Scubrats Cafe Diary: The green bicycle girl

On a sunny afternnon with the humid Houston loosing its moisture as a little soft chill mingles with the setting sun, Harriet takes a break form her coffee vending schedule to soak in the setting sun and chit chat with her freinds who had stooped by. Erika who also works at the Scubrats cafe and had taken that day off had come to smoke her lungs out as Harriet chatted incesentaly. The third girl, Heidi, in teh party was not so into the converstaion but was very much a company as she sipped her passion fruit drink.

Harriet was twenty one. Fair, skinny, weighing a little more than her green bicycle who lies locked to the cafe bench all day long. A tom boy character and unstoppable force when it comes to talking. She could talk anything ranging from her struggle as a student to the concern of her freakingly tiny breasts to the huge amountof loan she has taken to buy something valuable, which I had missed to over hear, to the arrangement of her sharing her apartment and eventually life with a man who was more than a decade older than her.

She has been home-schooled for more than a decade before she was put into a church school and this transition resulted in a very narrower view of the world. With least intercation with people in her home schooling days to the church's pattern of over powering one's independent thoughts with strict religion-influenced teaching resulted in creating a rebel who would later break the bondages of religion, family, sterotypical life style to the bike riding, tattooed, pierced rebel. The other day when I saw her behind the counter brewing my cafe-misto, I saw her limping and she must have run into some kind of trouble I deduced. She has been thrown out of school in her childhood, thrown out of the jobs when she did odd jobs to meet her tuition expenses, out of apartments by the sharing renter, out of another cafe for failing the weekly employee attitude-something tests, which I guess is fairly easy to conquer. She eventually landed in Scubrats.

But as you look into her eyes, you will always find something mysterious, something very innocent, something very childish and mischievous yet sensible human being.

All the names are fictitious, although the characters are not. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely intentional