White Rabbit Chapter 12

12.

Delores walked a few blocks down the street to the business district to hail a cab. The snow felt beautiful on her face and beneath her boots as she walked optimistically and not in a panic. Although, she didn’t remember her four months in Copenhagen, it was as though she knew exactly where she was going. She hailed the green and white cab and thankfully, the friendly-looking black driver spoke English well and she asked him to take her to a museum, one with a whale. Simply nodding with a smile he jerked the steering wheel and made a quick right turn darting in and out of traffic fearlessly. In a few quick minutes the cab came to a halt in front of a large impressive building that certainly looked like a museum. “Naturhistoriske.” The cab driver said pleasantly in Danish.

Delores sat still in the backseat for a moment. It was snowing outside more heavily than before and traffic was thick but she realized frantically checking all of her pockets that she hadn’t the money for the fare. She thought of running but she knew it wasn’t the right thing to do and besides, he could track her to the building and to the whale. “I am sorry,” she said nervously apologetic, “but I forgot my money. If you like, um, you can return me to where you picked me up, there being, I am at no advantage.”

“No. No.” The cab driver said laughing. He was apparently African and wore a Green Bay Packers toboggan and a thick blue vest—the sort that looks like a life jacket made for dry land. It was hard to explain the Green Bay Packers hat. “You go and I be here when you come back.” He said clearly pleasant.

“Excuse me?” Delores asked.

“Go. I wait here.” He repeated more simply. “I don’t need money girl. Go. I wait.” He insisted. Delores looked at him strangely but did as she was told. Once in a while she was a perfectly good kid who listened to adults. She ran out of the cab and there were a group of teenagers loitering outside talking on cell phones and looking around trying to be cool in skinny jeans and black jackets. A few smoked cigarettes and one boy whistled at her but she had no time for his pettiness. She was a teenager by age only but was much more mature. Though she was not a prune, a pre-aged fuddy-duddy, the wayward goofiness, irresponsibility and lack of purpose which corrupts most youth did not corrupt her. She was not lost where she stood like most teens seem to be at any given moment, desperately trying to fit in to some category or hole like an insect or a hobo on a rolling boxcar.

There was not a fleeting, contradictory, hypocritical bone in her young beautiful body and though she questioned the existence of the Holy Roman Catholic Church’s God, she wasn’t without a moral compass and it was never manipulated by the pitifulness of peer pressure or by whatever boy found a spot of interest in her and whether he wanted to corrupt her. She refused to be a notch, a tally, a learning experience, or to give herself to anything less than real romance. She had been built-up by years of love stories, always believing in more and not less, stories such as the woman who tried to commit suicide by jumping off the Eiffel Tower, who instead, fell in love. Virginity is too often a wasted gift, given to some miserable thief, and sex thereafter is as special and pure as riding a donkey that goes in asinine circles tied to a stake. Delores may be the last girl on Earth who believes there may be more than what is in front of her face and that love is not a matter of convenience, religion, or something you can will or have happen magically when you are ready for it. And she certainly is not the dumb stereotypical girl who loves those who are indifferent, flippant with their affections, those who could take her or leave her. She was tired of talking dumb with other teens so they wouldn't think that she was weird for the way she normally spoke. There was something that burned inside of her heart that told her that she had met the man she loved somewhere, sometime, and she intended to find him again. Him, she thought wistfully as though she always had known him. Him, she thought romantically, simply, walking into the museum.