"You cannot," Sari said, "keep wearing Clay's niece's sweatpants. I'm staging an intervention."
It was my third day. I'd survived two breakfast shifts at the counter, broken four mugs and one plate, learned that "over easy" and "over medium" were apparently matters of life and death to the people of Kalispell, and found out that I was very, very good at remembering orders and very, very bad at carrying more than one thing at a time. Sari had stayed late both days to "supervise," which mostly meant leaning on the counter eating fries and telling me about every person who came in.
"That's Dale. He's divorced, don't ask about his ex, it's a whole thing. That's the Pedersen twins, they're eighty-two and they've never once ordered the same thing on the same day, it's like a rule. That's the guy who comes in and orders just a single pickle. Nobody knows why. We don't ask the pickle guy questions," Sari said.
Now it was Sunday, the diner was closed, and she was standing in the doorway of my little upstairs room with her car keys in her hand.
"Clay's driving," she said. "He's got a Walmart list a mile long, and you're coming with, and I'm coming with, and we are getting you clothes. Real ones. That fit. Maybe a bra. Do you have a bra?"
I didn't know what to say to that, so I didn't say anything.
Sari's eyebrows went up, then down. "Okay. Definitely a bra."
* * *
Clay's truck was old and enormous, dark green with rust around the wheel wells, and it smelled inside like coffee and pine air freshener and dog, though he didn't have a dog. He used to have one. Buster. Best dog in Montana. Smell won't come out. Don't want it to. Sari and I squeezed onto the bench seat beside him, and he drove us out of the old downtown, past the courthouse that sat right in the middle of the road like the street had to bend around it, and up the long, busy highway north.
The buildings changed as we drove. The brick and the faded painted signs gave way to wide flat parking lots, and enormous boxy stores with bright names, and restaurants shaped like each other, and traffic lights that went on for miles. The mountains were still there behind it all, ringing the valley, their peaks still white with snow. They looked like they were politely ignoring everything humans had built at their feet.
Then we turned into a parking lot so big I couldn't see the end of it.
"Oh," I said.
"Yep," said Clay.
"It's so...," I said.
"Yep," Clay said.
"Why is it so—" I said.
"Nobody knows, honey. Nobody knows." He parked between two other trucks, almost identical to his. "Stay close. If you get lost, go to the front and ask for a manager, and I'll come find you. Like a kid at the mall."
Sari snorted. "She's not going to get lost."
I got lost within four minutes.
* * *
In my defense, the inside of the building was like nothing I had ever seen, and I have seen the inside of a nebula.
The ceiling was so high it was lost in shadows and metal beams. The lights hummed overhead, white and flat and buzzing, a sound I could feel in my back teeth. There were aisles and aisles stretching away in every direction, piled to the ceiling with things. More things than I knew existed. Shelves of brightly colored boxes. A whole section of nothing but plastic containers with lids. A wall of televisions, all showing the same man laughing on a boat. An entire aisle of pillows. Music came from somewhere overhead, a woman singing about love too cheerfully. A baby was crying two aisles over, and another one answered it from somewhere else, as if they were talking.
And people. So many people. Pushing carts, carrying baskets, arguing about paper towels, reaching past each other. A woman with gray hair leaning on a cane at the end of an aisle, her face pinched, her hip burning with an ache so old it had worn a groove in her. I could feel it from fifteen feet away. My hands itched.
I turned away from her and walked straight into the cereal.
This reproduction was taken from where the story was originally posted without permission, and reading there supports its author.
It was a whole aisle. I stood there with my mouth open. There were boxes with cartoon animals on them and boxes with pictures of fruit and boxes that promised to be good for your heart and boxes that looked like they would be very bad for it. Flakes. Puffs. Little Os. Squares of something with frosting on one side. I started counting them and stopped at forty because a man needed to get past me.
"Excuse me," he said.
"Why are there so many?" I asked him.
He looked at me. He looked at the shelf. He seemed to genuinely consider it.
"Choice, I guess," he said. "America." And he grabbed a box with a toucan on it and moved on.
Choice. I stood there a long time thinking about that.
Sari found me twenty minutes later. I was in front of a display of small potted plants, holding a little cactus, crying a little bit, because someone had bothered to grow it and put it in a tiny pot shaped like a cat, and I didn't know why but it seemed like the most hopeful thing in the world.
"Okay," Sari said, very gently, and took the cactus out of my hands, and then, after a second, put it back in my hands. "Okay. You can keep the cactus. Let's go get you some pants."
* * *
Clothes were a whole other problem.
Sari pulled things off racks with the speed and ruthlessness of a Watcher sorting souls. Jeans. Leggings. T-shirts in five colors. A flannel shirt "because it's Montana, and the law says you have to." A hoodie. A jacket that zipped. Socks. Underwear. And, from a section I was not prepared for, three bras, which she held up against my chest one at a time while squinting.
"Thirty-four B," she announced. "Maybe C. We'll try both."
"How do you know that?" I asked.
"Girl, I've been doing this my whole life. Into the fitting room. Go. Try everything. I'll be right outside," Sari said.
The fitting room was a tiny box with a curtain and a mirror. I pulled off Clay's niece's sweatshirt.
And I saw myself.
I had seen myself before, in a way. In the bathroom mirror at the diner, my face, my wet hair. But this mirror was tall, and the light in here was merciless, and there I was. A girl with long, wavy hair the color of honey falling past her shoulders and eyes a clear, pale blue, like sky just after sunrise. Skin that had never seen sun. A body that was simply a body, soft and ordinary, the kind that a hundred thousand girls had.
I turned, slowly, and looked over my shoulder.
The two small scars sat on my back, pale and thin, slightly silvery under the fluorescent lights. They didn't look like much. They looked like someone had dragged a fingernail down my back and the marks had healed wrong. You'd never guess what had been there.
I touched one. It was warm.
"You okay in there?" Sari called.
"Yes! Fine. It's fine," I said.
"Do you need help with the bra? Nobody knows how to do those the first time, no judgment—" she said.
"I'm fine," I said.
I was not fine. The bra had hooks. I did not understand the hooks. After four minutes of struggling with my arms bent behind my back like a broken bird, I made a frustrated sound, and the curtain twitched open, and Sari stuck her head in.
"Oh, honey," she said. "Turn around."
I turned around before I thought about it.
She stepped in behind me, already reaching for the straps. "You just hook it in the front and spin it, it's way easier, nobody ever tells you that—"
Her hands stopped.
I watched her face in the mirror. She was looking at my back. At the scars.
For a second her expression went completely still. Then something moved across it, quickly: shock, and a kind of anger, and then something careful and soft that slid down over both like a curtain.
She didn't say anything. She hooked the bra, gently. She tugged the straps straight.
"There," she said, a little too brightly. "Perfect fit. You're a thirty-four B. Told you."
"Sari—"
"Try the jeans next. The dark ones. They're gonna look so good on you." She slipped back out through the curtain. "I'll be right here."
I stood alone in the fitting room in my first bra, my heart pounding, looking at my reflection.
She'd seen them. The same thing Clay had seen in the alley, and she'd drawn the same conclusion, I was sure of it. Somebody hurt her. Somebody did something terrible. And just like Clay, she had decided not to ask.
I didn't know whether that made me feel safe or like a liar.
* * *
At the self-checkout, I lost a battle with a machine.
"Please place item in bagging area," it said.
I placed the item in the bagging area.
"Unexpected item in bagging area," it said.
"It's the item you asked me to place," I told it.
"Please wait for assistance," it said.
Clay was laughing so hard he had to lean on the cart. Sari was filming it on her phone. A young man in a blue vest came over, scanned a card, and pushed three buttons. He looked bored. I wanted to ask him how he could be bored in a place like this, a place where a person could choose from forty kinds of cereal and a cactus in a cat pot, but I didn't.
In the truck on the way back, with bags piled at our feet and my cactus in my lap, Sari leaned her head against the window and watched the mountains go by.
"So," she said casually. "Where'd you grow up, Eva Bell? You have literally never been in a Walmart. That's, like, statistically impossible. In Montana."
"I..." My face went hot. I could feel it. "Very far away."
"Like, another country?" she asked.
"Sort of. It was... very... sheltered. Strict. It was a very strict... community," I said.
Even I could hear how high my voice had gone.
Sari looked at me for a long moment. Then she nodded slowly.
"Like a church thing," she said quietly. "Like a compound."
I didn't say anything. I didn't trust my mouth.
"Okay," Sari said. "Say no more." She reached over and squeezed my hand. "You're out now. That's what matters."
On the other side of me, Clay didn't say anything at all. But his jaw was tight, and his hands on the wheel were tight, and I knew he'd heard every word, and I knew what they both thought now.
I hadn't lied. Not exactly. It had been very strict.
So why did I feel like I had?