Is it too late to back out?"
"Son, I've had one fella' back out o' this chair in my thirty years o' doin' this, and he was nine."
So, shivering, I thought to myself, what would Sephiroth do? Needless to say, I stuck my toungue out again, closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and...
I only cried for ten minutes. The pain was worth it though, because I now had a silver stud secretly sealed away behind my teeth to remind me that I was no longer a chicken-livered geek. There, I thought, I did something. Hopefully something to give me the courage to say "hello".
Well, it did that. Now what?
Still, that blank stare from those cool blue eyes.
"Uh, that's all I got," I explained pathetically.
Dejectedly, I was about to book it out of there before those gorgeous eyes shot lasers through my heart, when the most miraculous thing I could have ever asked for occured.
There it was! Her lip slowly began to curve! In that magical moment, what only I could recognize as a smile was born across those angelic lips.
It was fleeting, gone in a moment, and replaced by her usual blank mien, and then the lips parted to say, "My shift hasn't started yet, but I'll get your usual once I get behind the counter," the same way she would have said, "I'll scrape the bunyons from that elephant as soon as I'm done shoveling dog crap," and she turned away.
Then, however, that shiny hair flowed from one shoulder to the other as she once again turned her face to me.
"Oh," she said with an almost-smirk, "and hi."
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