[ofic] - Her and Haley
randomly written last winter, probably while I was listening to Lydia endlessly on repeat since they kept singin about a girl named Haley(?)
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Haley, Dia thinks, is the kind of kid that most people would call, maybe incorrectly, a small-town girl. They’ve both lived in cities, really, even if they’re small cities, and either way, it’s not as if the suburbs are farmlands anymore. The difference between country mouse and city mouse seems idiotic to Dia. Idiotic and obsolete.
Still, there is something to be said for differences.
Things like sun-soaked waves on the beach and sirens in red and blue sundresses don’t touch Haley. Neither does Dylan or Cobain or Hendrix or Joel. Truth be told, Dia doesn’t know what Haley listens to. She just hopes to hell it’s not Tchaikovsky.
Haley reads Alice in Wonderland once a year and gets lost in her own backyard. Not lost the way someone with a bad sense of direction would but the fascinated-by-the-green-and-yellow-of-grass-and-dandelions way. Something about spring, she says. Something about the colours. She takes pictures of everything yellow, sticks them on the back of her bedroom door with blue sticky-tack her neighbour stole for her in seventh grade.
Sometimes, Dia wants to be like her. Sometimes, Dia wishes that, like Haley, she knew some things and not others. Haley, it seems, knows some of the most useless things out there, like the kinds of flowers that mark the coming of summer, the dates of the exhibits at the museum downtown, how to make Pineapple mousse, and the life and times of Virginia Woolf.
She does not know the taste of liquor, or the feel of a boy’s fingertips on the skin of her back. Nor would Haley, it seems, ever quite care for any of that.
Maybe the one thing about her new step-sister that bothers her most is that she could, in practice, be just about anyone but she is not. Chooses not to be? Dia doesn’t know about that. Only that she is not.
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Dia grew up not too far from here but, sometimes, it feels like this is a different world altogether.
Meanwhile, Haley, somehow, has managed to be a different world altogether.
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Dia and Haley don’t always get along. Any stranger could point out how different they are, in preferences and in character. One look at their faces could tell you that. Haley’s still got the face of a child while Dia looks jaded enough to have lived a hundred lives.
When the sun shines bright, Haley looks half her age.
When the sun shines bright, Dia looks twice her age and feels like twice her mother’s.
Still, the two of them manage well enough. Live and let live, Dia sometimes thinks, because it’s not as if they’ve much to say to one another. Haley is quiet by nature. Takes after her dad, or so everyone says. And well, Dia tries and tries to be nothing like her mother, and thus chooses her words and motions carefully.
Although Dia has not cried in over five years, she is more like her mother than she would care to admit. It’s in the blood, people say. And though Dia hates to hell what people say, not all of them are always wrong.
Whether it’s the fault of blood or bone or deoxyribonucleic acid, there are some mannerisms she can’t shake off. There is this suffocating magnetism she can’t shake off.
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Haley, Dia thinks, with a twinge of envy, has probably never been kissed by a boy.
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tbc...possibly?