by R. R. Banks
With that Nia snatched a bag of licorice and started with a resolute stride toward a rack of fudge sauce she likely had plans for that I didn’t want to know about. I sincerely wished that there was some way that I could transfer any of the attention to her. That way I wouldn’t have to deal with him and maybe she would consider canceling the Halloween party before I had to go to it. Of course, that would mean that she would be afflicted by Gregory, and that’s not something I would wish on an enemy, much less a friend.
“That was not a new one,” I assured her, picking my shoe up off the floor where my convulsions had flung it, “That was Gregory.”
Nia stopped and peered over her shoulder at me. A sympathetic look had taken over the angry glare.
“Oh, that was Gregory.”
I looked at her painfully and stuffed my foot back in the shoe, nodding. We headed out the aisle, both of us moving a bit faster as if needing to get out of the environment tainted by his presence.
“So, you never told me the entire Gregory saga,” Nia said a few minutes later.
We had finished scavenging for provisions and were moving toward the check-out lines.
“Nor will I,” I responded, not looking at my roommate.
“Oh, come on. That is not fair. I have told you all the details of my sordid love life.”
I slid my eyes over to Nia, my eyebrows raised.
“Ok, I’ve told you all the details of my moderately interesting, semi-existent love life,” she rushed through the words as though she didn’t really want to admit to them. “But all the sordid ones of my imaginary love life,” she finished emphatically.
“Alright, I know, but Gregory…” I paused, flipping through a few glossy pages of my mental scrapbook. “I don’t really think it’s the same situation. You know the essentials. Let’s just leave it at that.”
“Fine, but one of these days…”
Nia was cut off by me grabbing her and yanking her behind a display of books. The junk food she had taken out of the cart to put on the self-checkout station slid and Nia juggled it for a few seconds before regaining control.
“What happened?”
I gestured for her to be quiet and pointed toward the row of cash registers ahead of us. Nia assumed a convincing mission-impossible stance and gazed around the white metal shelves of paperbacks to where I had pointed. At the register, three down from where we hunched, Gregory had his arms wrapped around a giggling, well-augmented blonde, his face buried in her neck. The cashier was swiping a rather scandalous array of purchases while simultaneously trying to keep down her dinner.
This. THIS is why 24-hour grocery stores are a murky place.
“Ewwww,” Nia said in evaluation.
“Yeah. That chick probably has Mattel imprinted on the bottom of her foot.”
Nia nodded in agreement then glanced back around the corner. Suddenly she pushed back against me, shoving me towards the back of the square book area.
“He’s coming!”
I grabbed the nearest book and buried my nose in it. I peered over the top of the book and watched as Nia looked around for a few frantic seconds, noted the food in her arms, and turned her back. I rose up on my toes slightly to look over the white racks of books, trying to find where Gregory had gone. He was standing a few yards away in a pharmacy aisle.
“That is so ghetto, Bea, look, this says ‘Fo Tracey’, can you believe that? Oh, wait, never mind, there’s the ‘r’. It was under the price sticker.”
I could hear Nia whispering behind me but was too busy watching Gregory to focus on what she was saying. He took a box of Double Lubricated, Ultra-Sensitive, Assorted Flavor, Ribbed for Her Pleasure and Your Reputation, Mentholated, Spermicidal, Extra Strong ‘Cuz You Don’t Know Where She’s Been and She Doesn’t Either, Bonus Glow-in-the-Dark pack condoms, thought for a beat and took another then headed back toward the register. I quickly hid behind the book again, feeling like I was back in high school and hating myself a little bit more for it.
“Hope they come in small,” I muttered.
“What?” Nia asked, taking a step backwards to stand beside me.
“Nothing.”
I was embarrassed by how childish I was being, hiding from a man and wishing plagues and shrinkage upon his nether-parts, but that was how Gregory affected me. No matter how hard I tried not to be, no matter how hard I tried to just put him behind me once and for all, he seemed not to want to let me recover. Even when I felt like I was getting close to not caring, he would appear again, trying to lure me back into him just for his amusement. I waited for as long as I thought it would take for him to make his purchases, scoop up that night’s acquisition, and leave the traumatized cashier before relaxing. For the first time I looked at the book I had been using as a shield.
“What are you reading?” Nia whispered, still staring at the far wall.
I elbowed her.
“It’s ok, I think he’s gone.” Nia turned around. “It’s a book of a zillion and eight baby names,” I told her, scanning the list I had opened to. “Maybe a new name will inspire me.”
“Inspire you for what?” Nia asked.
“The new identity that I’m going to create for myself.”
Nia sighed as we made our way back toward the cart of goodies that we had abandoned running away from Gregory.
“What the hell did this guy do to you?” she asked.
“You know very well what he did to me,” I said, not wanting to elaborate on it.
“No. I know that he left you. Again, you’ve never told me the whole story.”
“And again, I’m not going to. It’s not something that I like to talk about.”
“Well, whatever it is, I can’t believe that it could be anything bad enough that it still does this to you years later.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I snapped. “You think that I’m just being dramatic?”
“No,” Nia said, shaking her head. “Just the opposite. You are one of the strongest people I’ve ever known and I can’t imagine anyone being able to do this to you. I know heartbreak. I get it. But it was years ago. You’re a grown ass woman now, with your own life, your own everything. Why let him still have this hold on you? He has you dangling. I just watched him come up to you in the middle of a grocery store and totally take over your mind. He had you wrapped around his little finger.”
“No, he didn’t,” I argued.
“Really? Then why didn’t you just walk away from him?”
Damn. Told.
“I just feel like I can’t get myself away from him. He completely messed me up.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way, Bea. You let him talk to you like that and actually kiss you, then he waltzes out of here with some tricked out bimbo and you did nothing.”
“What was I supposed to do?” I asked.
“Throw things at him. Hit him in the backs of the knees with the cart and then run over him. Jump over the cash register and tackle him. Shame him for his bedroom prowess. There’s a plethora of options. It’s really up to your personal style.”
“Well,” I said, not really sure why I was choosing to admit this but feeling like I couldn’t stop myself now. “I don’t really have the necessary information to shame him for his bedroom prowess.”
Nia stopped and stared at me.
“Excuse me?” she asked.
“I don’t really have ---”
“No, no – I heard you. I just…. really?”
I sighed.
“Really.”
At 21, being a virgin wasn’t something that I frequently talked about. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I was ashamed of it, but I also wasn’t going to splash it across the front of a T-shirt and wear it on all of my outings. It wasn’t the best conversation starter.
“So, you’re letting a guy who you’ve never even had sex with still totally control your life?” Nia asked.
Well, damn. It sounds really bad when you put it like that.
“U
m….”
That was about as much as I could figure out to say.
“Girl, you’ve got to get the hell over that. You have a life to live, and Skeezy McSlimeball shouldn’t be a part of it, even in your thoughts. You’ve got to prove to yourself – not to him – that you’re worth more than what he thinks you are. You need to start living.”
I felt her words filling my chest and pushing into my mind, reaching into a place that felt raw and uncomfortable, but that was something I didn’t want to deal with anymore. I nodded.
“Where do I find a costume?”
Chapter Two
Beatrice
Open-air malls were another evolution of modern society that bothered me. I thought that malls had been invented so that people didn’t have to wander around outside to get to different stores. Several dozen shopping locations under one roof was a comfort and convenience in the rain, cold, or heat but now somehow it had become a status symbol to shop in coiling trains of interconnected stores that looped around to create a shopping mall with no overhanging roof. But since it was still not trendy or fashionable to be wet, shivering, or sweaty, these malls asked a lot of shoppers. I didn’t care how snazzy the landscaping in the courtyards was or how tall a replica grandfather clock the mall developers could place in the center (this, I believed, was the teenage girls’ version of the biological clock. It constantly reminded them of the seconds ticking by until it was too late to get what they wanted). I wanted to spend my shopping hours in the mind-numbing monotony of a florescent-lit, faux marble cocoon. Nia, however, was drawn to the sprawling outdoor mall that had sprouted right outside the city and that was where we ended up in search of an appropriately inappropriate costume for the party.
“It makes me feel like an adult,” Nia insisted as she pulled into one of the thirty thousand parking spaces outside of the mall’s arched stone entrance and caught the sour expression on my face.
“You are an adult. You have been for many years now.”
“It makes me feel like a classy-ass adult then, ok?”
“The phrase ‘classy-ass’ just brings it home for me.”
The cobblestone walkways were swarmed with designer barely-clothed teenagers brandishing their daddies’ credit cards, bored wealthy women walking bored spoiled dogs, and the occasional hoodlum weaving through the horrified crowds with neon hair and skateboards thinking it would earn them punk-outcast points if the rent-a-cop chased them out. I walked closely alongside Nia, ready to shove her into any store not dripping with obscenely over-priced materialism and that looked as though the clothing inside would preserve at least most of my dignity.
“You’re simmering on the evils of brand-names and commercialism again, aren’t you?”
Nia had stopped in front of one of the few stores whose easily-identifiable logo wasn’t plastered on the chest, back, and underwear of every mainstream middle-class teenager in the country.
“Not evils, per se, just…non-goodness. I think it’s just one more thing to make kids self-conscious and that it damages individualism and open self-expression.”
I sound like an after-school special.
“You sure are deep and hippified for someone who wears mascara to the mailbox and whose nails could kill someone.”
I glanced down at the acrylic nails that had become a fixture of my personal look in the few years that I had been away from my childhood home.
“And you sure do hate me, for someone who proclaims they are my best friend.”
“I don’t hate you. What makes you different makes you beautiful.”
“I thought we agreed that you would destroy the bad nineties music collection.”
Nodding guiltily Nia led the way into the store.
After several minutes we both had armfuls of garments that Nia was doing her best to convince me she could transform into amazing costumes, and were searching for fitting rooms. A falsely cheerful-looking girl with a heavily overloaded lanyard around her neck approached us.
“Are you looking for a dressing room?” she asked, surveying the stacks of clothing each of us held.
No. We’re going for a brazen daylight robbery.
We nodded and followed the girl to a row of skillfully camouflaged doors along a back wall. Selecting two keys from the hundred on her lanyard she opened two of the doors and gestured Nia and me inside. The key plethora reminded me of an old-time prison warden and I had the distinct feeling that I was being punished for something that I did to offend the Great Celestial Greatness.
“What do you think the rest of those keys are for?” I muttered to Nia who slid her eyes toward the lanyard.
“My name’s Chloe if you need anything. Different colors or…sizes,” the girl said with a distinct slide of her eyes up and down our bodies.
Chloe turned on her heel and stalked away.
“Did she just call me fat?” I hissed.
“Try on the blue one first.”
**
A full hour was devoted to that store, locked in dressing rooms working through what felt like endless mountains of dresses, skirts, tops, and pieces of glittery, state-of-matter questionable cloth that could probably function as two or more articles depending on size and adherence to the laws of the area in which they were worn. Chloe continued to perfectly perform the pantomime of the sulking teenager until my dropped credit card and Nia’s non-too-subtly flashed threatening glare sent the salesgirl skittering through the racks of clothing with renewed verve. Unfortunately for her and her verve, soon after she decided our discovery of the ideal articles for our Halloween celebration was her personal mission, she returned to the dressing rooms to find that Nia and I had escaped and run from the store like we were making a break for the border.
“So, you voluntarily come out in the sunlight now?”
I turned sharply from where we had paused to catch our breaths around the corner from the store. Behind me a tall, middle-aged, self-described voluptuous man stood holding six shopping bags in one hand and an antiqued bronze lamp in the other.
“Mr. Adam?” I said, stunned to see him out in the wild rather than in the confines of our usual context.
“Oh, Honey, flashbacks, flashbacks,” he said, squeezing his eyes closed as though he couldn’t bear hearing the name again.
“Sorry. It’s so good to see you.”
I rushed forward and tried to hug him, got tangled in his bags and smacked with the lamp, and settled on a modified headbutt into his chest. I turned to Nia who was trying to maintain the same frustrated, astonished look she had when we had encountered Gregory in the grocery store, but was only managing to look confused and slightly afraid.
“Nia, this is my old manager from the restaurant, Adam Gillis.”
My year-long stint as a hostess at a tiny, locally-adored, strawberry-themed restaurant had brought me bitterness, an ulcer, and Mr. Adam. There were days when he was truly the only thing that had kept me from smearing strawberry juice across my cheeks as war paint and raising a rebellion against the rude and stunningly dumb guests that wandered in.
“Actually, not anymore.”
“You aren’t at the restaurant anymore?”
“Oh, no. I’ll be there until Hades does a tap dance with Jesus backed up by the Ice Capades. What I mean is I’m not Adam Gillis anymore. Andy and I finally changed our last names. It was our twelfth anniversary gift to each other. Now we’re the Gilliamses.”
“Gilliamses?”
“We were considering Williamillises but that was too difficult to pronounce.”
“Good choice. Have you eaten?”
Adam looked down at himself, twisting back and forth as if examining his girth.
“Far too much for far too long, but that’s not stopping me from doing it again. Lunch?”
We wove through the crowd with both Nia and me using Adam as a human battering ram to form a path on our way to a bistro at the front entrance to the mall. Inside the pseudo-fancy restaurant, a disturbingly thin girl with eyes I di
dn’t want to look at too hard for fear they would pop out flashed a smile with at least double the number of teeth she should have had.
“Hi!” she chirped, and I took an involuntary step back. “How many?”
“Three,” Adam told her.
The hostess’s smile widened as she looked to a diagram of the restaurant and a waitlist on her podium.
“I didn’t get a podium,” I muttered to Adam.
He waved me toward a bench near the door.
“It’s going to be a fifteen-minute wait,” the hostess announced as Nia and I walked toward the bench.
I recognized the tone as if-I-am-exuberantly-optimistic-about-making-you-wait-you-are-less-likely-to-get-mad-at-me. The other hostesses at the little restaurant where Adam and I had worked had learned to master that tone, but I had never bothered. If these people wanted to wander into the packed restaurant on a Friday night, get told that there were twelve reservations in front of them, and still choose to get put on the wait list, they could damn well wait without complaining.
Which is probably why it’s a good thing that I left the restaurant when I did.
After giving our name, Adam joined us on the bench. Ten minutes later Nia glanced impatiently at her cell phone. Five minutes later she started to stand up but I grabbed her and yanked her back down.
“Don’t do it.” Nia looked at me strangely and went to stand up again. “Don’t do it,” I repeated and pulled her down again.
“What?” Adam asked, looking up from his bags of goodies.
“She’s going to go ask the hostess where we are on the list.”
“No, I wasn’t. I was going to…” I tilted my head at Nia, “Ok, I was. But it’s been fifteen minutes!”
“She can’t make the people move. Don’t be one of the people I hated.”
Twenty minutes later the hostess had stopped giving us the encouraging looks she had been flashing us every thirty seconds in hopes of seeming like we were on the same team and lulling us into complacency. Five minutes after that she was hiding behind a column.
