symphony of horror

mission recommenced

i sat at the picnic table and waited for lucy for something like two hours. over this course of time she would visit me periodically, baring some new offering from the food court: first a chocolate shake, next fries, last an egg roll, two fortune cookies and a sprite from the wok-n-roll. my well-being seemed to be her greatest concern. she cared for me the way i imagined she might have cared for a stray puppy, or a wandering orphan. i began to understand that my appearance in lucy's life was probably more excitment than she had had in some time. she'd drag over the other girls to meet me: to see what exotic thing she'd found. she was full of pride. if i wandered off to the bathroom without first telling her, she would chide me gently upon my return, telling me i had her worried sick. back at home i would probably have been put off by lucy's gushy, good samaritan, blondeness. i probably would have told her to fuck right off. but the ride with the smithfields had left me feeling lonely and disturbed. i needed this.

at the end of her shift lucy came bounding over to me with a giant fountain coke and a cinnabon. she said we should wait to eat the cinnabon until after we smoked some of her brother's weed. she handed me the coke and cinnabon, and threw my backpack over her shoulder. we walked over the grass out of the picnic area and into the employee parking lot. lucy had the look of an ice skater. something about her eye shadow and highlights and everything's-coming-up-roses freneticism. in her excitement she seemed to be gliding across the parking lot as if on ice, beaming out smiles like ice skaters do.

lucy's car was a vaguely sporty, dusty junker of an indeterminate blue. she said she hated her car and acted embarrassed by it. it was a hand-me-down from her older brother rick. i could have guessed as much from the startling number of cigarette burns in the seat cushions. rick had always hated the car, too as it was the product of ill-won compromise. he had really wanted a camaro, but his parents had refused him for fear that he might involve himself with potentially deadly drag racing, which had recently become a favorite pastime among the town's youth. rick and his parents had butted heads for three long months before they had bought him this car. the cigarette burns were his rebellion. lucy had inherited his car when rick bought himself the red dodge charger that he now drove, with money he had saved up from his job as shift manager at the local movie theater.

i sat in the passenger seat and waited for lucy as she cleared a space on the backseat for my backpack, which she nestled with great care among the accumulted trash: candy wrappers, empty soda bottles, a rumpled bag of mcdonald's remains, ateast three empty cinnabon boxes. when she sat down she yanked off her uniform hat and put it on the dashboard. she aimed the rearview mirror at herself, pulled a hairbrush from between the seats and ran it through her hair with intense focus -- over and over again. from the glove compartment she fished out blush and the kind of frosty pink lip gloss that is applied with a wand. she turned each cheek toward the mirror with exaggerated ceremony to access her pallor as she rubbed her giant blush brush back and forth over the strip of pink compressed blush powder. when she felt the brush was sufficiently loaded up, she worked the powder onto her cheeks in swiftly executed, tight circles. next she unsrewed the tube of lip gloss and pumped the wand up and down in the frosty emulsion. she brought the wand to her bottom lip and swept the foam tip of the wand from lower right to left and back again. then she pressed her lips together to spread the gloss from the bottom lip onto the top lip. when she when she was finished, she stuffed everything into the glove compartment, heaved an inflated sigh of relief, flashed me a smile and turned the key in the ingition.