This choice: Piper gets dressed and heads out with her friends, Dakota and Zack... • Go Back... You know, getting dressed in the morning with a room as messy as Piper’s wasn’t exactly easy to do.
Everything was kinda... all over the place. Some in part due to Piper’s “eclectic” style of decorating, and the other parts a mixture of her own unwillingness and seeming inability to clean her room anything farther than half-way. It was a defect on the Black family gene if anyone else’s room was any indication, rest assured. But they managed to get by just fine.
Piper threw on one of her band t-shirts. 21 Pilots might be a little overplayed, but damn if they couldn’t make a good t-shirt. The logo looked great spread across her chest--she’d bought it about a size too big to make sure that the girls had enough room to breathe; just big enough to give her chest some room, but not so big as to make her look dumpy. Standing at the mirror above her desk, Piper combed her long black hair and pulling them into two twin ponytails, going for something between “quirky” “flirty” and “I didn’t feel like actually doing my hair today” before jumping into a pair of skinny jeans that (while she would never admit it) seemed a lot more skinny as of late than she cared to remember.
“Hey Ma, I’m headed out!” Piper called back into the little hobbit hole, “If you need me, text me okay?”
”Noo, why would your heavily pregnant mother need you for anything?” she could practically hear her beached mother roll her eyes as she hollered from the master bedroom, ”At least make sure you stop by D’s on your way home! Your sister ate all the donuts!”
“Kay, love you!” Piper called out without looking back, letting the screen door slam as she hurried down the rickety wooden porch towards the sweet salty smell of freedom...
***
Daven’s Port, rather the area of Daven’s Port that surrounded her depressingly impoverished neighborhood, had always been Piper’s favorite escape from her troubled home life. Even before the falling out between her folks, she had always been a professional street rat. Back when she was still in high school (read: literally a month ago), she would skip classes to cause all kinds of trouble with various other truants. Smashing bottles in alleyways, hooking up with dudes who she thought were her age, hooking up with other dudes who definitely weren’t her age, a little loitering... you know, a regular adolescence.
Among the places she wasn’t still banned for her behavior during her young, impressionable days, Piper was welcomed almost everywhere else. She had a vast repertoire amongst the locals. Shopkeepers, street vendors, even some cops knew Piper. Whatever the trade off, it was a lot better than home most days.
Which was why she was so very eager to show Dakota Johnson, a newbie to the good old DP, all the ins and outs of the city that she so very much loved to call home.
Oh, and Zack was there.
Because, you know, it’s Zack. And he tended to go most places where two pretty girls went and it wasn’t a school night.
“Don’t tell me that they don’t have donuts in Texas, Dee.” Piper guffawed, “Or do they have them, but you have to pronounce them with an accent or something?”
Dakota Johnson was a twiggy little thing who had just moved in a few streets over. On the “good” side of their neighborhood. Typical nuclear family--Breadwinner Dad, Stay-At-Home Mom, Annoying Little Brother, and one Why-Did-We-Move-Here? Daughter. Her life was about as Basic as they came; it could have easily been the next premise of one of those godawful teen dramas (on ABC, of course). Which was where Piper had been making an effort to step in and try to make her life a bit more interesting than staying at home listening to... country music. Or whatever someone did when they missed Texas.
“Well yeah, it’s just... you know...” Dakota held up her Homer Simpson Special, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a donut this... big.”
Dakota was a pretty small girl. Narrow in the waist, narrow in the chest, big in the butt. She had long brown hair liked to wear tank tops and short shorts. The real girl next door archetype. But the girl was right--donuts like the Homer Simpson Special didn’t exist anywhere else. Only in Daven’s Port, circa D’s Donuts!
...And, Piper supposed, the FOX Network, for licensing purposes.
“What, they aren’t all Ten Gallon Hat sized?” Zack offered from Dakota’s end of the table, “I thought everything was bigger in Texas?”
Dakota groaned, and Piper punched him in the arm.
Zack was younger than either of them. He was only a junior in high school (an aspiring senior after the Summer, he was quick to remind her!) and was something of an old friend of Piper’s. Back when Zack’s folks made the split (well before Piper’s) Piper had been quick to come to his aide and keep him from becoming one of the insedit troublemakers that wandered around the streets because their parents didn’t love them. Now that Piper was a child of divorce, he had been just as quick to ensure the same. He was always there for her, and as much as his mom hated her, there was always a place for her to crash if she needed it.
Still, that didn’t mean he was funny.
Zack was a shorter guy with sandy blonde hair that hung down to his eyebrows. As he’d been told most of his life, he was very punchable.
Most times, Piper agreed.
“Shut up, Zack.” Piper groaned, “You’ll scare away our new tourist.”
They’d been hanging out with Dakota for the better part of two weeks now. Showing her the ropes, easing her out of that monument to normality they called a two-story house. Maybe mooching off her folks a little. But this was the first time they’d ever gotten her to go out to eat.
“So this is what you guys do for fun?” Dakota giggled, “Eat donuts and beat up Zack?”
“Mostly.” Piper said with a smile, punching Zack again from across the table, “But sometimes we go to the beach.”
“Sometimes she kicks me.” Zack grumbled before Piper kicked him swiftly underneath the table, “GODDAMMIT.”
So far, it had been pretty fun! Piper never really pegged Dakota as someone she would have thought she could get along with. With her long brown hair and her penchant for preppy, basic thoughts. But she and Dakota had become fast friends, ever since Dakota let her hide out in her backyard while she hid from some less-than-scrupulous Russian gentlemen. Despite what her mother thought about her.
“Okay, so...” Dakota led, taking a bite out of her donut, “Which of the two things left to do in Daven’s Port are we gonna do today? Since, you know, we’ve kinda already got donuts...”
“Actually...” Piper said with a smile... indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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