“Hey,” she said in back to Bernadette. “Those high school guys just ditched.”
Bernadette filled a soft drink and set it down. “Chase them,” she said. “Now’s your chance to scream at them. I’m serious. It’s an opportunity.” She pushed Chelsea toward the entrance, and Chelsea went there. “Call them names! It’ll feel good.”
Outside, they were across the parking lot, getting into a car, and Chelsea chased after them — vaguely, in a jog. She felt tired, but wanted to scream things. Maybe she should call them shitheads. She kind of wanted to wave at them. The air was warm and things were quiet, and she didn’t want to run anymore, but they’d think she was strange if she just stood there with a blank face — they’d say she stopped because of being too fat. She ran at the car and one of them put his head out a window and screamed something. His voice cracked. His mouth stayed open a moment and Chelsea looked for teeth, but there was just black space there, a hole on the face.
Back in Denny’s, Bernadette said she’d pay.
“I’ll pay,” Chelsea said. “They think I pretended I didn’t know them.”
“What are you talking about? I’ll pay.”
“Fine,” Chelsea said. “You pay.”
“I’ll pay half. But tell me where they live and we’ll vandalize their homes.”
“I don’t know them.”
“We’ll bury their mailbox in the neighbor’s yard,” Bernadette said. “This’ll be good. Causing destruction when it’s justified is good.” Chelsea’s mother left when Chelsea was in middle school. She had written a note, then one morning was standing by her car. She hadn’t ever smiled, really — they’d been a family of grinners and smirkers — but she did, that day, in the driveway, teeth white and glistening as something that in darkness would glow, and it made Chelsea, at the front doorway, smile, too; and she looked up and her dad was also smiling; and her mother drove away. It wasn’t so sad (except maybe in the way that all things are sad), as the three of them had never been close, but just mumbling and monosyllabic all the time, like an inwardly preoccupied people, distracted always by their own supposed alivenesses — how their wet hearts, placed there, behind the breezy hollows of the lungs, in the saunaish chest, warm and pressurized as a yawn, would sometimes (at night or in the afternoons, though sometimes over a few weeks, or seasons, even) feel tired and too hot, and then airy, and dry, and finally a little floating and skyward, as if wanting to leave, having realized, perhaps, wrongly or not, that life was elsewhere; or, rather, that their service was not to these lives, not to these single people, but to some history of people, already gone, faceless and sadder as some ocean in some night somewhere, not touching anything, or existing, even, but feelable, still, sometimes, cold and temperatureless, like a sudden awareness of time, of being actually alive; a sensation of falseness, really, of being lied to.
“You should be a bounty hunter, or something,” Chelsea said. “I don’t know.” In high school she got nervous around people, and spent too much time on the Internet. She began to stutter a little, and one Christmas her dad — who was a card-giver; had never bought Chelsea, or anyone, a present — ordered her tapes for social anxiety disorder and put them in her room. You were supposed to listen to them and do the assignments and become more outgoing and less afraid. Chelsea cried when she saw them. They didn’t talk about it. And though Chelsea listened carefully to all twenty tapes, and tried hard — making small talk with strangers, walking around in malls and making eye-contact with people, calling stores to practice her voice — nothing really changed, and she went to college in New York City, where sometimes, in bed and unsleepy, the rest of her life would quickly assemble and disassemble, as if some faraway eye had glimpsed the entire idea of her, by accident, and had not noticed, really, but subconsciously dismissed it, as an optical illusion; and where, most days, a keen, gray energy (this deadened sort of voltage — something of faux-sophistication, low-grade restlessness, and, in that she often had the urge to stop walking and curl against a building and sleep there and freeze to death, a passive-aggressive sort of suicidal despair) would move through her (though some afternoons around her, uncertainly, like she might be in the way, and then she’d just feel indistinct and hungry).
“We’ll chalk their driveways,” Bernadette said. “We’ll write, ‘I am inside your house and will kill you.’ Then draw a ghoul. I’d freak out so bad.” She laughed. “We did stuff like that in high school. I miss it.”
After college, with her higher-education unassimilated and separate and dully stimulating as tropical fish — darting, slowing, and then not floating to the top but just sort of self-destructing — in the light-reflecting pond of her mind, Chelsea returned home to Florida, sat around the house for about a year (eating things, mostly), and, as a way to get out more and maybe make some friends, then, got a job at Denny’s.
That was in November, and now it was March, and Chelsea — the water of her mind lately fishless and still, though occasionally something enormous and blurry like the Loch Ness Monster would roll through, in a sort of cartwheel — still got nervous at work, most days had to sit in her car, breathing deep, from the stomach (little towels of air, warm and wrapping against the heart), before going in. But she was glad to have some social interaction, so as not to lose herself completely, as one could do that, she knew, could toss one’s life in a pile, like a nail clipper, with a lot of other stuff. It could get thrown out, by accident. And then you had to get a new one. But it wasn’t as good. Or maybe it was better — maybe sometimes it was better — so good you couldn’t remember the old one anymore.
After work, Chelsea didn’t want to go home, and called her dad. “I’m going to Wal-Mart first,” she said. “I might try on clothes.” A hat. Maybe there’d be a nice hat. “I might go to the bookstore too. So don’t worry.”
Her dad said he found a white dog. He said something about the stock market, and to buy a movie for him.
In Wal-Mart, the lights were bright and everywhere like in a surgical ward, though also cheap and paneled and vaguely irradiating like in an elementary school or TV UFO. Chelsea felt disembodied and wandered deep into the clothing section, then went back to her car, and then back in Wal-Mart, to the side of the store not the clothing section, where she found a discount bin, leaned over it — kind of wanting to climb in, like a kid — searched a while, and found a foreign movie she’d seen before, in college. She had downloaded it one night in her dorm room and watched it off her computer screen. It was about a man who suffered from existential despair. He suffered and suffered, and then someone shot him twice in the chest.
“This is a movie to watch on Halloween when the kids are out trick-or-treating,” said the register person, an old lady.
“Oh,” Chelsea said. “Why?”
“The film’s on sale,” said the old lady.
“It is?”
“First nothing’s on sale. Then five things. Then everything is free.”
“Oh,” Chelsea said, and almost said, “Cool,” as she had a thing — back in college, mostly — where she’d say, “Oh,” wait a moment, say, “Cool,” and then grin self-consciously. It was her way of saying, “I have no idea how to respond to what you just said. I have no idea, but other people, I’m sure, do. It’s my fault, not yours. I know I seem disinterested, or something. You shouldn’t trust that. I just didn’t know how to react. The grin means I’m amiable.”