August
Lucy's Age: 15
It's been months, and I still don't really know what to think about all of this. After pretty much blowing me off when we first came down from Yonkers, Geoffrey then started showing up out of the blue to visit us.
Renworst was in heaven from day one, but I just kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. Geoffrey was really stiff and formal, especially for the first few months, but as time went on he seemed to loosen up.
He offered to begin my training again on his third visit which I accepted grudgingly. It was sort of childish, but I guess I wanted it to be on my schedule rather than his. He'd turned me down, twice now, and then seemed to think that he could just come around whenever and change his mind.
I would have just said no, but I really wanted to start back up studying some kind of martial art, and I figured that if I turned him down he probably wouldn't be very keen to pay for me to take lessons from someone else.
I said yes and then prepared to be disappointed when he stood me up. As it turned out, he didn't exactly stand me up, our sessions were just very fluid from a scheduling perspective. I'd get a text from him at random times of the day, usually early in the morning or late in the afternoon, asking if I wanted to meet up.
His cellphone number changed on a regular basis, so it was practically a full-time job just keeping up with his number, but if I said yes then he'd show up to collect me half an hour or so later. He seemed to have a membership to every gym in the area because we never went to the same place two times in a row.
At first I really resented the fact that I pretty much was just at his beck and call, but it didn't seem to bother him when I said no, so I started getting over my annoyance when I realized that he wasn't trying to be a controlling freak, he just had a really unpredictable schedule.
It took me a month to notice that we never went back home the same way that we came either. I would have figured it out sooner, but he was pretty sneaky about it. He'd wait until we were just about ready to leave the gym and then he'd mention a new café or a bookstore that he wanted to hit up on the way back home.
I was usually just so excited about the fact that he would be buying me something that I didn't clue in as fast as I normally would have. Once I did finally notice his paranoia, I tried to ask him about it, but Geoffrey just shook his head and told me that he had to be careful about stuff like that.
I would have kept asking, but the truth was that I didn't really mind. It wasn't like I had anywhere to be. Renworst still wasn't letting me out of the house other than to go buy food with him, so the trips to the gym were pretty much the high point of any given day. The fact that we just went home the long way meant that I got to see more of the city than I otherwise would have been able to.
Not only that, I didn't want to rock the boat when it came to our training sessions. Geoffrey was good, not just I've-been-doing-this-for-a-long-time good either. My old sensei had been hell on wheels on the tournament circuit six or seven years before he started teaching, but I was pretty sure that he wouldn't have lasted eight seconds against Geoffrey.
We'd moved on away from aikido or any kind of traditional karate by the time Geoffrey had been training me for a couple of months. The new stuff was like pure distilled violence and I loved it. It was all kill shots and elbows, destroyed joints and knees. I'd hurt Renworst pretty badly back in Yonkers, but even then I'd know that it had mostly just been because I'd caught him by surprise.
Aikido works against people who are bigger and stronger than you, karate does too, but you have to be so much better to compensate for their reach and strength that it's almost not even worth trying. This stuff was awesome though because it put me right up close to them, inside their reach where they would have a hard time hurting me as badly, and let me just wail on them.
If you had asked me a couple of months ago I would have said that I was happy. Renworst had mellowed out a little now that he wasn't just stuck with me for twenty-four hours a day, I got to go outside three or four times a week, and I had an almost unlimited supply of books.
I would have been lying though, because I was lying to myself right about then. I had a whole new batch of tutors, none of whom were any fun, and our new place, while pretty much obscenely large for the city, didn't have room for a treadmill.
I was so busy fooling myself for the first few months that I didn't even really notice how much of my old life was missing until I realized that I'd started watching the building across the street from us each night. I'd given a bunch of the families there nicknames and was making up stories about their lives to compensate for the fact that my life sucked in a major way.
Once I realized it was just another coping mechanism, I almost started just closing my blinds and going straight to bed, but then the 'Fightersons' got a new family member. I'd started calling them the Fightersons after I noticed just how angry they were at each other.
The dad wore a suit to work every day and worked late most nights, weekends too. The mom looked unhappy most of the time and went from unhappy to angry within about thirty seconds of the dad arriving home from work.
Just based off of their age difference I figured that the dad had been married before, but I wasn't sure until his son moved into the apartment. I could tell the kid was his instead of hers because the dad looked guilty a lot when he was around the boy and the mom was now angry basically all of the time instead of just when her husband was around.
I say kid, but he's not really a kid. I mean he's my age, or maybe a couple of years older, but what do you call someone our age? Anyways, I've been watching him for a few weeks and he seems really amazing. He's got all of these posters on his wall from the various DJ's and bands that he's gone to see live. I can tell that he actually went to see them live because he'll come back really late, there will be a yelling match with his parents, and then the next day he's got a new poster up in his room.
A few days ago he saw me watching him, but instead of getting mad at me he just smiled and waved. We've started writing messages to each other on loose leaf paper and then holding them up to the window.
That's how I found out that his name is Ryan, that he wants to mix music, and that he thinks I'm cute.
If Renworst finds out he's going to freak out. He's mellowed out a little bit over the last year or so, but he'd still freak out.
I'll just have to make sure that Renworst doesn't find out. I like Ryan and I'm not going to let Renworst or Geoffrey, either one, stop me from talking to him.