‘I don’t need any help!’ she said in her familiar peculiar and disagreeable voice. She was an odd-looking girl with a thick, puffed-out tangle of black hair that looked as though it had never known a brush, much less a proper cutting. Her clothes were ill-fitting and baggy and had that stale, sour smell which meant a washing was long past due. Her face she kept in a perpetual scowl that would have curdled new milk, with jaw slung forward belligerently and her mouth puckered as though she had been sucking on rotting lemons- hence the moniker, Monkey Guts. After a few moments, she muttered, ‘Shit! Those little bastards!’ They had torn her decrepit nylon backpack. In her arms and on the floor were scattered materials far too numerous and cumbersome to carry.
Ignoring her protests, David began picking things up and placing them in his own pack.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Lending you a hand. That is, unless you want to make two or three trips. You know as well as I that by the time you get back school will be locked up and your things will have disappeared.’
She accepted this with sullen reluctance and began following him. When she noticed their direction of travel, however, she balked.