ArchivedLogs:Vignette - Old Habits

Vignette - Old Habits
Dramatis Personae Shelby
In Absentia	2013-04-18 '
Location <XS> Rasa and Shelby's Dorm - FL2
The dorm room shared by Rasa and Shelby was probably one of the most colorful in the school. In the bare two months that Shelby had been an occupant, she'd managed to cover the wall, ceiling, bed and furniture on her side with artwork, both "borrowed" and original. Rasa's was the more elegant and richly attired half of the room, with bright draped fabrics and--to Shelby's eyes--exotic prints. It was also consistently tidier than Shelby's, who was in the middle of an experiment to see just how large a pile of laundry and discarded sketchpad papers could grow before gaining sentience. Textbooks and sheet music littered her desk. There was a bra hanging from her lamp. Just...hanging there. Because. The ginger teenager sat at her desk with her chair spun around to study all of this. Order and chaos, beauty and...more chaos. After a time, she reached up and rubbed at her eyes with thumb and forefinger. It had been a long night; her eyes felt as if they'd accumulated a layer of beach sand inside of each lid. Then she stood up and crossed the floor to drop to her knees before the closet. Shoe after broken CD player after dirty socks after crumpled shirt were pulled out to join the litter on her half of the floor. Finally she found what she was looking for. Her old duffel bag. It had been an Army surplus store find. Faded green, the canvas frayed and thin in places, but the stencil could still be seen against the wrinkled olive side--PROPERTY OF US ARMY. Beneath it, years ago, she'd written in Sharpie, "ARMY OF ONE PISSED OFF FREAK", and added a bug-eyed doodle of herself, wearing a threatening look. The Sharpie's ink had faded too but not as much as the stencil. It took her longer than it should have to pack the duffel again. Travel light, take only the necessities--but she'd become accustomed to more necessities in the past several months. More than one pair of shoes, more than two pairs of underwear, extra shirts and pants, laptop, art supplies, music books, instruments borrowed from the music room, a few CDs, a dried flower and a glass one... It took her awhile to pare her new horde down to only what she might need again on the road. If there were a few unessential items in there, well...she was careful to hide them at the bottom of the bag, beneath everything else. Once that was done, Shelby dragged the bag over to the bed and shoved it, with her feet, into the far, dark corner where she hoped it would go unseen. All that remained to do was slide a couple of twenties into the toes of her sneakers, the way she used to. Years ago, and more recently than that, too. Just in case. Old habits were hard to break. She'd managed, for awhile. "But they get to be habits for a goddamned good reason," Shelby mumbled to herself as she took her seat at the desk again. By the time Rasa returned, the girl was hard at work--or hardly working--studying her biology textbook.