I dream of flies, swarms of them lighting on me, biting at my clothes. Flies are the demons of people who live on the outside. They peck at you, crawl over your stink, feed on you, make you sick. I wake up, swatting blindly, and hear, “Stop.”
It’s Blue, kneeling next to my bed, pushing my swinging hands out of the way. Her hair falls against her face. “Listen. I need to tell you something.”
She tells me, “I did get away from my dad, once. Made it all the way to Indiana, of all places. Fucking Indiana.”
She tells me she was flipped on crack and working at an A&P. She says, My whole body was electric, like all I could think about was getting out of there, going back to my shit apartment and cutting and how much better I would feel, how I’d be able to forget this piece of shit job.
She worked faster and faster, trying to get all the cereal boxes on the shelves, organized and price-stamped. She was sweating, using her purple smock to wipe her face, when she started to hear laughter.
“Like, the store itself was laughing at me. The cereal boxes, the price-stamper, the fucking loading cart, the lights. The things in the grocery store were laughing at my stupid ass. Like, now even inanimate objects knew what a fucked-up asshole I was.” Her face is splotchy and her eyes are wet. “And I knew then, right then, that I was going to go home and kill myself. And. Here. I. Am.”
From the other bed, I can hear Louisa breathing. She’s awake, listening.
Blue pins those wet eyes on me and takes a deep breath. “The moral of the story, Charlie, is this: Don’t let the cereal eat you. It’s only a fucking box of cereal, but it will eat you alive if you let it.”
