Chapter Text
That anything but warm, tired autumn, I was a backwards tornado. Twirling at the speed of seventy miles per hour, all a tornado can accomplish is the destruction of pocket-sized towns and tiny cars by cracking spider-webbed glass, pulling windows off their hinges, turning pickup trucks onto their sides, and destroying not only the fragile town, but the lives of those who live in the fragile town.
Now, if you were to somehow catch this tornado in action on tape and play it on rewind, you'd see the complete opposite of destruction.
You'd see repair; slowly and efficiently the wicked tornado would replace the broken shards of glass, re-hinge the crooked window, upturn the fallen pickup truck, effectively rejuvenating the fragile town you once thought could never be fixed.
Thinking about it now, I ought to laugh at the idea. I was no healer, and I'm still not, but if Santana believed it, you should know now that I believed it too.
60 days before winter...
"Tell me about your life."
The wrinkly old woman sitting across the table carefully dragged her eyes from my serious expression to the silver tape recorder pressed flat on the table. I tried to smile, but the action hurt my face from lack of use, turning the gesture into more of a grimace than a friendly expression.
"I thought you were going to ask me questions?" she asked, crinkling her nose.
"I'm not a reporter, miss," I reassured her for probably the fifth time this afternoon. "Ever heard of a documentary?"
Fiddling with the thin reading glasses tied around her neck, the elderly woman narrowed her eyes on me, as if insulted by my question. "Of course I've heard of documentaries," she said, shifting uncomfortably in her seat. "After all, I am eighty-one years old, dear."
Even though the woman seemed a bit peeved, I ignored her upturned nose and haughty sneer in favor of clicking my pen and scribbling down her age in my notepad.
Now we were getting somewhere.
"Eighty-one, you say.” I quickly did the calculations in my head until I came up with a result. "So, you were born in 1932. I bet life was a lot different back then to how it is nowadays."
I purposefully refrained from asking her too many questions. I didn't want answers like yes, no, and maybe dirtying up my notepad. I wanted to hear a story. Sometimes it's not about asking the right questions, it's about steering the conversation in the right direction.
All I really wanted was to have a nice discussion. It didn't matter who it was with, or what it was about. Politics, religion, thoughts on abortion, illegal trafficking, bunnies and rainbows, Huckleberry Finn, apples and bananas.
It didn't really matter to me. All I needed was someone to talk to. And if that made me seem desperate in the process, well...that was neither here nor there.
For years, all I ever did was observe from afar, especially in places like schools, aquariums, bookstores, coffee shops, hospitals. People watching was not only my specialty, it was my entire life.
If I sat in a coffee shop long enough and just watched, by the end of the day I could recite to you all of the coffee orders, how much the customers paid, what form of payment they used, and if they grabbed a napkin on their way out just in case a small spillage occurred between their current location and the destination they were heading towards.
Both a gift and a curse. I'd get so enraptured in watching other people's lives, I'd easily forget about my own, which evidently wasn't very healthy. It's not my fault I chose this tactic as a way of escapism. The only person I could find to blame this on was my mother. And the only person I could thank for pulling me out was Santana.
"Well," the old woman contemplated, "They sure didn't have any of those fancy gadgets and gizmos you children have these days."
"That's helpful," I muttered, continuing to click my pen.
"And," she added, taking a sip of her coffee. "We had a lot more focus. Especially the young women."
"How do you mean?" I asked, skeptical.
The elderly woman shook her head sadly. "Where are the housewives? Where are the devoted mothers? Where are the picket fences and the two and a half children?"
I resisted the urge to scoff. People so closed-minded made my stomach ache sometimes.
"Oh," I drawled, squeezing the bridge of my nose. "So, you're one of those."
"Pardon?"
"You're one of those," I repeated, reaching forward to turn off my tape recorder. "People who are stuck in a specific time zone never move forward, miss. It seems to me that you need to move on. And I say this in the most respectful way possible."
The old woman seemed affronted at first; white eyebrows knit together, lips pursed tersely. Even her wrinkled hand grasped on tighter to her cane.
She looked ready to fight back, but before she could whack me in the side, I continued with, "Imagine if enough people still had the beliefs of our ancestors during slavery times. Life changes, times change, and with time, our mindset should change as well. Throughout the decades, women have broken out of their stereotypes, shackles, which have hindered us from succeeding in a male-dominated world.
"Why add fuel to their already burning fire, miss? We have to remember the strong women who stood up and burned their bras for our rights," I rambled on, "Somehow, I doubt you were one of the many hippies who made signs and rallied around Congress for hours on end and chanted for equal rights and wages-"
Somewhere in the middle of my calm argument, the old woman had become even more insulted and began collecting her things. I didn't stop speaking, even though I knew I was in the process of driving her away, and as she noisily slid her chair into the table, I raised my voice a volume louder so she could hear the end of my diatribe as she exited the café.
You can say I'm a persistent nuisance; I didn't stop babbling on until she was out the door. Once she was gone, though, I exhaled to catch my breath and looked around to find the whole entire café staring at me as if I had three heads.
Not two, but three.
To my delight, though, a sixteen year old girl in the back of the café looked as if she wanted to applaud, but before she got the chance her mother shot her a cold look, silently telling her not to encourage my radical behavior.
"What are you, a reporter?"
First words Santana ever spoke. To me, at least. At the time, I was annoyed, because, no—I was not a reporter, interviewer, detective, private investigator, or any of the above. Was it really so strange to see a person strolling about with a notepad and pen all day? I didn't think so, but it seems my opinion didn't matter.
"Reporters ask questions," I answered, peering up into the brownest eyes I'd ever seen. "Reporters dig for dirt and search for a particular story that may or may not exist. I don't ask questions. I don't dig for particular stories, only true ones."
She continued to gaze down at me with this unreadable expression. Till this day, I still can't manage to make sense of it. In that moment, standing there, she was anything and everything and too much but not enough.
"So," she drawled, absentmindedly tightening the mud-brown apron around her waist with a tug. "Is that a no?"
"Yes."
"A yes?"
"No, it's a no," I replied briskly, rolling my eyes to the cracked ceiling, because who was this barista to question me on how I spent my Sunday afternoons?
As far as I knew, it was still a free country, thus it was within my rights to freely sit at this table in this coffee shop for as long as I wanted. As far as I knew, I could talk to whomever I wanted in this rainy city, and if they allowed me to record their musings, it was none of this beautiful barista's damn business.
"Well, that's a shame," she said in response to my abrupt statement, shaking her head with a thoughtful pout. "I could really use a reporter right now." Ducking her head, she leant down and whispered, "The douche I work for pays the women on staff less than the men. And I mean, that's definitely illegal, right?"
Just because I listened and read and talked about political issues didn't mean I understood them. I was only nineteen for heaven's sake; I didn't know what I was doing with my life.
"I..." Biting the corner of my lip, I racked my brain for something smart to say. "Uh, sure."
She smiled slowly, this questioning twinkle in her eyes. "I think I'm going to get him arrested."
"And how do you plan on doing that?" I asked skeptically, but for some reason I didn't doubt she had a plan forming somewhere in that stubborn head of hers.
"Easy peasy." Shrugging a shoulder, she glanced towards the cash register where a lanky man with a baseball cap stood. "I happen to know my boss keeps weed back in the storage room." She turned around and looked at me with a sneaky grin. "You should right this stuff down if you want an interesting story for the news tonight."
"For the billionth time, I am not a reporter," I huffed, fiddling with my notepad anxiously. "And I'm not writing a story for the news."
"Then what are you doing?" she asked, sounding genuinely confused.
"I, um..." I stuttered, rubbing the back of my sweaty neck. The way she stared at me; eyes narrowed, jaw clenched, hip cocked to the side, made me feel exceptionally anxious. I didn't know who she was, but oddly, I wanted to find out. "Tell me about your life."
It was beginning to become a nervous habit of mine; randomly blurting out this five word phrase in order to get out of predicaments I couldn't complete.
In my opinion, that statement was the beginning of the end for us. Why was I so curious to learn of people’s lives I would probably never even see again anyway? I still don’t really know the exact answer to that question, like most questions I ask.
Apparently her shift was over, because instead of waving me off like my mother, the barista sat down and told me a twisted version of the truth that was her past. It's been years since then, so the details of her tale are a bit fuzzy, but if I remember correctly, she told me she was a dangerous convict on the run from the law.
A regular raconteur she was;
"Killed a man," she told me with this wicked smirk slashed across her face, but the deep dimples in her cheeks kind of simmered the deadly glaze in her eyes as she explained how she got away with it.
"The coppers searched far and wide, but there was one place they never suspected," the barista whispered, ducking her head secretly. "Traveling cross-country in my grandfather's hippie van was the last thing the police would've guessed. Working at a low-down and dirty café was even farther off their radar."
The story was oddly amusing, and I think she knew I was enjoying it, because the more and more I smiled at her words, the more and more ridiculous and convoluted the story became.
"Joined a circus while passing through Arkansas. No one suspected a thing but the fortune teller. She wanted a bribe in order to shut her up, but I had no cash, so I had to kill her too," she whispered, shaking her head with a dark chuckle. "After the circus, I worked as a grease monkey at a garage in Nebraska. The wrench became my new favorite weapon of choice. Again, no one suspected a thing except for the boss' dog. Couldn't kill a pup though; that just ain't right."
Mesmerized, I listened on carefully. "So, what did you do?"
"I ran," she said, as if obvious. "You know, in case of the off chance dogs gained the ability to speak over night or something."
I laughed unwillingly and genuinely for probably the first time in months. It felt weird bubbling up my throat. It felt even weirder as it sat on my tongue and escaped my parted lips. Laughter; something you can't ever really forget to do no matter how long you go without practice.
"Most people call me San. That's my nickname," she told me, thrusting a hand over the table. She had thin hands, I noted, placing my palm into hers for a quick shake.
"Sam?" I asked, curling my sweaty hand into a fist after retracting my arm.
"No. San," she repeated. "S-A-N. But I like you, so you can call me by my real name, Santana. I’m trusting you won’t call the police, okay?"
I laughed again. Santana, so easy to talk to and joke with and laugh at. I never really had friends before, and I'm still really proud to say she was my first ever.
"I'm not a reporter, remember? I have no reason to call the cops."
"I like the way you think..." she trailed off, raising an eyebrow expectantly.
"Quinn," I offered. "And that's all anyone ever calls me, so...no nickname."
She smiled then; the first time I ever saw those pearly white teeth. "Quinn, Quinn, Quinn," she repeated three times fast with a curt nod. "Got it."
It was dark out now. It seems I was so lost in Santana's incriminating story that I didn't even notice the setting sun, or the herd of people leaving the café, or the low music in the background come to an abrupt stop as the employees began stacking the chairs as they cleaned up shop.
Santana stood up from her seat across from me and continued to grin. I smiled back; not only to be polite though. She kind of unknowingly forced it out of me. It's hard to explain, really.
"I guess I'll see you around, Quinn, Quinn, Quinn," she said, while untying her apron.
"I guess so," I said, watching as she backed away from my table and headed towards the glass doors.
Bye, she mouthed, peeking over her shoulder one last time.
And with that, she was gone, leaving me with a massive headache and a tape recorder which had been inconveniently turned off during Santana's entire rant on why burying missing dead bodies in a cemetery is a much better place than the woods.