In Summertime Saga

The deodorant aisle at Consum-R had forty brands and all of them were wrong. I was holding a stick of whatever the kid whose body I was wearing had been using and it smelled like a chemical plant had tried to invent a mountain and given up halfway. The label said ARCTIC SURGE. The previous owner of this body had walked around smelling like Arctic Surge and apparently nobody had loved him enough to say anything.

I put it back. Grabbed one that said CEDAR on it and smelled like actual wood and cost three dollars more than I should have been spending, but I'd been wearing a dead teenager's deodorant for a week and the situation had become urgent.

Hillside Mall was bigger than the game had made it look. In the game, it was a map screen with six clickable doors, each leading to a single room with a single NPC and a buy menu. In person, it was two floors of actual retail under a glass ceiling that let in too much sun and not enough air conditioning. The ground floor had Consum-R at the west end and a food court at the east end and in between there was a comic book store and a movie theater and stores I didn't recognize that sold things I couldn't afford. Escalators in the center went up to the second floor where more storefronts lined the railing and a few people were leaning on it looking down at the ground level like they were watching fish in a tank.

I'd walked here. Twenty minutes from the house, past the school, past Tony's Pizzeria, past a stretch of road where the sidewalk ended and I had to walk on grass. My legs were sore from yesterday's delivery run and the walk hadn't helped and I was in Consum-R because I needed deodorant and a notebook for Bissette's class and those were the things I could afford with fifty-two dollars minus the three-fifty for the cedar stick in my hand.

Consum-R was a department store the way a gas station is a restaurant. It had aisles of everything arranged in no logical order, fluorescent lights that made everyone look mildly sick, and a clerk behind the counter who was reading a magazine and hadn't looked up since I walked in. The store sold deodorant and school supplies and swimsuits and milk jugs and bug spray and, at the back near the sporting goods, bikes.

I walked over to the bikes. There were three of them chained to a rack. The cheapest one was blue with a white stripe and a price tag that said $200 and the handlebars had grips that were already cracking. Two hundred dollars. Four more deliveries at Tony's rate. I ran my hand along the seat and the foam was thin and the frame was light and it was the ugliest bike I'd seen in either of my lives and I needed it more than I'd needed most things.

I couldn't buy it. I had forty-eight dollars after the deodorant and the notebook and that was three deliveries short and I was going to run those deliveries on foot like I'd run yesterday and my legs were going to hate me and I was going to do it anyway.

I grabbed a notebook from the school supplies aisle. Dollar fifty. A pen, fifty cents. I stood in front of the chip rack for too long deciding whether I could justify a dollar-fifty bag of chips when I'd skipped lunch and my stomach had been making noises since the deodorant aisle. I grabbed the chips. Salt and vinegar because those were the ones closest to my hand.

The clerk rang me up without looking away from her magazine. Total came to seven dollars and change. I paid and she handed me a bag and said "have a nice day" into the magazine and I left.

The mall was doing what malls do on an afternoon in summer. People moving through it at the speed of people who had nowhere to be. Two kids were sitting on the edge of the fountain near the escalators dropping pennies in and watching them sink. An old man was sitting on a bench outside the movie theater eating a pretzel and staring straight ahead with the intensity of a man who had been told to wait somewhere and intended to wait there until the heat death of the universe. Muzak was playing from speakers in the ceiling and it was a song I almost recognized, close enough to hum along to and wrong enough that humming felt like a mistake.

I took the escalator to the second floor because I hadn't seen it yet and because the food court was downstairs and I wasn't ready for the food court until I'd mapped the rest. The second floor was quieter. A gift shop with hearts and flowers in the window, a photo booth with a curtain that needed replacing, and at the end of the hall, a storefront with a pink awning and the word PINK in cursive on the glass.

I knew this shop. Same way I knew every location in this town. I'd clicked on it during a walkthrough. The Pink shop sold lingerie and toys and specific items for specific routes. Handcuffs for Jenny. A breeding outfit for Diane. A corset for Helen. Every purchase a quest step I'd completed with a mouse click and never thought about as a physical object in a physical store on a physical second floor of a real mall.

The window display was lingerie on headless mannequins. Black lace, red satin, a sheer purple piece that was more architecture than clothing. Behind the display, through the glass, a woman was arranging items on a rack near the back wall. She was facing the rack and all I had was her back and her hair, which was reddish-brown and wavy and fell past her shoulders, and she was tall and wearing a green crop top under a shop apron and a skirt that ended well above her knees.

She turned. Reached up to a higher shelf and the stretch lifted the apron and the crop top rode up and there was a strip of skin at her waist and the curve of her hip where the skirt sat. She was older than me. Late twenties, maybe. Grey eyes, a choker around her neck, and a body that the apron was doing absolutely nothing to hide. She was built like someone had designed her to sell lingerie by standing near it.

She looked through the window. Saw me looking through it. Her mouth curved and she raised one hand in a wave. A small one, just the fingers.

I waved back. Kept walking.

I didn't need anything from a lingerie shop. I had seven dollars less than I'd walked in with and the closest I was getting to lingerie purchases was the memory of clicking BUY on a menu screen. But I'd be back. Jenny's route would need things from that shop and Diane's route would need things from that shop and I was going to walk through that door eventually and the woman with the reddish-brown hair was going to sell me items I couldn't afford yet for purposes I couldn't explain.

The food court was back on the ground floor. Pizza that wasn't Tony's, limp slices under a heat lamp. A Chinese counter with a woman asleep behind the register. Burgers, closed. And a pretzel stand where the old man from the bench had apparently gotten his pretzel because the same brand was sitting in the display case. I sat at a table near the railing and opened my chips and ate them and watched the mall move below me from the mezzanine overlooking the ground floor.

A couple walked through holding hands. Both in their twenties, the girl laughing at something the guy said, his free hand gesturing to make the story bigger. A group of teenagers were clustered around the fountain filming each other on their phones for reasons I didn't understand and wasn't meant to. A mother was pulling a small child past the comic book store and the child was pulling the other direction with his whole body, feet planted, arm straight, fully committed to the losing side of an argument about going inside.

A group of girls walked past the pretzel stand. Four of them. My age. I recognized two from school but couldn't name either. One had dark hair and long legs and she was wearing a sundress and the fabric moved when she walked and for about three seconds it was the most interesting thing in the mall. She caught me looking and turned to the girl next to her and said something and the other girl glanced my way and they both kept walking and the moment was nothing and it was gone.

I ate my chips. The salt and vinegar burned the inside of my lip where I'd bitten it at some point and I ate them anyway because they were a dollar fifty and I was going to get my money's worth.

Everybody in town passed through this mall at some point. The girls from school. The woman arranging racks on the second floor. The clerk who read her magazine. The old man with his pretzel. You could sit here with a bag of chips and watch a town happen.

I finished the chips. Crumpled the bag. I had forty-five dollars in my pocket and sore legs and a notebook and a pen and deodorant that smelled like cedar instead of chemical mountain. Tomorrow I'd run another delivery for Tony and the number in my pocket would go up by fifty and I'd be one run closer to the blue bike with the cracking grips.

I stood up from the table. The food court was emptying out as the afternoon got late. The pretzel stand was closing its window and the old man was gone and the fountain kids had left a wet patch on the marble where they'd been sitting. I walked to the escalator and rode it down and passed through the ground floor toward the exit and the automatic doors opened and the heat outside was worse than the heat inside and I started walking home.

On the way out, I passed a gumball machine near the exit with a hand-lettered sign taped to it that said OUT OF ORDER - KEEPS YOUR QUARTER. Somebody had stuck a piece of gum to the sign.

I walked home. My legs were sore and the sun was lower than when I'd left and the shadows were longer. The bike at Consum-R was waiting. The woman on the second floor was going to be there when I came back. I'd be back.