August, 2011

    "Goodnight, Valerie!"

    Doogie turned and waved to the third-shift cashiers at Super 8 Supermarket. They were three elderly women — swallowed up by the checkout lanes and magazine racks that were as tall as they were — who insisted on calling Doogie by her birth name. When Doogie first started work at the cozy Super 8 who housed more character than it did canned corn and sat on the corner of Eighth and Jefferson nestled between a car wash and Al's Carpet Emporium, she found it difficult to respond to anything but the nickname Ever had given her in high school. Her co-workers would often repeat "Valerie!" countless times before Doogie would remember to respond. Finally, after almost four months at the supermarket, acknowledging both names became as instinctual as breathing.

    "Goodnight, ladies," Doogie smiled, and then she hung her apron on the hook beside the manager's office door.

    The manager of Super 8, Mr. Clarke, had been a childhood friend of Doogie's father. That was how she was able to charm her way into only working the weekends while she earned her bachelors degree before packing her bags and leaving Seabrook for an exuberant medical school stationed somewhere perennially sunny. She heard it was always sunny in Philadelphia, but that may have just been the moniker of a TV show. Either way, she wasn't interested in any of Philadelphia's schools. She used to have her heart set on Seattle, but it rained too much. Her parents and brothers found it especially comical that she would base her academic career on the weather, but Doogie persisted in her studying of the weather patterns in the areas of the nation's best medical programs. After Ever told Doogie, "The sun looks good on you," Doogie decided that she would follow the sun to whatever medical program it lead her to.

    With Ever in mind, Doogie wondered why she still cared about what Ever thought. It wasn't like their friendship ended on a bad note — it sort of faded away like the end credits of a movie after Ever met her boyfriend, Reese, during her freshman year of college and found herself too busy to spare Doogie a call— but Doogie hoped she was over that phase of her life. The phase where everything she did was in hopes of pleasing Ever and Iggy. Ever never pressured Doogie to be anything but herself, but it's hard to be yourself when your two best girl friends are absolutely gorgeous, unbelievably popular, and infinitely interesting, while the reflection staring back at you is mediocre, you're only relatively popular because of who you're friends with, and you think you're about as interesting as watching paint dry. Doogie hoped she would've gained more self-esteem by now. The only friend she still kept in contact with was Milo, and every once in awhile she would call him crying at three o'clock in the morning when her insecurities crept up on her like a thief in the night.

    It was cool and starless on this night in Seabrook. The roads were virtually empty, save for the bearded trucker that whizzed passed Doogie, who walked among the cracked cement of the sidewalk. Doogie smiled to herself at the thought of her brothers chanting, "Step on a crack and you'll break Mom's back," when they were kids, and so she hopped over each fracture in the pavement.

    A cool rush of late August air swept through Doogie's hair. She subconsciously wrapped her   pea coat tighter around her. She thought that maybe she should start driving her car to work in the coming chilly months, but she only lived a few blocks away and gas was too pricey to waste. Plus, her car's heater was in the midst of a six-month long temper tantrum with no signs of a behavioral adjustment in the near future, so she let the idea drift away on the breeze.

    Beneath the bright, buzzing streetlights, Doogie turned the corner where her apartment waited down the street. The tall buildings on either side of the street were so dark and daunting, with a network of narrow alleys in between, but she got used to them after awhile. When day broke and the shadows were cast away by the golden chariot of the morning sun, they were just oversized mounds of cut-out rock with cracks in between. Nonetheless, she remembered the can of mace her father forced into her purse the last time she went home for dinner. She never thought she would need it, but she hadn't had the heart to throw it out.

    All of a sudden, a gruff voice cut through the quiet night like a knife. It rattled Doogie's bones like a cage and nearly threw her off balance.

    "Got a lighter?"

    Doogie whorled around, her neck almost the victim of whiplash. In the alley beside the sidewalk was the tall, broad figure of a man. The shadows blended him into the blackness of the lightless alley between the long-closed pharmacy and the apartment building that was so empty that the owner ran monthly specials with ridiculous rent reductions just to attract tenants. She thought that maybe he was a new resident of the building, but she wasn't sure. She lived in the complex down the street, so he could've been the owner of that apartment building for all she knew.

    Even outside of work, she still employed her customer service mindset. "I'm sorry, sir," she smiled, "but no. I'm not a smoker."

    She made to walk away, to continue down the street where her apartment was a growing silhouette in the distance, but she was snatched from the sidewalk like a balloon on a windy day. The hard collapse of her body against the mildew of the alley floor proved to be far less gentle than a balloon. She felt a snap in her ankle, and she remembered all the times she sprained it in gym class. This time, it was different. It wasn't the dull throb of yesteryear's laps around the football field. This time, the pain was insurmountable.

    "That's all right, bitch," he grunted above her, his features still lost somewhere between the galaxies of the shadows. "You got somethin' else I want."

    She reached for her purse. The can of mace laid neglected at the bottom beneath all of the frivolous things she carried around; beneath the stale packs of gum, the used tissues, and the half-a-dozen forgotten chap-sticks. Her fingers grazed the leather —  the last thing she would really feel after that night. Before she could wrap her fingers around the handle, the steel toe of his work boot kicked it further into the alley. She saw the reflection of the wetness in her eyes on the purse's buckle as it slid away.

    He pulled her up by her hair, the follicles throbbing with an ache of emptiness as she felt some of the hair rip from her scalp. He shoved her face-first into the grime of the alley wall. She tried to push off of it, to throw her head back into his nose like she had seen during one of Jay's action-movie marathons. She hoped to break it, to buy herself time to get a good deal of distance between them while he coddled his wound. But her head only soared back through the vacant air. After connecting the figurative dots, he slammed her face into the wall. She felt a bead of blood from her eyebrow trickle down her face.

    He leaned close against her back, snaking a head around her head and over her mouth to muffle her delayed screams. "I've always loved the ones that fight back," he snickered.

    She would never forget the smell of him and the heat of his breath on her neck. He smelled of stale cigarettes, and sweat, and mustiness. She also got the faint aromas of dirt and of liquor. It was a unique combination that would plague her dreams for years. She would never forget the feel of his hands, either, as they ripped her clothes away, groping and molesting her skin. His fingers' callouses scratched sharply against her back while his slimy tongue lolled over her shoulders.

    Doogie squirmed violently, every muscle in her body screaming to get away, to run, but every time she would move, he would press her harder into the wall until her lungsnwere nearly deflated.

    When he ripped her underwear away, and she felt a hard bulge press against her thighs, she felt so dirty. So physically and psychologically unclean. No matter how many showers she took after that night, she could never wash the feeling away. To make matters worse, she was a virgin. Up until that point, she was as pure as winter's first snowfall. Afterwards, she felt that every part of her, every constituent of her body both inside and out, was filmed in thick slates of perpetual filth.

    What felt like hours later, after screaming her throat raw beneath the alternating hands that muffled every sound she made and feeling every atom of her being burst with a pain so indescribable in its wickedness, she was tossed aside like a toy whose owner found something else —  something better —  to occupy their time.

    His smile and his laughter as he watched her fall onto the alley floor was criminal. After zipping up his pants, he pulled a cigarette and a lighter from his pocket. He took a long drag before spitting on her naked, battered body. Then he left her life as abruptly as he came in, and with him he took everything that she once was. He took all of her liveliness, and her smile, and her appreciation for life. He left a stagnancy and a vacancy in the shell that he tossed onto the alley floor, a black hole in place of her heart.

    After his pounding footfalls faded into the darkness, Doogie laid there staring up at the sky drunk with dying stars. She thought about how someone somewhere else was looking at that same velvet sky and having the best night of their life.

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