Meredith had never seen a gun in real life before, except for maybe in a policeman’s holster, but this thing in the man’s hand looked exactly like every single gun she had ever seen on television, so she didn’t doubt that it was real. The man pointed the real gun at the sandwich farmer and said, “Open the register, fat ass,” which didn’t make sense because the sandwich farmer wasn’t even fat. Lisa Bellow let out a little squawk, and the man’s head swung toward the girls.
“Get on the floor,” the man said. His voice was muffled by the mask, so it sounded more like “Gone the four.” It also wasn’t clear who he was talking to, so Meredith only crouched down slightly until she saw Lisa Bellow getting on her hands and knees and then she did it, too, and felt—astonishingly—a stab of embarrassment that she had not been able or willing to do it herself initially and instead was following the lead of Lisa Bellow. What was wrong with her? This was a robbery. The Deli Barn was being robbed. The Deli Barn was being robbed and that was all and she didn’t have to worry and there was nothing wrong with her.
As she lay down she caught a fleeting glimpse of her left wrist, Steven Overbeck’s drawn-on watch buckle, blue ink already fading, joined at her pounding pulse. Her backpack was still on her back and it was incredibly heavy—her Algebra II book alone must have weighed five pounds—and it shifted and settled awkwardly across her upper back once she was flat on her stomach, its weight suddenly immense, like the weight of a whole person with his foot pressed into her shoulder blade.
Because she had been at the bread station, and Lisa a few feet ahead at the condiment station, when Meredith lay down she and Lisa were face-to-face, though their feet were pointing in opposite directions, Lisa’s toward the front door, and Meredith’s toward the potato-chip rack. The floor was cold and smelled like dishwasher detergent. Meredith could hear the sandwich farmer breathing and the jiggling of the cash register drawer.
“You know the safe combination?” the man with the gun asked.
“There’s no safe,” the sandwich farmer said.
“You wanna die in this shithole?” the man said. “Is that what you want?”
The sandwich farmer started crying, or at least it sounded like crying, or maybe hyperventilating. Meredith wasn’t sure because she couldn’t see anything except for Lisa. Lisa was crying, too. Her lips were trembling and slimy with spit, and thick teardrops slid down her cheeks and puddled on the floor about six inches from Meredith’s nose. Meredith could feel Lisa’s breath as it came out in hot little puffs. Meredith wasn’t crying. Her eyes felt dry and sore, like she’d been staring at a movie screen for a long time without blinking. In her mind she saw a picture of her and her brother sitting on Santa Claus’s lap at the Parkway Mall. She was two or three years old, and her hair was clipped back in green barrettes that were shaped like Christmas trees.
“Swear to god,” the sandwich farmer said. “I swear to god there’s no safe.”
“Show me,” the man said. “You show me.”
Meredith heard them walking into the back room. Somebody’s shoes were squeaking (sneakers), and somebody’s thunking (hiking boots). Now it would be okay. There was a door back there, to the outside—Meredith had seen sandwich farmers smoking by that door before—and the man with the too-long hoodie would see there was no safe to open and then he would run out that back door with the money he’d taken from the cash register and he would go far away, first to another state and then probably to another country, and no one would ever hear anything from him again. It would be a clean getaway. That’s how it would be described in the newspaper tomorrow: a clean getaway. Vividly, as vividly as anything in the Deli Barn, Meredith could see her family sitting around the breakfast table, her mother reading aloud from the newspaper article: “It was a clean getaway.”
Meredith licked her dry lips. “It’s okay,” she whispered to Lisa Bellow. She couldn’t remember a time she’d been so close to someone else’s face for so long. And it was especially weird because their eyes were almost perfectly in line but the rest of Lisa was upside down. “It’s okay now. It’s okay.”
Lisa’s mouth opened like a word was going to come out, but only a little wet pop came from between her lips. Thick black mascara lines connected her eyes to the floor. Meredith thought of the scorching tennis court that summer morning, all those years ago, Lisa’s lip gashed, the blood spattered on her white Nike tennis shirt. Had Lisa cried then, there on the court, or after, walking across the dry brown grass to the Snak Shed? Meredith didn’t think so. But back then there was no makeup to ruin, no face to distort so colorfully, so maybe she had, a little. Maybe, their backs propped against the Shed, Lisa had held the Baggie of ice to her face and in doing so shielded Meredith from the brimming tears in her eyes.
The thunking feet, the hiking boots, returned. The steps were heavy and unhurried. No squeaking accompanied the boots. The boots were alone. Meredith couldn’t see him, but when the thunking stopped she was pretty sure the man, the robber, was standing right behind her head, between her and the counter. He had come back without the sandwich farmer. Meredith had heard no gunshot, but something had happened in the back room and now it was just the man with the too-long hoodie and her and Lisa. And now Meredith was absolutely certain of something, as certain as she’d ever been of anything in her whole life, and that thing was as far from what she had just said to Lisa as a thing could be:
It was definitely not okay.
It was definitely definitely definitely definitely not okay. It was not okay now, not anymore, not ever again, because the man was going to kill her. He was going to shoot her in the head as she lay on this floor. This spot, this very spot, was where she was going to die. She would never see her mother or her father or her brother or her cats or her room or her toothbrush again. In a moment she was going to be dead. Now she was completely alive but in an instant she would be completely dead and she wouldn’t even know it, it would just be over, and she wouldn’t even know it was over because she herself would be over, and all the stuff in her brain—all the thoughts in her brain right now, right this second—would just be a big sticky mess on the floor of the Deli Barn. And it was now—now—now. It was this instant—no, this instant—this instant—this—
—this is me. This is really me. This is my real life.
She realized her eyes were closed, bracing for the impact of the bullet, and she wanted to see the world one more time—even if it was just a crappy old Deli Barn—so she opened her eyes and there was Lisa Bellow staring right at her.
“Don’t worry, Meredith,” Lisa said. “It’ll be okay.” She didn’t even whisper it. She said it in a normal voice, as if nothing were wrong, or even out of the ordinary. She had stopped crying. Her cheeks were dry. Something in her face made Meredith think she was about to smile.