//Author's Note: This story is about a character created by a good friend of mine. Odessa is awesome, and there's a lot of good art of her out there if you know where to look!//
"Day 21."
Odessa sat back in her chair, staring at the two words, or one word and one two-digit number, at the top of the otherwise empty page, and stared. And stared.
"Twenty one days of this," she said, wearily, though not as wearily as one might have expected. She tossed down her pen, and sighed as it bounced and rolled over the edge of the desk and onto the floor. If journaling her experience had lost its purpose, then the tool she used to do her journaling was similarly useless. She couldn't handle another night spent chronicling, or, the more she thought about it, even just another night stuck in her apartment.
Reluctantly, Odessa put her bra back on and rooted around for her boots. She hadn't planned on taking any kind of night time excursion, and was as ready for bed as she ever got anymore, so a few minutes passed before she was thumping down the stairs of her apartment building. The warm August night air hit her like a pillow, which is to say 'not hard but hard enough to know something had happened.' The humidity was so high she was surprised she hadn't started sweating on contact.
She wouldn't, though; not anymore. Sweating took a lot more than a little heat. She was so confident that she wouldn't that she didn't hesitate at pulling up the hood on her sweatshirt, which she did more for peace of mind than anything else.
Odessa had lived in New York for almost a year, the actual anniversary still weeks away. Although she liked the bustle and the energy, she was still uncomfortable with how many people stared at her, and that was before. Now?
She grunted, rolling her shoulders to get the hood to sit a bit more forward.
Didn't want to do that,
she thought.
Spend another night psychoanalyzing myself. Waste of my time.
Odessa decided, apropos of nothing, to just get lost. She just looked down, right in front of her feet, and watched the breaks in the concrete pass by for a while. She turned here, and turned there, not really paying attention, and for a little while, she got out of her head entirely watching the sidewalk roll by.
***
Four hours later, Odessa found herself in a part of the city she'd never seen before. That wasn't surprising. During her year in the Big Apple, she hadn't done much more than commute to and from her office job. Which she hated.
The style of the buildings around her at that moment was different. It was more neighborhood-like than she was used to; more like back home in the suburbs of Toronto. Her apartment building in Queens was just like the dozens of apartment buildings surrounding it. More than once, she'd gone up to the eighth floor of the wrong building and tried in vain to enter apartments with the same number as hers, jamming keys into locks they weren't made for.
She hadn't crossed any bridges, and there were a lot of brownstones. Block after block of them. Miles of them, seemingly. Odessa felt slightly out of place as she walked, hands shoved into the pockets of her hoodie. She
thought
she might have been in Brooklyn, but she
knew
she was still in New York when she heard hushed-but-urgent voices coming out of the alley across the street. It was with a heavy sigh and great reluctance that she stopped in her tracks and turned toward the sound.
"It's all right," she told another woman, who was perched at the edge of the alley, looking on with concern. "I'll handle it."
"You'll... what?" the woman replied, stunned. "Wait!"
Odessa did not wait. She strode forward, determination settling around her like a mantle a little more with each step.
There were two dumpsters on her left, and then another one a little further along on her right behind which two men had moved beyond mugging and into threats of physical violence. Odessa heard the telltale
shlick
of a switchblade knife extending from its handle just as they came into view. There were two of them, young and wearing ski masks. The further one, angled slightly toward her, noticed her first and gawked. The other one, the one with the knife, seemed to notice something amiss with his friend and whirled.
Odessa grabbed his wrist before he'd finished turning, before he could see enough to bring the knife to bear, twisting his entire arm until his left elbow was closer to his right shoulder than should have been possible. The knife slipped from his shaking fingers, clattering loudly on the concrete, and Odessa kicked it away. The other one lurched forward, possibly to save his friend and possibly to attack her, but she took the choice out of his hands completely with a short jab he wasn't expecting. It caught him clean in the nose, and his feet ran out from under him.
When she looked back at the first one, the one whose nearly-broken arm she was still holding, she saw that he was feebly trying to reach under his jacket for something, and she rolled her eyes. She used her grip to haul him toward her at the same time she was stepping into a left cross that sent him spinning.
There was a definite crunch, but she was pretty sure he wasn't dead.
It wasn't until both of them were on the ground and, for the most part, immobile, when she noticed the older man cowering in the corner where the dumpster met the brick wall. He seemed almost as afraid of her as he did of the muggers, and with another very poorly concealed roll of her eyes she pointed to the mouth of the alley. He yelled something on his way out that might have been
thank you
and and might have been
fuck you
, and might have been both.
"You're welcome," she mumbled, as she glared at his retreating backside.
The sleeves of her hoodie felt very tight around her upper arms, and she grunted in frustration as she shook them out and tugged on them a little, very very gently. It would really annoy her if she ripped these sleeves open too. She was too far from home to get another hoodie quickly, and it was too late to be able to buy one.
Not that she had the money for that.
She flipped up the top of one of the dumpsters, wrinkling her nose at the smell, and grabbed a length of frayed nylon twine peeking out from under God only knew what. Once the two would-be muggers were tied up, back to back, she finally made her way out to the street where the woman from earlier was still looking on.
"It's okay," Odessa said, holding up her hand. "I've got them subdued."
"You do?" the woman said, her brow furrowing. "That's... impressive."
Odessa said, "I need to call the police. Have you got a quarter?"
The woman patted her shoulder, and her eyes went a little blank when she realized there was no purse there. Then she patted at her waist, as if there should have been pockets in her skirt, and shook her head. Odessa harrumphed as she looked around on the ground, and bent over to grab a quarter that glimmered in the streetlight.
"Are they coming?" the woman asked, two minutes later, after Odessa hung up the receiver on the payphone.
She was surprised the woman was still there. She said, "I... Yeah. I think so."
"You
think
so?"
Odessa didn't squint at her, but she did look more closely. "Why are you still here?"
Without missing a beat, the woman said, "I saw the whole thing. I thought that maybe, if the police needed, I could testify? Or something? I don't know how that works."
Odessa shook her head. "That guy ran. Without a victim, the most they'll do is hold these idiots for twenty-four hours. They don't have the capacity to do much more right now."
The woman cocked her head, birdlike, and said, "If you know that, then... why did you call them at all?"
Odessa took a long breath and stared back into the alley. "Maybe it was their first time. Maybe this scares 'em. Maybe, next time they need some quick cash, they'll try something different."
"That's a lot of maybes."
"Maybe," Odessa said, nodding.
The woman smiled at her, a smile that winked without involving the eyes at all. "Alright then."
"Alright then," Odessa said, nodding, and turned. And then paused, when the woman moved to walk right alongside her. "Are you... Do you live this way?"
"Do you?"
This response made her head spin, and Odessa blinked a few times before she responded. "I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name."
"It's Alex," she said. "And you are?"
"Odessa," she replied, and started down the street again. And then stopped when Alex continued to move in lock step. "Can I help you?"
"Actually," the woman said, "You can." She put her hand beside her mouth, as if to whisper, and then at full volume said, "I heard a rumor that there's some muggers out tonight. Could you be a 'lil cabbage and walk me home?"
"Where is home?" Odessa asked.
Alex turned around and pointed back in the opposite direction with a smirk that said... something. Odessa wasn't sure what, but it was something. Like Alex was making a joke, and that also maybe Alex was the only one who got it.
"Fine," she said, with a sigh, and the two of them turned around to walk back past the alley. Then she said, "Are we in Brooklyn?"
Alex just gave her a look.
***
Alex was pretty. She had a patch of white hair right in the front of her otherwise pitch black hair; Odessa was sure it was the first thing anyone saw about her. She also had striking features that seemed too... mature for her. Or maybe it was the way she wore them. The way she held her chin. It was a kind of confidence Odessa wasn't used to seeing on someone her own age. Her pale skin, so much lighter than Odessa's own, looked porcelain in the moonlight.
Alex was also very talkative. She filled the quiet with opinions, random facts, anecdotes, and stories about her childhood. Odessa wasn't used to that either, so she limited herself to nodding and the occasional grunt when it seemed like some commiserate agreement was in order, but the truth was that Odessa was still very much in her own head. She had handled two men, one of them armed with a knife,
like it was nothing
. Yes, it was maybe a little generous to call them men; she'd have been surprised if they could legally buy their own cigarettes, but that was beside the point. She herself was only in her early twenties.
What really bothered her, though, was how much stronger than them she was. Odessa had always had some curves to her, and there was certainly a level of strength that came with moving a body like hers around day in and day out, but in the past three weeks her body had started changing. She'd felt compelled to work out --driven, even-- and the progress she'd made had been both immediate and consistent; she'd gone up five pounds, every day, in her free weights workouts, and had been able to keep up the same number of reps.
She was pretty sure that wasn't normal.
She was also pretty sure she could do a lot more, of both reps and weight, but she was nervous about making too large of a jump too quickly. On the one hand, she might injure herself. On the other hand, if she pulled it off, it would attract even more attention than she'd already gotten, which was too much to begin with. There was at least one gym rat who had noticed her, but so far his interest was purely selfish and, unless her senses had completely abandoned her as well, completely sexual.
She could not have been less interested in him.
"Why were you still there?" she said, abruptly, interrupting Alex's monologue, which she was pretty sure had been about the strange ways that the moon had been behaving in the last three weeks.
Alex blinked. "Still where?"
"Afterwards. That guy
ran
out of there. He was afraid for his life. They had knives and weren't afraid to use them."
"I was trying to get a good look at them," she said.
"So you could report it to the police," Odessa said, narrowing her eyes slightly as she stared into the distance.
"Yes."
"Because you were going to call the police."
"
Yes.
"
She took a chance. "What would you say if I told you I saw you talking to those two muggers. Beforehand."
"You... what?"
