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An Excerpt from Immaterial Girl

By

Michael A. Arnzen

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Copyright © 1998 Michael A. Arnzen. All rights reserved.

I hadn't seen Faye DeWhite since high school, so when she walked into Sears and started riffling through the lingerie hangers across the floor from me, I wanted to run right out of the store, bury myself in the mall crowd and find a vacant men's room stall to hide in for a couple of hours. But like everything else in my life, the job held me back: I had a family of three lick-combing one another's hair and adjusting each other's collar buttons like a gang of preening orangutans. They were standing below the obnoxious banner -- "8 8x10's for $8.10!" -- which sectioned off my so-called studio, and I felt that Faye would either spot me as an employee or figure I was there with my family. It was embarrassing either way. And doubly embarrassing to even be embarrassed, just when I was starting to get used to the everyday humiliation of sporting my dorky smock with the even dorkier name badge on it. So I kept my head turned away from Faye DeWhite, only stealing the occasional sideways glance when she picked something off the rack or moved to another department of the store, while I pretended to prep the big camera and ignored the monkeys in front of the mirror.

Faye looked good. Her hair was as light blond and frazzled around her almond-shaped head as I remembered it. She had grown up, obviously, but she still looked exactly the same. In high school she carried one of those faces that looked impossibly sophisticated for her age -- an adult face on a young girl's body, a soft form just waiting to be filled up with age. In those days, about thirteen years ago, she dressed like the other girls at Cheshire High, emulating Madonna's "slutty virgin" masquerade which was so popular at the time. And judging from the way she looked now, pert and pale in her long black leggings, long black sport coat, and faded black T-shirt, I could see the afterimage of that look on her thirty year old body. Either she still liked the style -- which gave her some charm, since it was old fashioned by today's standards -- or she had simply given up on fashion trends right after high school, and stayed with the look because she didn't know what else to do. Either way, she had apparently become the beautiful woman her mature face had always promised, and now she was standing within thirty feet of me.

"Okie-dokie, we're ready," the Orangutan Father called from behind me. I turned to face his family, who positioned themselves in front of the crushed violet backdrop. The color helped bring the veins out on Mother Orangutan's crossed, chubby legs. Little Boy Orangutan, bobbing on her knee in his high-water black suit pants, dribbled grape lollipop juice on her thigh. Father Orangutan swallowed his chewing tobacco and smiled.

I winced as I snapped the photo, swallowing my own spit. They winced from the blinding flashbulb. And then I was tapped on the shoulder and I jumped, pegging my eye socket onto the camera's viewfinder.

I turned and blushed, knowing it would be Faye before our eyes met. She cocked her head and crossed her arms. She was clutching a small purse in one long white hand, dangling a long cardboard price tag. "I bet you don't remember me, do you? You're Charley or something like that, right?"

It was a chance to lie. I took it and shrugged, wearing my best frown of confusion. I hoped she didn't see my name tag, which said Charley in big block letters.

"I'm Faye...Faye DeWhite?" Her head cocked to the other side. "Remember? We went to Cheshire High together?"

My cheeks flushed as hot as a water bottle. It was just like the old days, whenever I shared a hallway or classroom with her -- a sudden feeling of pure panic corked in a ceramic bottle. Back then, she never spoke a word to me; hearing her address me after all these years in a curious and somewhat needy voice seemed to cheapen all my adolescent suffering. And there was no way I'd be caught dead working in the local Sears store back then, so there was no reason to let her catch me now. "Sorry," I said, tearing my eyes from her silver moon glare. "You must have me confused with someone else."

Her scrutiny stayed on my shoulders as I turned and took cash from the monkey family. I wondered if she would remember my birthmark, the genetic blotch of brown branded on the back of my neck. I robotically handed the father a receipt with a computer-generated date on it, telling him that that was the day he could come pick up his shots. He nodded rapidly, making a face like he already knew how long it would take. I glanced over at the three-way mirror where his family had groomed one another, and saw Faye catching my eyes and then looking right through me, her eyes all wet and dilated, before spinning away from my gaze in a blur.

"I should have known better," I heard her mutter as her leather shoes clacked the tiles down the aisles away from me, the sound dissipating like the drops from a spout minutes after a shower. Her voice sounded genuinely sad and she had said the same sort of thing I myself would have said long ago, rejecting myself before ever even trying to talk to a girl like Faye. "What was I thinking," I heard her complain down the aisle, "Coming back to this place?"

I got the nerve to actually face her as she marched away. My head pulsed back to normal as she turned an aisle and headed for the mouth of the store that spilled into mallway. I felt better for about ten seconds. And then I realized what a gutless idiot I still was. I'd felt guilty for breathing since long before I attended Cheshire High. And here I was, working in the same Sears store in the same town taking the same pictures of the same old people ever since I graduated. I had nothing to lose by saying hello to Faye, who obviously might have had some fond memory of me. After all, she wasn't laughing in my face when she made her approach. She was smiling.

I had nothing to lose by running after her, except maybe my shame and a measly minimum wage job. I tore off my smock and ran into the mall.

When I finally found Faye, she was standing in front of a leather goods store window. It was a shop that I usually ignored, because leather jackets and all the other things they had were far out of my price range and no one who really lived in Cheshire would be caught dead wearing leather. Faye, however, was built for it. When I approached her, she was staring vacantly through the glass, transfixed by a biker chick mannequin in a leather recliner, with a stupid "Mom" tattoo magic-markered on her plastic forearm and a remote control in the other plastic fist. Too afraid to interrupt Faye's gaze, I sat on a wooden bench in the median of the mallway, uncomfortably positioned beside a stoned teenager with pins in his face and a purple crew cut. I watched Faye watching the dummy, like mutes having a philosophical conversation.

Faye continued staring at the mannequin until she noticed my reflection gawking at her in the window. Or maybe it was something else. Either way, she turned and lilted into the store, casually stripping the mannequin nude and slipping on its jacket and cap. No one inside the store seemed to notice her. Something about the way she did it made me blush -- her slow stripping of the plastic nude made me feel like I was watching a porn flick, and the apathetic punk sitting beside me made me feel perverted and old.

As I looked around the window to see where Faye had gone to, I noticed she had already exited the store and was crossing the mallway to a gift shop. It was so fast that she must have stolen the biker jacket. Inside the gift shop, she ogled doodads, slipping the ones that she admired into her purse. The purse with the price tag still on it. The one she had stolen from Sears right before my eyes.

She left the gift shop and I followed her from behind, totally in awe of how easy it was for her to shoplift and steal. It wasn't just that she never bothered to be covert that got to me -- she was the best looking woman that ever had graced this run down excuse for a mall, and no one was paying any attention to her whatsoever. Except me. I watched her pocket it all: from clock radios to Barbie Dolls. She simply grabbed things and held them for a moment, feeling them out and testing them, before exiting the store as if she were walking out of her own house in her own clothes with her own personal property. She didn't see me following and she didn't even bother talking to shop clerks and salesmen. In fact, they never approached her when she was inside, which seemed very strange to me. Mall clerks always confront their customers -- it's what makes them seem like they're earning their pay, even though they're really avoiding their jobs by talking to people and hoping the other clerks do the stock work and inventory.

Outside of a video game parlor, Faye finally caught my eyes. Instead of looking away, I stayed focused on her silver stare, which widened as I got closer and closer. When I was within an arm's length, she turned and ran.

Not knowing why, I gave chase, mimicking her path through the small crowd of teenagers in the food court, and ultimately falling back far enough to see her turn a corner that I knew would lead to the main exit and out of my sight. Something in my gut lurched, as if I'd not only lost her, but lost every chance I ever had. I almost gave into it. But then I kicked my legs into gear and doubled my jog to get around the corner.

And she was there, waiting for me right around the edge of the hall, her left arm akimbo. I nearly knocked her down when I rammed into her elbow, but she held her footing and then clutched me to keep her balance. Her new purse banged into my chest like a brick. Her grip seemed very strong for someone so thin-boned and waifish.

She held on and began consuming me with her eyes. "You do remember me, don't you?" Her question begged me to say yes. I wouldn't have lied if she were a stranger.

"Yeah," I said, trying to keep my cool. "But I don't remember you being a shoplifter in high school."

She shook her head as if her crimes were irrelevant. She knew I wasn't playing security guard. "You remember me. And you followed me..." She tightened her grip on my arms. "And you're here with me now."

"Uh-huh."

She didn't let go. She looked at her hands around my arms and then back up to my face. "Will you stay?"

I bent forward and looked in her eyes, hoping to find her logic, but I found only desperation in them. "Sure thing. I've got nowhere else to go."

She let go, but kept me pinned in place with her eyes. Her lips cracked into a flirty smile. "Well come on, then." She headed toward the exit, almost walking backwards, keeping me in her sight as if I were the one who'd been running away. I followed, curious and confused. I didn't give a damn about skipping out on the job. But I didn't know what I was doing. I felt like I had finally passed some unspoken existential final test that had held me back from the world all along, and that Faye had come to escort me through graduation.

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"Immaterial Girl." Copyright © 1999 Michael A. Arnzen. All rights reserved.

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