Serena's POV:

I put my serving apron back on its hook and headed to the washroom. I pulled my brown hair out of its ponytail and brushed my hair down. Two of my co-workers also came in to tidy up before we left this little café where we worked. At 5'8", I was a bit taller than them, although I was more lightly built.

I grabbed my backpack and slipped out the door to avoid my one snobbish co-worker. I was good at blending in and being unnoticed. To be honest, I preferred it when people didn’t notice me. It made things simpler.

I walked down the sidewalk and opened the small shabby door that belonged to a small rundown restaurant. The owner looked up, “Serena, good to see you. The broom is over there. No clue where the dustpan walked to this time though.”

I nodded and went to grab the broom. I have actually never seen this supposed dustpan and had always used cardboard to collect the dirt. The broom had seen better days and sweeping wasn’t easy with it, but I got the entire small room clean in about ten minutes. The owner tossed me two dollars.

It was the usual and I wasn’t about to complain. It was just enough to pay for my bus ride. Every dollar I earned was one more dollar than I had before. I left to head to the bus stop.

Two men were already waiting and I kept my distance. I was uneasy around men. Several times, I had barely managed to dodge men with shady intentions. The bus pulled up and I got on while leaving lots of room between the two men and me. As per usual, the bus wasn’t even half full. I sat in an empty seat. The scenery passed by as we left this part of town.

The tall metal fence that surrounded the medical research center entered my view. I closed my eyes as grief touched my heart. My best friend had gone there for an experimental cancer treatment. The cancer would have killed her in about ten years, but she didn't even make it a year due to those treatments. Her heart had given out.

The worst part was that the research center had known the drug was harmful. We found out later that over twenty other people had already died from it. They hadn't even warned her to stop taking it once they realized the drug would kill.

I took a deep breath as I tried to suppress my grief. I still missed her terribly. My parents had died in a car crash when I was 12 and I had no other family left that I knew of. I had no other friends either.

No one really wanted to be friends with a homeless person, and if you tried to keep it a secret, they tended to get suspicious when you never let them visit your home. Both ways had the same result with the person no longer wishing to be a friend.

I hoped no one discovered that I actually was homeless. The owner of the café was under the impression that I just rented a bedroom and had no mailbox. In all honesty, that was pretty close to the truth.

I eventually got off the bus in a small neighborhood that was starting to show its age. It looked more like a place for retirees to live and most who lived here were well over the 70 mark. Bus stops were few and far between around here, so it took me a good ten minutes of walking to reach my destination.

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I entered the back gate of a small backyard and looked around before heading to the shed to drop off my backpack. I glanced at the back wall of the shed. This shed had a false back wall that hid my tiny room. Rent was simply too high for me to afford anything else. My backpack was left on the floor as I grabbed some gardening tools.

I went to pick weeds out of the small garden and flower beds. It was part of my rent. I paid $50 a month and I would care for anything he planted. The old man was so arthritic that he was unable to manage any of the yard work, but he loved flowers and fresh garden vegetables. I loved gardening, so it worked very well for me.

I was saving my money to move to the mountains. My mind drifted a bit down the common trail of thought. I could have a tiny cabin and a garden... My co-workers thought I was nuts, but tiny remote places in the middle of the mountains were not that expensive. The lack of reliable cell service, coffee shops, and general city entertainment were huge problems for my co-workers, although it sounded just fine to me. Out there, I could even sing.

I loved singing and music, but it was too risky for me to sing. Whenever I sang, odd things tended to happen. If I got caught up in any sort of music and hummed, whistled or sang, strange things had a habit of occurring. Many of those things could not easily be explained away either.

The dirt under my fingers was relaxing. It was a conscious effort to not hum. I enjoyed humming, but I knew exactly what would happen in this situation if I did hum. When I had first started gardening for this old grandfather, I had hummed contentedly while I worked.

I exhaled slowly as I remembered that catastrophe. It was true, plants did like music. I had been weeding around some flowers up front and didn’t notice all of the small garden sprouts behind me were growing at a visible rate.

Those tiny finger-sized sprouts had been half-grown plants by the time I saw them. The next day I had asked the old man what kind of fertilizer he used so he didn’t think I was responsible. He had almost fallen over when he saw his garden.

I wasn’t sure where the ability had come from. It had appeared about the time I was finishing high school. It took me quite some time to figure out that it was linked to music and song. It had taken some subtle testing, but I had a pretty good idea how my magical singing ability worked now.

Humming was the simplest and least noticeable. Whistling was stronger than a hum, and singing was stronger yet, although its effects were much more limited. I preferred humming if I was actually trying to use my weird magic, it was more subtle and had a wider range of effects to choose from.

Perhaps, once I was in the remote mountains I could sing, or at least hum, without having other people notice weird things. My music always had some sort of side effect and I couldn’t always control what it might be.

It didn’t take me long to tidy up the gardens and pick the tiny weeds. I did this every day and it was easy to keep it looking perfect. I ensured the neighbors weren’t looking and went back into the shed before retreating to the tiny hidden room.

It wasn’t much, but it was far better than actually sleeping on the street. I had two old yoga mats for a mattress and several blankets on top. The bed took up well over half of the floor space in the hidden room.

I pulled a leftover sandwich out of my backpack. The restaurant owner let us take the old sandwiches if no one bought them. I did buy some food, but couldn’t buy much since I had no way to store or preserve it. I also didn’t want to leave anything out in case it attracted mice or rats.

There were no windows, but the clouded skylight above let in enough light for me to read. I would be able to read for several hours before I went to bed.