It might have been in the way she smiled or the way she moved, but fact is the moment I saw that girl I knew I would want her for the rest of my life.
It had been a long time since I’d had a woman. Some part of me had given up. I was a cashier at a grocery store. I had been out of my parents’ house for two years. I rented a room. I couldn’t start college yet. I didn’t own a car. That was the number one reason why they all left. I couldn’t whisk a woman away on a romantic drive in a city bus.
I had given up trying. Maybe I could be happy single. I met plenty of people at work. The robot face, the robot questions, the robot voice, filled my entire existence. I pretended to smile till my face throbbed. I didn’t have a social life anymore. I had almost no friends outside of that place. The women I worked with chased sugar daddies. I chased customers. Most had rings. Most were taken. Most rejected me on the spot-the eye rolls, the glare, the gasp. The laughter. I pretended not to feel that pain. I pretended to smile on.
The Blonde changed everything in a way only a beautiful woman can. She wasn’t platinum, a fake. She didn’t strut in stilettos. She didn’t wear a tight dress with a mini-skirt. It was all 5’9” of flaunted girl in skater shoes and skinny jeans that hugged long legs and short black jacket over loose green t-shirt and a good curve. Her face was sharp enough to be striking and soft enough to be called beautiful. That afternoon I had register nine, the one with all of the gift cards and lighters and laser pointers on the metal rack feet away from me. When I first saw The Blonde she was poking her way through all of the different kinds of gift cards we had, arranged like a book in pivoting racks. She was going through all of the restaurants. She’s taken. She’s buying it for her sister, her broke dipshit brother. She pulled a card from the middle and dropped it in her hand basket. Her shirt failed to hide a good swing.
She rummaged through her basket. My stare remained unbroken. She felt it. Steel grey eyes popped up, flicked to the left to pretend to eye gum. She couldn’t hide it anymore. Thin lips were already quivering.
She looked at me and smiled.
Her eyes went back to her feet. I breathe in for the first time in five minutes. I lean over the register on my elbows. I hid the excitement in a small grin. I hoped she couldn’t hear my heart race from over there.
“I can take you, if you want me to.”
Somehow the wording was perfect. Somehow she tilted her head back and laughed and stepped up to my conveyor belt. That small grin was still there. It stayed when she dug in the basket and dropped her stuff on the belt. I eyed them for a second as a box of Wheat Thins and a bottle of Gatorade and toothpaste crawled toward me. Surely somehow they could serve as a conversation starter.
In another version she leaned over the counter and whispered that she’d let me take her anywhere I’d want her to.
Here her eyes flittered from the gum to the army floating at me to the kid checking her out. The smile was gone. She caught my eyes and her grin flittered back, fake, forced.
I got off my elbows to grab the Wheat Thins. The laser burning my eyeballs stopped to scan the barcode, the register beeped, I dropped it in the plastic bag down on my left.
“Find everything okay?”
Robot question. Real smile.
She shrugged. It’s probably the millionth time she’d heard it. She didn’t bother answering me.
She didn’t buy anything worth talking about. Nothing comedic. No book or video game or new phone or CD or anything that said anything about who she was as a human being.
Was. I need to remember to use that word.
The smile crawled on my lips. Hers was long gone. I said her total came to twenty-eight and change. I tried not to lean over the counter, spun the carousel her way, watched her dig in the latch-over purse for a 20 and 10 she slid into my palm. I kept my hand still. I waited for her to push back against my fingertips, for her skin to linger over mine for the one moment that would mean she wanted me.
She ran to pull her bag off. We had surveys I was supposed to push. I popped a dollar sixty two in the paper in my left hand, circled half of what I was supposed to.
Ten digits brave on warm paper.
Robot words. Pretending to give a shit about what I’d circled. Half of it was in her hand, half in mine, the other tapping what I pointed out. Hoping she noticed the paper tilted with scrawling on the back visible.
She pretended to thank me. She looked down at the receipt, at the change I slid into her soft palm. The girl’s smile was gone. Her face sat blank. Maybe she saw it. Maybe she was thinking about it.
The girl shoved it in her jeans pocket and slammed the bags in her cart and walked out the door.
“Bye, have a good night now,” I called after her. The long-gone southern accent dripped back into my voice.
She turned around to smile back at me and say thank you again. Maybe I still had a chance.
Another half hour before I could go home. The Blonde left at 3:30. It wouldn’t get busy till five. Half the cashiers begged the manager to be cut, turned in their drawers, left. There were almost no customers. They came in a soft trickle, like blood from a paper cut. Single mothers with little kids, the jobless buying the cheapest bread around, the packs of school kids who needed soda while in the area.
Fact is whenever I heard shoes squeak on tile floor I looked up and wanted the Blonde there. She had swooped around and gone back in the store. She was waiting for me.
The shift didn’t end fast enough.
Wait three days. That’s the rule.
Thirty minutes became one day became two nights’ boozefest became three long days, waiting.
It became a week.
She was playing a game. She was waiting on the other side of the phone. She was deciding when to call. She was trying to figure what to say to me. She was nervous. She knew how much I needed her.
She didn’t want me to forget it.
She was the girl in the gym window.
She was the girl checking her P.O. Box the Wednesday after.
She was a pair of long legs walking away, tempting me.
She was a whispering voice.
She was a soft sigh.
She didn’t own a car. She was stuck taking the bus everywhere, just like me. The Friday a month after I met her I sat in my favorite spot-the very back seat, an inch away from the motor that purred and moaned. I leaned my head back, let it rattle against cold steel, played my music near silent and people-watched.
It was empty for four thirty on a Friday. Most people didn’t get out of work till six. Three people on besides me-the chubby single mom in baggy sweatpants and her kid covered against the rain next to her. They hogged the sideways cripple seats all the way up front. The kid snored. The girl sat and piddled on her phone.
There was the silent old man in the Home Depot ballcap, balding grey hair and moustache covering scarred white skin. He sat two rows up, alone, ancient headphones over his head, eyes staring out of the window. It looked like a good seat. I told myself fuck it and hopped to a window seat in front of me. The rain slithered down the window. It was crying for me. Something out there missed her too.
I was a half mile from being dropped off alongside a hallway. I would walk home a quarter mile.
We glided by a long broken sidewalk. Empty. Then somebody popped up in the middle coming right at us like a scar on pale flesh.
A girl. The bus raced closer.
Start at the shoes, look up from there.
The blue skinny jeans. The loose t-shirt. The curve. The jacket up over her head. The blonde hair in loose locks around her forehead.
I floated by her on the bus, invisible. She wore the same clothes from three weeks ago. Same hair, same walk, same curve, the same loneliness in the gentle steps.
The same longing hidden under pale skin.
No one else noticed her. She didn’t see us. The bus was in front of a small plaza, fronted by an unlit gas station and flower store and abandoned pizza shop, rotting brown boards covering every opening. I hit the wire on the window, a soft ding from the front of the bus, the driver nodded at me without looking, pulled over, I said thank you, I stepped off.
The rain peppered me like shrapnel. I waited. I faced a bustling road. I looked left. The girl was still there, walking. I could see her shiver from here. The rain poured over me. I slid the ballcap on and walked after.
Yes. This was her. She was close enough now I could reach out and touch her.
The Blonde was close enough her blood dried on my shoes.
She deserved mercy. I cut her quick. I kissed her lips soft. Her hair didn’t clump under her. I spread it over her head, a halo, like she was already an angel. I refused to take anything from her except the cash and credit cards that would make it look like a robbery. She is already a piece of me. She will never leave. She haunted me before. She will haunt me after.
Now at least she has an excuse.
by 
Matt Mattila
Latest posts by Matt Mattila (see all)
- All That You Can - January 6, 2017
- Elementary Games - December 3, 2015
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Spirited writing!
So fortunate to
read your works.
You are so very
talented!
If this is the future of fiction I can rest easy tonight. Great story. I will be watching for more from this guy.