I WAS STUCK WITH FITTING room duty: handing people plastic tags with numbers printed on them and unlocking doors and picking clothes up off the floor. Clothes weren’t the only refuse of the changing rooms. Old sodas, iced-coffee cups, chunks of gum whose flavor had run out, receipts, the occasional petrified french fry or well-aged Cheerio that had been dislodged from a stroller . . . they all found a temporary resting place in the Bargain Mart fitting room. Someone even decided it was an appropriate place to dispose of their child’s dirty diaper.
In between all of those fun tasks, I had to answer the phones and talk over the loudspeaker, telling different departments to pick up the call on line one, line two, line three, and then I had to talk to the person again when they called back, angry, because no one ever picked up in the department I transferred them to in the first place.
Hour after hour passed the same as the one before.
I’m friendly enough to not get fired, but not so friendly that people want to stand around and have whole conversations with me. It’s a delicate balance.
My phone kept vibrating in my back pocket, but I didn’t look for two reasons:
1. I wasn’t supposed to have my phone out on the sales floor.
2. I already knew who it was.
Hayden and our friend, Gabby, had returned from the beach a couple days earlier, and they’d been texting me practically on the hour, every hour, since.
The phone at the fitting room rang. I picked up, reciting the same lame greeting we were forced to say each time: “Thank you for calling your friendly Carson Bargain Mart. How may I direct your call?”
I had my next line all prepared—“Hold, please”—when Hayden’s voice broke the static on the other end of the line. “What’s the deal, did your phone stop working?”
“Oh, hey,” I said, doing my best to sound happy to hear from her. “Sorry, I was planning on calling you later today.”
“I’m just getting off work now.” I heard a sequence of beeping sounds I immediately recognized. She was getting into her car; they were the alarms that go off when you’ve turned the key but haven’t buckled your seat belt. “Can you take a break?”
“It might be tough to get away right now,” I lied.
“Well, try. It’s been so long, I’m not gonna remember what you look like! I’ll be there in five.”
She hung up without giving me a chance to make up another excuse.
I walked out into the forest of bras and underwear to find Donna, the older woman who just last week had hugged me in the break room and cried on my shoulder over Mallory. Her pity was as oppressive as her smothering hugs. But it meant I could count on her for favors.
“Hey, Donna, can you cover the fitting room while I go on lunch?”
She squeezed my hand and said in the most solemn voice, “Of course.”
“Thanks,” I mumbled.
By the time I made it outside to the cluster of old rusty metal picnic benches that have no doubt been sitting behind Bargain Mart since Donna started here in the 1970s, Hayden was already waiting for me there. As I approached I saw that she had two Styrofoam DairyLand cups sitting on the table. I already knew mine was a strawberry milkshake, and hers was vanilla with mini peanut butter cups.
The sun was blazing, the humidity ratcheting up by the minute. It felt like the inside of a dog’s mouth: sticky and stinky and wet. Welcome to July in the South, also known as hell on earth.
“Hey,” I said as I scooted into the bench.
“Oh! Sorry, but”—Hayden tore off her DairyLand hat and placed it on top of the table—“I’m saving this spot for my friend who I haven’t seen in forever ’cause she’s been avoiding me.”
I smiled as I sat down.
She clutched my milkshake, like she was protecting it.
“Wait, Maia?” She reached across the table and took my face between her hands, smushing my cheeks and poking at my forehead and chin. “Is that really you?”
I batted her hands away and whined, “Stop!”
“Fine,” she said, pushing the strawberry milkshake back to its spot in front of me. “So?”
“Yeah?”
“So . . . ,” she repeated as she unbuttoned and wriggled out of her DairyLand shirt, which bore the DairyLand Fairy mascot emblazoned across the back. I always thought it looked more like an evil ice-cream swirl-haired demon with insect wings than a fairy. “Why are you avoiding me?”
“I’m not avoiding you.”
“Liar,” she said as she moved the strap of her tank top aside to examine the sunburn line on her shoulder, wincing.
“No, I’ve just been kinda busy.” Lie, lie, lie. “Working and everything. The usual.” I didn’t know how to tell Hayden that lately being around her, or anyone, only made me feel completely alone.
“Well, how about you come over tonight? Just the two of us? I need to show you our pictures, so you can see all the fun you missed.”
“Gee, thanks, Hayden.”
“Well, then you’re gonna wanna come next time.”
“I already do.” I sipped on my milkshake, but it did little to cool me down. “Can we do it sometime next week instead?”
“I guess.” She paused, then added, “You’re still coming with us to the Fourth, right?” I studied her face as we sat across from each other, but I couldn’t tell if she actually wanted me to say yes or no. I looked down into the now-melted, soupy milkshake and gave it a stir with my straw, uncertain if I could bear attending the Fourth of July town celebration this year.
“Earth to Maia,” Hayden said, waving her hand in the space between us.
“Of course I’m coming. It’s practically mandatory, isn’t it?” I tried to joke, but like all the words that seemed to pass my lips lately, it came out wrong.
“You make it sound like community service or something.” She slurped her milkshake and gave one of her polite, tight-lipped smiles. Then she squinted out at the baking parking lot, the sun bright against her burned cheeks, and looked back at me with that pity face she’d learned since Mallory died. If she could quit doing that, then just maybe we could get back to some sort of normal.
“Are you okay?” she finally asked.
I shrugged. “I’m fine.”
She raised her eyebrows, and I counted the seconds she stared, not believing me—one, two, three—“Look, I heard about what happened at Bowman’s.”
“Oh, that?”
“Yeah, that—the party you went to while we were at the beach, even though you vowed to never again attend another party without me.”
“It’s been a week.” I spooned a soggy lump of milkshake into my mouth. “Hasn’t someone else done something stupid or embarrassing in this goddamn town by now?”
“Why didn’t you tell me about it?”
“I don’t know, probably to avoid the are-you-okay conversation.” That got me a laugh, but she was still watching me too closely. “It really wasn’t a big deal, Hayden. Neil hates me. I don’t care for him either. That’s all. End of story. No one even took a video this time, so it couldn’t have been that bad, right?”
She laughed again, but this time it was faked; she wasn’t letting me off that easy. “No one said it was that bad, but . . .” Her voice trailed off in that way she often does when she’d rather the other person finish her sentence for her, like a song that fades out because it doesn’t know how to end.
“But what?” I asked.
“Is it true that you were hiding and watching them?” She scrunched her face up like this conversation was putting her in actual physical discomfort. “Did you really have Mallory’s camera?”
Part of me wanted to tell her about everything—the gas station wall and the quote and the pictures and Chris. Especially Chris. I wanted to know what she thought of Chris trying to step in and help me with Neil. Was that chivalrous or sexist, Hayden? I wanted to ask her because I’d replayed it in my head so many times and I still wasn’t sure. But I couldn’t.
So instead I said, “I should really get back in there.”
“Yeah, okay. But—”
“Thanks for the shake,” I told her as I stood and threw my empty cup into the garbage.
“See you on the Fourth?” she called after me.
I smiled my big fake Bargain Mart smile. “Can’t wait.”
• • •
When I got back to the fitting room, Donna was there with a whole shopping cart full of socks and underwear that needed to be repackaged. Why people felt the need to rip open the plastic and touch the socks or underwear prior to deciding whether or not they were going to buy them, I would never know.
Every once in while a customer would stop by, talking about the weather—it was getting dark and cloudy. Another person told us that the National Weather Service had issued a flash flood warning. People were not buying clothes; they were stocking up on batteries and bottled water and milk and bread. I understood the need for batteries and water, but why they all planned on making milk sandwiches was beyond me. Granola bars and beef jerky seemed more logical.
Donna talked my ears off about living through Hurricane Hugo in 1989, which she would tell me about every time we had some kind of weather going on. “Trees uprooted, no power for two weeks, flooding, windows blown out of buildings.” She went on and on. “I thought it was the end.”
I sensed she meant The End, as in biblically, the end of days.
In her next breath, she said, “Why don’t you go ahead and get home,” adding morbidly, “while you still can.”
As soon as I walked through the sliding glass doors, I was thankful for Donna’s early dismissal because the wind was already blowing hard, thunder was rumbling miles away, and the clouds were dark and full. I hurried around to the side of the building where my bike was waiting.
When I pulled it out of the metal bike rack, it was hard to move. I kneeled down to get a closer look, and that’s when I realized they weren’t just deflated; there were two ugly puncture wounds, one on the wall of each tire. I knew right away it was no accident. It was Neil. He wasn’t going to let what happened at Bowman’s go that easily. I stood back up and looked around, half expecting to see him somewhere watching me, but no one was in sight.
A drop of rain hit my forehead. They splattered one by one, cold against my skin, falling faster and faster, pockmarking the dusty gravel.
I had several choices:
1. I could wait it out inside.
2. I could wait for one of my parents to give me a ride on their way home from work.
3. I could call Hayden and ask her to pick me up . . . that is, if I hadn’t been so weird with her earlier.
4. Or, I could walk.
In case Neil really was watching, I chose option four. I wheeled my bike out of the parking lot and onto the road—those deflated lumps of rubber flapping against the pavement like slabs of raw meat. I would trudge through the goddamn apocalypse in spite of him.