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There wasn’t much Elisa hadn’t seen. Her family had traveled most of the United States before she was twelve and most of the world until she had to choose a college at eighteen. Living in one place was a novelty as was actually going to school. Elisa was extremely intelligent; She had taken almost every advanced placement test she could and gotten fives or fours on every one. Her first SAT and ACT scores were astronomic. She had a photographic memory and could remember information if someone mentioned it, even once. Her mother taught her from whatever hotel room was their home and she did homework and research on their car rides across the continents.
She looked up from her computer screen on one such trip and stared at the expanse of bare farm fields, unbuttoning her coat in the heat of the car. The music through her headphones had stopped and she moved to choose another album to listen to. The car continued forward. Elisa set down her headset and iPod on the seat next to her to focus on the scenery. She imagined herself living in one of the small houses near the highway. She would see hundreds of people passing her every day and she would wonder where they were going so fast and if they would like it there. But she would be happy with that because, of course, she would be married with kids and very good friends with the people who lived next door. She would go riding on her horses to the barn to milk the cows. Or maybe, she would live in an expensive apartment downtown in the city with her billionaire husband or boyfriend as she entertained celebrities and interviewed them for her newspaper, sometimes taking joy rides in her sleek silver car down to the lake front or park to write.
There was a very handsome boy at the hotel, yesterday, who had glanced at her. He even introduced himself when she saw him again at the pool. They had gotten to talking and she didn’t want him to leave, but as he pointed out, it was very late and they were the only ones left in the pool area. The hotel staff poked their heads in to say that the pool was closed. She almost asked him for his phone number, but she chickened out.
She stared out the window at the expanse of dead fields, finding it difficult to focus on her homework. She was getting sick of her parents. At least college wasn’t too far away. She really wished she had gotten that boy’s phone number.
This entry was posted on Saturday, February 7th, 2009 at 8:52 pm and is filed under Fiction Prose, Realistic Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.