The cold swish of air-conditioning flows over her, and she stops and closes her eyes to savor it for a few heartbeats. She’s gotten so acclimated to the hot, still air of Mr. Reese’s house that she realizes now that she forgot to turn on the car’s AC, just rolled down the windows and let the heat soak in. Funny, how quickly a person grows accustomed to their situation, like an animal in a cage that stops trying to escape. She read once that baby elephants were taught they could never break the chain that tethered them to the ground, and therefore older elephants who could easily break the chain never tried. She’s learning that life is full of people sitting sadly beside their fragile chains.
“Good morning, beautiful,” the guy behind the counter says, and she smiles tightly and dives into an aisle before he can ask her some inane question or start the usual awkward, skeevy, complimentary small talk guys in their fifties have with girls a third of their age.
She quickly realizes she’s in the perfume aisle and doesn’t have a basket or cart but is too embarrassed to walk the gauntlet past the counter guy and hopes she’ll find something along the way to carry her groceries. She finds the food aisle and winces at the prices; things cost double what they used to, thanks to cascading economic fallout from the first pandemic and now the Violence. In other parts of the country, the supply chain is back to normal and prices are reasonable again, but in Florida, they’re still unnaturally high because shipping companies demand more to travel down here—that’s what her economics teacher told them, right before she left school. People who get the Violence while driving tend to cause massive wrecks. Ella hated economics, and all she knows is that a box of drugstore-brand crackers should not cost five dollars, and she’s going to have to carefully consider prices instead of just grabbing Cheetos like she would’ve back when her parents were footing most of the bill. Cheetos, she knows now, are basically puffed air and don’t provide much bang for her buck.
Around the next aisle, where the canned foods are, she sees a basket on the ground and looks up and down to see if anyone has claimed it. The only thing in it is a case of beer, which is not something she can actually use, so she’ll need to go put it back in the refrigerated section. Even in a pandemic, infected with a disease, Ella is not the kind of person who could just leave someone else’s case of forgotten beer in the middle of the aisle.
She’s reaching for the basket when someone says, “Sorry, that’s mine.”
Ella snatches her hand back and flushes and tries to remember how to word.
“Oh. Sorry. I just thought. I mean. Sorry?”
But the other girl doesn’t look pissed. She looks exhausted. She’s in her twenties, taller and thinner, Japanese with her hair up in a messy bun and smudged glasses. She’s wearing a drooping dress, black with white flowers, and Keds with no socks. She looks like she just stepped out of a 1990s sitcom and hasn’t slept in a week.
Ella stands back, puts her hands up. “Really. Sorry.”
The other girl smiles and picks up the basket. She has the calm, earned confidence of an Instagram artist. A beret would work perfectly for her. But she seems sad, too, and so tired, like if Ella pushed her gently with a finger, she’d keel over like a felled tree.
“Are you okay?” Ella asks.
The girl cocks her head. “That’s an awfully weird question to ask during the second massive societal trauma in five years.”
Ella flushes. “Yeah. Sorry. You’re right. Weird. And too personal. I…uh, haven’t been around people in a while. Excuse me.”
She turns and blunders past the counter guy to get a basket, then disappears back into the aisles before he can finish asking her if she needs any help. That was completely mortifying. She feels like some escaped forest child no longer fit for society. She didn’t even brush her hair today, although if she’s being honest, her hair looks good no matter what. She lands in the cracker aisle again, but at least there’s no one here, so she grabs Saltines and cookies and bread and peanut butter and checks to see if jelly is shelf-stable, but it isn’t.
Her thoughts flash back to Mrs. Reilly’s house, the air-conditioning and cold fridge and plentiful ice. Then they flash to Uncle Chad, dead on the floor. The police knew he was dead, so they must’ve collected his body. But they probably didn’t clean up, and they’re probably checking back in. Or calling Mrs. Reilly’s daughter. Something.
She wants to go back, but she can’t. Someone else will come.
It’s not safe.
She’s tried the houses of other past clients, but nothing else is empty.
She puts the jelly back.
There’s no way to make Mr. Reese’s house any better, no way to get that refrigerator running, and she’s not yet ready to just start randomly knocking on the doors of abandoned houses, hoping like hell no one will answer and spending that first night alone and awake waiting for someone to return and…what, get her in trouble? It’s hilarious that that’s still what worries her.
She feels like a little mouse, and every direction she runs, there’s something scary. She’s so sick of being scared.
She can’t live off this kind of food forever. She already has these annoying ulcers in her mouth. Maybe she should buy some cheap kids’ vitamins.
But for now, just the picture of Cheez-Its on the front of the box makes her drool. They’re pricey, but she wants them so bad. She puts the box in her basket and peeks around the corner to see if the other girl is gone, which she is. Ella is reading a soup label, imagining the luscious chewiness of beef between her teeth and trying to picture what stew will taste like at room temperature because she has no way to warm it up, when she hears the girl’s voice again.
“Hey, I didn’t mean you were weird. I just meant…most people don’t bother to ask how strangers are anymore. It’s nice.”
Ella looks up, and the other girl is in her aisle now, holding her basket in both hands in front of her knees, her head cocked curiously.
“Like, you don’t have to freak out. We’re all weird now, you know? It’s just nice to have someone actually see you and inquire. So thanks for that.”
Another person arrives and stands slightly behind the girl. Ella can’t tell their gender or if they even conform to one, but they’re tan and brunette, about her height, stocky, with a kind of rooster-y haircut and a loose, ragged sweater worn over a T-shirt, skinny jeans, and Docs.
“Hey,” they say, their voice low and brusque and their eyes alight like a crow. “You infected?”
Ella stumbles back a step, her eyes darting around for escape.
That is not a question you’re supposed to ask these days, much less answer.
“No, don’t freak out,” the first girl says like she’s talking to a scared dog. “It doesn’t mean what you think it means.”
Ella looks down at the soup can in her hand. She’s not done shopping. She needs this food. She doesn’t have the energy or brainpower to go elsewhere. But these people are…scaring her? It’s funny, because on the surface, they’re not threatening at all. But asking that question causes her entire system, body and mind, to go into panic mode, which is not good. Malnutrition, sleeplessness, extra stress. She would hate to storm in here and hurt the nice girl—or get shot by the security guard.
“She looks hungry,” the brusque one says, as if Ella really is a skinny, skittish stray dog
“She looks scared,” the tired one corrects. “Are you scared? You asked me if I was okay, but are you okay?”