by R. R. Banks
“I love midnight grocery shopping,” Nia said as the sliding doors parted before her and light that should have been accompanied by angels singing burst out toward us.
Of course, you do.
I blinked against the sudden contrast between the vibrant light and the darkness that we had been walking through in the parking lot as I stepped inside the store. The floors were shimmering from a new layer of wax that had just been put down by those hopeful workers who I felt must go into their shifts each night hoping that no one will do something as nonsensical as shop for groceries in the middle of the night and ruin all of the hard work that creates approximately 10 minutes of pristine perfection in the store. I had the compulsion to take off my shoes and slide down the cereal aisle in my socks, and knew that the craftiness of the 24-hour store was getting to me. I had to wonder what had happened in our society that created a need that could only be filled with the ever-present availability of high fat snack foods, high fiber cereals, and a fully-stocked pharmacy section.
I watched as Nia gathered several bags of Halloween candy from the towering display at the front of the store and then headed directly for a nearby table filled with pumpkin spice cake rolls, cookies, and all other means of autumnal sweets. It was that time of year when the combination of gourd, cinnamon, and nutmeg rose up and tried to take over all of civilization. I was fairly certain if I looked long enough I would find pumpkin spice dental floss and edible underwear. Possibly not in the same store, but likely similar customer bases.
Nia grabbed an armful of the sweets and then headed for the doors again, coming back with a cart so she could manage more of a haul.
“You want me to eat all of that and also wear three threads short of nothing to your party?” I asked.
“Is this a party that anyone is invited to?”
A slick, hinting voice from behind me made my stomach roll slightly. Nia glanced over my shoulder then at me, her expression incredulous.
“Are you serious?” Nia whispered, but my eyes were closed as I shook my head, trying to convince myself that this wasn’t really happening. “Is this guy actually trying to pick you up?”
Taking a resolute breath, I turned to face the dark, perpetually slumbering eyes that made me feel instantly self-conscious and brought a sharp pain into the middle of my chest.
“Hello,” I said.
A familiar, tugging feeling in my gut made me blush and scold my biological makeup for its shameless reaction to the man that was staring at me. The pain should be enough to take away that feeling, but it wasn’t. It was there, just like it always was, and I hated myself for it.
“Hi, there.” Gregory’s eyes scanned my body. “Are you heading home or just going out?”
“Home.”
How could he do this to me? How could he fucking do this to me? Just go away.
“Want some company?”
Why now? Why not three years ago?
Nia gasped, then became deeply engrossed in an investigation of the seasonal desserts.
“I’m sorry,” I told him, looping an arm through Nia’s and pulling her closer, “I’m having a slumber party tonight. No boys allowed.”
Gregory laughed the laugh that used to melt me and approached me. Cupping a hand around my face he leaned down to kiss me. His lips felt like they seared mine, bringing tears to my eyes and the same sick feeling to my belly. I had to fight the reaction that rushed up within me, not wanting to make a scene in the middle of the store. He brought his mouth to my ear, close enough that I could feel his breath on me as he spoke.
“I’m jealous,” he whispered and walked away.
I restrained myself long enough for Gregory to get out of the aisle before flailing around like a cat climbing out of water, trying to shake away the feeling of his eyes, his hand, his lips.
“Are you freakin’ kidding me?” Nia asked, sharply depositing another box of pumpkin pastry into the cart. She stared at me and then in the direction Gregory had sauntered for a second before adding a container of caramel and another bag of candy. “Did that man seriously just do that? I’ve spent three months planning a Halloween party in hopes of getting a little bit of trick or treat action, you don’t even want to go to it, and you still get a guy just ringing the hell out of your doorbell. Are you wearing some sort of neon ‘open’ sign that is only visible to men? And, if so, can I get the dealer’s number?”
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.
“Um….”
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 thoug
ht 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.