Tandy Bowen doesn't have to pick between (cloakndagger) wrote in repose,
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She's chilling. The bathroom floor is her new bff and she's chilling with her back against tile and her head in her hands and she's waiting, OK. Nothing in this town is ever done until it's taken the last pound of meat off the bone, until you're slivers of shocking white and ground beef. What's going through her mind is all the places she could be aside from here. Amsterdam. Bora-Bora. Mustique. It takes over as she's thinking deliberately about sunny beaches and if reluctance could keep you from getting soaked up in it, Tandy would win. But it doesn't so, so sad, you lose.
She remembers nine. Nine sucked, as a general age. She remembers nine and hunger going hand in hand, the growth spurt and the lack of anything more nutritious than white bagged bread in the house. Maybe an apple, if they were feeling fancy, bruised and soft. It's a smart move, to find waitresses, to exploit sympathy. She always felt the kind of burning at the back of her neck, humiliation climbing up underneath the roots of her hair. Yeah no, she was still stupid at nine, but it's borrowed, this nine-year-old's memory, and the fight, the nails-dug-in grit of finding something to toss back in faces like kicking sand, she kind of wishes she'd had this kid's gumption.
It's the store that fixes it. Because she's been there. Enough times to know what this place feels like even when it's bigger, hollowed out with the weight of dread and expectation. She kind of wants to shut her eyes, put her face on her knees, somewhere in the bathroom where she ought to be but she can't. That's not how this works, and she's done the pick-up from places where mom's passed out in vomit enough times to know she wouldn't want anyone to see this shit.
She shakes it off when she's herself again, and she sits with her fingers braceleted together around her knees, and she tucks her cheek against one kneecap and sits there for long enough she hears the hum of the extractor fan dull down to nothing, waits for whatever next wave hits to take away the stripped-back, stripped-away feeling of disappointment so full it's gotta be outweighed with enough imagination to carry you.