First Few Paragraphs Of "A Powdery Tattoo"

Just for fun, here's the opening to A Powdery Tattoo, a Young Adult novel I am polishing up at the moment. This is raw and unedited.

It’s not like it’s hard to get from my house to my school in the mornings, it’s a simple point A to point B bike ride. It’s hard to get lost when you only have one left turn and then a long straight line down the boulevard, I’m not saying that I can’t do it, or that I don’t do it most mornings. It’s just that if it were a job with a paycheck, the paved road beneath me with the empty fields full of dry brush and the rounded tops of Crafton Hills, the churches and parking lots would all just be a part of society that I belonged in and could relate to.

The little fast food restaurants, the drug stores, those ugly little box houses that they mowed down several hundred acres of orange trees to make room for.

But I’m 16. I don’t have a job, except that school is my job. The gas station and the car wash and all the traffic whizzing past me is all part of my path to something that I don’t particularly like to end up at when I’ve completed my regular morning journey. It’s not like it’s hard to get lost going from point A to point B, but let’s just say that I occasionally get distracted and miss first and second period to go sit and be by myself at the park.

The dry cleaner’s, the grocery store.

I have no defense, really, because I should be in school and I should be making things a little easier on Gran. How I hate upsetting Gran.