She smeared coral gloss over her unremarkable lips and wore her lashes long beneath Jackie-O sunglasses. Her hair was in an easy ponytail, her jeans cuffed, her tanks colorful. She looked like a beach, like she must have smelled like burning incense. Bangles jangled on her skinny, scarred wrists, glinting in the sunlight. Her oversized bag was in a constant disarray, the perfume vials and empty green tea bottles clinking and bleeding onto her notebooks stuffed with inky poetry.

Her nails sat trapped between her teeth, her watch ticking. I couldn't hear it, but I knew she did.

She looked like she should have been somewhere else. Maybe an art museum or a planetarium, quietly observing until the rest of us wonder if she knows something we don't. She should at least have been sprawled out in a green back yard, maybe with a boy. A boy who's lips would taste like a vanilla milkshake, a boy who would sing to her along to his acoustic guitar.

Her own little mister jack johnson.

But she wasn't and he wasn't. She was worried and waiting, in an airport terminal, back against the wall- full windows allowing sunlight to fall upon her browned feet.