It was early one afternoon, and I was supposed to go with my friend Stephen to the mall. We were going to hang out and maybe catch a movie. Stephen and I went way back. We had played together when we were little kids, but he had moved before we started school. I had seen him once when I was 12. He was visiting his grandmother and we had hung out a time or two that summer. As happens, he went back home, and I didn't see him again until the summer I turned 22.
He moved back, and called me. We went out to dinner, and started a weekly ritual of hanging out. We were the best of friends, and didn't want to do anything to change it. I had a slight crush on him, but I knew it would ruin everything to mention it, so I kept quiet, I was always a little scared of being too forward, so I was never forward enough. Well, anyway, back to that fateful afternoon. When we got to the mall, we ran into Samantha, another old friend of Stephen's. She was babysitting, and had just turned the baby over to its mother. We sat in the food court and talked, or rather they talked. I just sat there and listened... and looked. I wouldn't have left my child with her... if I had had children, that is.
Sam was the complete opposite of me. She was blond and thin. I have brown hair, and a larger build. She was wearing this outfit that would look trashy on me, and looked right at home in it. She had a large tattoo of a dragon on her left shoulder, visible in her skimpy white halter that left her midriff, and belly ring visible. Her long hair hung to her exposed waist just above her low-rise faded and worn jeans, and her makeup was on the heavy side, especially her black eyeliner.
I sat there beside her in my black Capri pants and pink blouse looking very conservative, with my shoulder-length hair pulled back in my sunglasses feeling dumpy... I was out of sorts, and it was all her fault. I had been raised in an environment that looked down on such manner of dress and action, and I knew that if Sam had been me, she would have made a move on Stephen, and to hell with the consequences.
I could see her flirting with him, and he was leaning in, responding to her in a way he had never responded to me. I was jealous of her easy manner, and knew that she had never been held back by confines of society that had suffocated me, and would continue to suffocate me until the day I died. I was feeling like a goody-goody-two-shoes, and not liking it one little bit.