I let Telly go on ahead of me so I can stop by a random convenience store. It’s as dreary and lifeless as the rest of them, with buzzing, flickering lights and shelves packed so densely that they’d be a nightmare for store employees to clean if any existed. It’s more like a warehouse or an overstock store than anything. I sidle my way between some aisles and pick out what I need. It doesn’t take long. There’s not a lot there.
Off-white nail polish? I’ll take it; I like doing my nails sometimes. Two cans of soda? I drink those on the spot and toss them away; they taste sort of like a placeholder knock-off brand, heavy on the malt and light on the acid, but in a way that I prefer over the name brands. A bag of bagels? Sure, I’ll take those too. There’s a pretty big can of peanuts, which should last me a while. I find a notebook with a white cover, but it’s small and the pages are hard to bend; I figure this one is still growing, so I leave it. And, finally, blessed, blessed alcohol. It’s a bottle of cheap ‘WINE!’, a white label over a black bottle, and the best wine is the wine you have. It’s mine now.
Just when I’m leaving the convenience store, eating a bagel in one hand and drinking straight from the bottle in the other, I catch a glimpse of pink, of spidery webbing, from the corner of my eye—deep in the alleyway. I stop; my feet skid on the screws, and my ponytail flutters from inertia. I gulp down the alcohol, its grapes washing down my throat while I shift my attention, a tick of my neck, to look down the dark alley.
The drawn-on blue features of Adol’s face stare back at me from her pile of trash. She’s digging through it with her hands, plastic wrappers strewn about her ankles and desiccated fruit peels crumbling at her feet. She’s frozen like a kid caught raiding a cookie jar, and there is, in fact, a stick of chocolate hanging out of her mouth. I spend a moment trying to visually follow how it goes ‘into’ the seam of a drawing, and can only conclude that the chocolate itself loses three-dimensionality at some point… “Looking for something?” I ask.
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She doesn’t even blink.
“Um. I’ll be going now,” I say, and take a single, tentative step away. The chocolate cracks, bitten off in her mouth; the two remaining squares fall into her upturned palm.
“I know what you fucking did,” she whispers, clear as day.
Here goes my heart rate again. Okay, okay, maybe she just meant I took something from the store that I shouldn’t have. “Were you trying to get something from the shop? Sorry about the soda, if—”
“You know what I’m talking about.” Her voice is quick, sharp, dripping with contempt that could bore a hole through concrete.
I swallow. “I didn’t know more people would vote for him.”
“And you didn’t stop us.”
“I didn’t know there would be an abstainer.”
She is not swayed in the slightest. Her eyes regard me like I’m a cluster of ticks. I get an apple core thrown at my face, mealy and brown; it’s so dry as to prickle me. I turn away, reflexively closing my eyes.
I rub my face and look back. She’s gone, a disappearance deeper into the alley, but her memory follows me with a face that I can’t just close my eyes to stop seeing.
She hates me. Why does everyone hate me so easily? How have these people survived for so long without voting for each other, when it’s so easy for them to flip to wild hate for each other? And what am I going to do now that I have another enemy?
