A guy came in right as Merry started crying herself stupid. I told him she had just found out she was pregnant and he scurried away.
There’s crying and then there’s ugly crying. And then there’s what this woman was doing. The amount of snot coming out of her nose was astonishing. There was some kind of blow-back that made it look like snot was coming out of her eyes at one point. It was really something.
I stood there and waited. Eventually she mastered herself enough to say that we could talk after her shift. I told her that this was probably more important than some douche getting monogrammed balls or an ugly hat.
We went and sat on a bench outside where she ate an edible out of a plastic baggie in her pocket and then took some deep breaths. She said that until I showed up, she had convinced herself that “it hadn’t actually happened, that her memory wasn’t real.
She said that she and her friends on the archery team (what kind of HS has an archery team?) had found this book of magic. After a few hard lemonades (you can’t even taste the alcohol!) they thought it would be “funny” to cast a spell from it on this “gross” guy who came to their meets and stared at them.
They didn’t think it would really do anything. They were wrong. The guy never came to another one of their meets. What he did do was start showing up any time they were out after sundown and begging them to undo whatever they had done to them. He said that the sun burned him and he couldn’t eat or drink anything anymore. Vampire stuff.
Merry and her friends in all their teenage wisdom decided the best course of action was to only go out during the day and wait until they went away to college and could forget the whole thing. Then Dave killed the guy and the problem was solved forever and they could go back to getting fingered by guys on the football team.
I wanted to slap the Christ out of her. But instead I just asked her where the book was. She said that she wasn’t sure, maybe her friend Pippa had it. I asked her where the book came from and she said she couldn’t remember. I accused her of lying and she started bawling again. She said that whenever she thought about the book, her memories got “wavy” and confusing. Like when you’re on mushrooms.
I tried to impress upon her how important it was that I find that book, but she seemed too wrapped up on feeling sorry for herself to get it.
