*****
Darci stood in front of a two-for-one snack rack at the Pump and Go, debating what to steal.
She let her mind create a fantasy around the cookies that cost fifty cents more than the other cookies, which cost fifty cents less.
There must be something special that comes with that price tag, something that would fulfill her more, give her fifty cents more inner worth than she had before consuming them. She definitely wasn’t a bargain shoplifter, and a quick grab and tuck had the package inside her oversized front sweatshirt pocket. Utah fashion was the best for shoplifting. They should call it the shoplifting state, she thought. A crafty smile passed her lips – for a moment the crime was her life - and it was going well. She looked up at the clerk, an older lady with thick rimmed glasses and hair that stood on end with lift from some beauty product that really should have been recalled. Something on a fuzzy black and white TV above her shoulder caught Darci’s attention. It wasn’t the checker-box surveillance camera monitor that had certainly just caught her master crime on tape – it was the news report. A girl was being led through a crowd of reporters, blankets wrapped around her body. She babbled in a language incoherent to almost all of the listeners, save Darci.
“It was Blue, and his eyes. Blue eyes – bleeding on tile. There wasn’t sex – pain is Blue. Sky Blue.”
Her sluggish steps through the crowd of reporters were also familiar to Darci, except in her memory there were no crowds and no blankets. Darci read the name below the video image, but the letters were out of place, all wrong. Darci knew something about the girl that no one else did. Tracy didn’t notice the crowds and she couldn’t feel the blankets. The chill that froze her mind and body couldn’t be seen, or warmed from the outside.
“That girl, that girl was me.” She approached the cashier, leaned over the counter, getting as close as she could to the screen. “It should say Darci.” It was at that moment that the broadcast cut to commercial and it was like the strings of a puppet were cut. Darci staggered backward, no longer drawn toward the image on screen. A trained eye would have seen the anguish and loss in her stare. An expert might have diagnosed the situation as significant and delicate.
The clerk was not a trained eye, “What you been drinking?”
Darci dug into her stuffed pockets and offered up a bribe. “I’ll give you back these cookies if you let me use the phone. I need to call the FBI.”
The cry for help was met with the unending compassion of a convenience store clerk. Actually compassion overstates the sentiment, tough love without the love. “Put those on the counter and if I see you in here again I’ll call the cops, they might have the number for the FBI.”
There were at least two people in the world that could have entered the shop that would have made the standoff between Darci and the clerk even worse. And in one of life’s shit-cannon moments, they happened to walk through the door at that moment.
Darren and Bone Pike were brothers, stoners and founders of the Ski Bikini Appreciation Society of Greater Utah. Their father, a former federal prosecutor, was a partner in the most prosperous firm in the state. They looked like the standard-issue, youth culture shit heads, but in reality they were a caricature drawn in green ink, dripping money.
Bone burst in the door holding his breath. The game was called Convenience Store Gauntlet. He was going to try to keep it held until he’d bought four different items from four different rows of the store. This test of skill and speed was the fresh brainchild of Darren who expected his brother to yack before making it to the counter.
The frantic ransacking of the shelves broke the silent standoff between the clerk and Darci. Whatever might have been said was now buried. In the time it took Bone to hit the counter with four items and unload a sustained rancid burp fueled by the gush of air leaving his lungs, Darci found her legs and began to back her way to the door where she intersected precise spot where Darren was doubled over in laughter.
“Tha- that was awesome dude. Whoah.” Darci bumped into him. She turned and was face to face with nervous, pale shale gray eyes. Darren flipped his long stringy hair out of his face and some of it tangled in with hers. It was like their hair had an idea that neither of them had the time to follow up on at that moment. She was losing her balance and Darren reached out an arm to steady her. “Sorry babe.”
Darci snarled, “Get off of me.” and shrugged off his hand. A package of cookies fell out of her front pocket.
The clerk trumpeted behind them. “She’s stealing, stop her.”
He knelt down and picked up the broken cookie, it might have been her skewed impression, but he seemed impressed that she was stealing the expensive ones. Darren made no move to restrain Darci; rather, he gave her a nod of appreciation and returned the cookie to her pocket. A wink said that finding out she was a thief was cool.
Darci said, “Pay for these and I’ll find a way to get you back. I’m around.” She didn’t wait for an answer pushing her way past him out into the cold.
Darren nodded at his brother who rocked back and forth a little unsteady from the oxygen deprived head rush. “Pay the lady.” Bone pulled out a stack of twenty dollar bills from his crotch pack and dropped a couple on top of his purchase: a bottle of drain-o, a candy bar, toilet paper and a package of replacement windshield wipers. He then proceeded to vomit on the whole stack.
Needless to say, there was no drain to fix, or car needing wipers. Life was a pointless game for the brothers, and there were no rules.
Bone staggered toward the door. Darren watched Darci through the yellowing weathered plastic sheets that made up the nearby bus stop enclosure. A bus pulled up and she waved it on. He let a shiver of the outside world into his reality for just a moment, it was as close to maturity as he allowed. A craggy voice screeched over his shoulder.
“That little snow angel’s a tramp, bona fide tramp. She made fun of that poor abducted girl on TV.”
“How?” Bone was always looking for a laugh.
“She wanted to make a prank call the FBI, tell them that she was the same abducted girl too or some damn nonsense.” Bone remembered his change and walked back to the counter, “You don’t get any, I don’t know what else she had in her pockets.”
Bone shrugged, he was pretty certain that Darren had loaded his pockets with candy. He flipped the earflaps on his hat down and trudged toward the door. Darren held the door open, then the as he passed lunged into his body bumping him into a display stack of oil cans outside the door. The cans scattered, snow flew up in a cloud and when it settled the boys stood staring back into the store, posed in unbelievable enthusiasm, like they were in a Mentos commercial, holding stolen candy flipping off the clerk.