damp & smoking. [south?/or just open :)]

I feel like I am about to rust.
Ruin my heart,
I'll buy another

It's hard to be Thea Quincy when you have a cigarette in your hand and a gust of ocean-wet breeze comes flying through your hair, tangling beachy waves and extinguishing the flame of a home-rolled cigarette. Thea sighs, she can always try slowly killing herself in another less conventional way. Cigarettes are over-rated. Yeah, yeah. She's too different/cool/pretty/hot/young to get wrinkles and cough up lungs.

Cheered by her own psyche, Thea tosses her cigarette in the ocean where it sits to this very day. Or she thinks it does, but the question is, does she care? Littering is illegal, that was the point of the action. Certainly she wasn't aiming to think about a piece of white-trash (pun intended) floating in the ocean for so long. The point is that she is b - a - d to the b - o - n - e. Silly, did you think any differently of Thea!?! The girl who rolls her own cigarettes and scoffs at flat shoes? The one that works for a pervy old shop keeper because it gives her the cash she needs to buy sparkling jewels and alcohol to chase away the lonely nights she spends staring at a kind of moldy wall across from her bed? She hasn't been out to a party in weeks.

It's not because a friend died or the PKs were onto her circle of drug-abusing, people-using manipulators, it was just that Thea couldn't stand people recently. All she ever did was hang around parties and go home with boys who were too stupid to treat her right. Or they treated her too well and she knew the candy-sweet-smiles were all fake and meant to gain access straight into her favor. And she wasn't into that anymore, it was like she'd eaten too much chocolate: now she needed a nice detox.

But Thea felt wrong now, she felt strange walking around at night like a hussy in her tall heels, skulking on street-corners and making the prossies out on the street stand straighter and push their chests up in case Thea was the new girl on the block trying to steal their cherished customers. She wasn't into that. She'd actually never gone all the way, only once or twice. It wasn't much fun, all the fun was in the chase and in the teasing glances from behind curtains of well-managed hair. Guys like a girl, but the guys that Thea liked preferred chasing girls around. She guessed they felt their lives were inadequate. Some guys are smart and funny and handsome, they get bored of getting everything they want and there are no thrills in an easy task. Thea was The Challenge.

She is the girl who everyone thinks is mysterious and sultry, when in secret she's just as thick and brutish as any of the other girls sulking around with mama's eyeliner and sticky-bright lipstick tainting perfectly moist and pretty lips. Some guys dig her, they think she looks different than others because she smiles nicely and when she takes a drag from an errant cigarette, she doesn't hog all the fumes and instead breaths them out and shares them with any guy who brings his lips close enough to her mouth to inhale it. And she's just as willing to take sloppy-second inhalations as the sweet boys who take from her.

Thea was the definition of relaxed. People thought she was easily excited and overly eager, but really she just wanted to curl up in a little ball and press herself against other humans and feel like she belonged. Her mom had never been affectionate, and the term "mom" is used loosely - literally. Her birth-mother had left Thea to be taken out to sea, just sitting swaddled in a boat and crying her little face off. A woman picked her up and Thea turned out alright, but she was insane in the brain. She liked people too much and she knew just how to make herself equally appealing as a dessert-mirage in an unforgiving desert of dry-humored, serious-and-frowning girls who liked the idea of love too much for Thea's taste. She just wanted contact and connection, none of that gooey emotional stuff that just gets between the bodies and makes every touch an electric shock of something more complex and wired then the simple, too-good touch of a friend and the smiles you can share between a shared hit of something-that-is-so-crazy-you-forget-your-name.

Thea is caught between the realms of the depressed, serious girls and that of the bra-strap-showing, giggling sluts who think boys like them for their personalities. She doesn't much like either, in fact she feels repulsed and wants to toss her cookies when she imagines these groups of girls circling around each other and taking comfort in shared unhappiness. She prefers the company of boys, boys who expect nothing of her, and are easily thrilled by the simplest of tricks. They treat Thea like a dog and reward her when she sits properly, but they're amused and appeased by the way she nips at their heels and steals their left-overs right off their plates. Thea is the pet puppy of the world, but she is growing up, and she doesn't know what she's growing into. Pretty soon she's going to have to make a choice, and then it'll be stuck that way until she dies.

But right now, she's just staring at the ocean as Thea Quincy slowly walks down the boulevard and her boots make crunching noises over the broken glass of a shop's window. There are robbers in there, making off with everything the 'keeper owns. She feels for them, the robbers. The PKs will be coming along soon and they'll have their asses handed to them. Thea takes a deep gulp of fresh air, not the musty, gross cigarette smoke she'd been trying to suck up a few seconds ago, and she keeps walking by with a silly, half-smile twisting on her mouth like a squirming puppy that won't sit still. Her hair flaps around and the edges of her worn-in leather jacket snap against the jean-material of her pants. Thea struggles to walk through the wind, and she gives an inquisitive glance to her side when she notices she's gained herself a partner in crime.

But not literally, because then they'd have their asses handed to them too by the PKs coming to arrest the scummy, morphling robbers down the road. And Thea isn't a fan of self-harm in such an immediate way. She likes the slow, painful death of not knowing who she is, and smoking too many packs of home-rolled paper and herb cancer fumes.

"Hey stranger!"

ooc- they can be strangers or not, I don't care how they know each other, whoever responds to this