Snapshot of a Girl

She pulls up her knee-high sock, then unfolds her body as she stands, teetering a little bit as if she overbalanced or stood up too fast. “Sure you can interview me,” she agrees, talking a seat on the metal bench. She pulls one plastic knitting needles out of her messy bun, leaving a pencil to hold the colorful hair in place, then retrieves the other and a ball of yarn from a fuzzy purple bag. “You don’t mind if I knit while we talk, yeah?”

“Sure, that’s fine,” I reply, shifting my weight from left foot to right, my sweaty palms making the paper clutched in hand crinkle. “Um… well, can I ask about the bag? It’s rather… odd, but cool!”

“Oh, this?” she asks, petting the pink purse thing with a smile as if it were a pet. I notice now that the face on the purse is made of a blue glove for a nose, and has huge googly eyes that jiggle when she shifts on the bench. The flap of the purse is the mouth of the monster, and the whole pink purse just seems to fit with the rest of the girl. She seems equally fuzzy, and just as loud person. “My aunt made it and one day when I was at her house I saw it, and it was just like ‘Wow, hey Auntie! That’s sooooooo adorable, and it’s so me; can I have it?’ and she said ‘Oh my god, you’re right!’ and she gave it to me. I fucking love this thing! Oh… should I not curse for this? Crapshit! I mean…”

We both crack up and I lean back against the glass of the bus stop shelter. “I don’t mind if you swear,” I finally manage.

“Great, so hit me with your questions.”

“What’s your philosophy for the good life?” I ask her, figuring that was a good place to start. I grip my pencil tight in my hand, ready to scribble down what she says.

“Um…” she ponders for a moment, making a few stitches with her needles, the sound of them clicking together accompanying her words. “Don’t get in the mindframe of misery. If you’re feeling down, try to do something about it, let happy people help you. If you’re feeling good… exude that happiness, don’t hold it back, smile at strangers, because you never know what those vibes could do for someone else.”

I glanced at her for a moment, absorbing the words. I wouldn’t have expected that from someone who seemed around little younger than me. Especially not the way she dressed in purple socks with unicorns on them, an orange skirt, and a black zip-up hoodie with vicious wolves printed across the front.

“That’s pretty deep,” I reply after a moment, having no idea what else to say. But she was right, I realized. I approached her to talk to because she smiled at me.

“What’s next?” she asked, completing a row and then squinting through her glasses at the row she’d just made. I noticed there was an unbent paperclip on one side of the blue plastic frames.

“What’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened to you?”

Again she thinks for a few moments, then a broad grin lifts her lips and she chuckles. “Um… this is anonymous, yeah? How much do I have to censor?”

“Please, no censoring. It’s completely anonymous,” I immediately assure her.

“Well then the time I accidentally clicked onto the gay porn site and proceeded to have a panic attack because of the penis hanging around. It was 3:00 AM and I had to try and keep from waking the house, but uh...once I got over it, I went and read the bios for the porn stars. Turns out, most emo porn stars have fantasies about Zac Efron! May not have been that funny at the time, but it's great now!”

“How in the hell did you manage to get that accidentally?” I chuckled.

“Well, I was looking up someone on Google, I don’t remember who now, but I ended up at this gay porn site. It was traumatizing! Too much penis! I hate penis!”

“Um…”

“Well, I’m not strictly a lesbian, I like men too, but sex is creepy,” she shudders.

“Creepy?” I repeat, shifting my weight again on my feet.

“Yeah. I don’ t like sex. It's weird.”

“What else do you not like?” I ask quickly, hoping to get back into a little more comfortable zone, at least for me. She doesn’t seem bothered about talking anything; not even a blush colors her cheeks.

“Well, let’s see,” the girl replied, her knitting abandoned on her lap now. “I hate snow. It needs to die. And I don’t like Boy Scouts either.”

“Really? Why not?” I asked, settling down even more. “My best friend doesn’t like them either. She says they are sexist.”

“They are!” the girl nods firmly. “Their values are old-fashioned and outdated, they are very sexist at times, and they really, really need to screen their scoutmasters better...if they're going to continue being an organization, they need to make a lot of changes. I mean a bunch of scoutmasters recently have been molesting the boys, I’ve been reading about that, and there have been a lot of claims of sexism, they're anti homosexuality - basically, they're stuck in the 18th century and can't get out.”

“What do you love?” I ask her, still finding it weird that she too dislikes Boy Scouts.

“I love rain - there's just nothing quite as cleansing as walking out in the rain, whether it's a drizzle or a downpour. It's amazing to just get soaked outside and have a good time, even on the worst of days it cheers me up. And I like ska music too. It's IMPOSSIBLE to stay in a bad mood with music this upbeat, you've got electric guitars, bass guitar, drums, vocalists, and then a whole brass section!”

I give her another little grin. “You’re a very open, friendly person, aren’t you?”

“I like to think of myself that way,” she nods, her head going up and down so fast that the pencil almost slips out of the waves. “Do you have any more questions?”

“Um… how about if someone wrote a biography about you, what would the title be?”

“Having Sex is Overrated. Either that, or Can’t Stand the Normal, Can’t Stand the Ordinary. Both are lines to a song that I was listening to earlier. It’s genius!”

I nod and write down the answer just like I had all the others. “Okay, now I’m curious about how you’ll answer this next question. If you were a mythological creature, what would you be and why?”

“A Cthulu,” she answers immediately, glancing up as a bus pulls up to the stop. “They’re just kickass. And cannot be defeated! And their name is bitchin’. But hey, this is my bus. I gotta go,” she says, slipping her knitting back into the monster bag.

I thank her quickly as she slips onto the bus, and then she waves at me from inside as the bus pulls away from the curb.