Nadine Martin,
Adv. Comp, Character Sketch #7
Susy
She slammed the screen door hard,
venomously, and with all the force of her skinny eight-year-old arms. Racing across the room in her tattered
sneakers, she pulled askew the curtain of the front window, pressed a dainty
nose into a hideous shape against the glass pane, stuck her thumbs in her ears,
and made menacing claws of her small fingers.
“Cheaters! Liars!
Rat-finks!” she shrieked in a raging treble.
Away from the window she felt angry
tears gather in her dark brown eyes, and she hurled her slight self into the
cushions of the dowdy, fat sofa. But her
lips firmed, and her chin poked out suddenly, stubbornly from the baby-folds of
her neck. She sniffed once, liquidly,
wrinkling the tip-tilt nose. Heavy,
casually-plaited braids fell forward as she leaned over to examine a newly
skinned, knobby knee. Studying the raw,
red skin she recalled an old scab on one pointy elbow. The pin tip of her tongue ran over the full
upper lip while she scratched the scab’s edge with immense care and
concentration. Flopping back on the
patient sofa, she described a few lop-sided circles with her coltish brown
legs, then collapsed, lay almost still, and closed her eyes. Eyes still shut, she thrust her lower lip far
forward, and energetically exhaled upward, fluttering the uneven hair of the
gold-brown bang. Under the hair the
forehead was a lighter tan than the rest of her gypsy face; a small, insistent
pulse beat at each temple. Dark,
stenciled eyebrows, only slightly arched, lay over creamy, opaque eyelids. Fringes of dark-brown lash met faint freckles
scattered high on warmly-flushed cheeks.
Refreshed by her moment’s inactivity
and suddenly possessed of some happy plan for revenge, she rolled off the couch
and made for the door; a wide grin of delighted malice dimpling one cheek and
exposing new, still jagged-edged, white, white teeth.
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