Eagle Eye

My favorite summer days are those that I convince myself waking before 12 in the afternoon is a good idea, and, equipped with phone, key, tennis shoes, and a motivational playlist, trek three blocks to my local organic food store.  Their banana bread and blueberry granola are the best way to start my morning.  I like to peruse the shelves, smelling the natural ingredients and raising my eyebrows at fruits I knew not of until that moment.  I might spin the handmade-jewelry case a few times for good measure, and then it's just a skip, a hop, and a dangerous intersection to the thrift book shop.  Eagle Eye is my hidey-hole, a nook untouched by my hectic world of teenage concerns.  They've strapped a brass bell to the door handle that rings on my entrance.  The store is deeper than it's exterior suggests, but you could walk to the back in thirty strides, and from one wall to the other in ten.  The shelves are a foot shorter than me, so that most of my time there is spent stooped until I've collected my top picks, which I carefully spread on the carpeted floor and plop down criss-cross-applesauce to edit down to my soon-to-be purchases.  I can only imagine the looks on the faces of my fellow customers at a seventeen year old girl stacking classics like a seven year old stacks picture books--can only imagine it because when I'm sitting there, no one else matters.  I haven't come to be social, I didn't dress for company, I dressed for a day of book-watching and banana-bread-eating, and as I read first the back cover of one, and the first page of another novel, I smile in delight at my slightly-used new acquaintances pressed between pages of books I have stacked to tote home, whom I need not impress with flowery language or elegant dress, yet still speak to me like I'm an adult.