"Busy in here, isn't it?"
An awkward silence breaker in every way. I grinned, pretending to be witty, while I was fully aware that this was the only open line. The only people in the store were me, an old woman staring at the magazine rack, and the cashier, who probably hated me. The woman at the register stared at me with utter disdain, and I couldn't blame her. It was one in the morning in a random mile-wide hick town in the state of Indiana. Not exactly the most fun place in the world.
The store itself was on the verge of suicide. Parts of the ceiling had holes in it, the floor was dusty, and the light that lit the line's number sign was orange. I couldn't imagine what a girl like her could stay in the town for. Though I called her a woman before, she couldn't have been past her early twenties, a college student maybe. She was a pretty girl in a plain way, short black hair with bangs and a ponytail, and sapphire eyes that you couldn't avoid. Her skin was pale, so pale she seemed blue against the night sky peeking through the window. One ear was lined with studs and hoops, and while there were numerous holes in the other ear, only a single star and a safety pin hung down.
"Sonny?" I read as I stared at the name tag pinned to her vest. The way she stared at me, you would have thought that I kicked her grandmother in the shin. Maybe I had a hint of what could be mistaken for disgust in my voice, but really it was just curiosity. I had never heard of a girl named Sonny. My ID had been laying on the counter, ready for her to swipe, but we hadn't even gotten to ringing up my basket of items. The girl named Sonny picked it up, sneered, and looked at me.
With intended disgust she said, "Brian?" The girl could speak. Her voice was rather low and monotonous, born with sarcasm. The way that she looked, like a fairy or a pixie, whatever the difference is, I expected her to have a high-pitched squeal of a voice. The teenybopper voice that I heard more times than I wanted. "What's wrong with Brian?" I asked, smartened up to her game but almost offended by the tone she had taken.
Sonny shrugged and slapped my ID back down on the counter. "Nothing is wrong with Brian, unless you live with Donna Reed. Brian sounds like the name of the neighborhood kid that delivered milk bottles and groceries to nice housewives. You look like a Cleaver type of kid." Her sentences sounded like they were stitched together, the monotonous girl barely took a breath.
"What kind of name is Sonny, then? You make it sound like you haven't read your own nametag." The dark-haired girl began to ring up the things I had let sit on the conveyor belt. A bag of chips and assorted junk, a Jones soda, beef jerky and a few magazines. "Maxim? Really classy," Sonny commented as she scanned one of those magazines. I smirked.
"Sonny," she began, "is short for Sonata, and since you seem to know everything, you should know that a Sonata is a musical composition for the piano." I bet she got her rocks off by informing people about little things. She was probably the know-it-all in high school. Annoying or not, she was still an interesting person. You don't run into many interesting people in the middle of nowhere. "What does your mom do?" I asked as I watched her haphazardly drop everything into a paper bag. "She owns a thrift shop downtown." Downtown? I couldn't help but chuckle. Downtown had to be a yard away.
Sonny shoved the bag toward me, rushing me off to where I needed to be, but as far as I was concerned, I had all the time in the world. Everyone else was probably in a hotel anyway. I was an expert on driving all night to a show. "What about your dad? What does he do?" Sonny glared at my intrusive questioning. What was considered normal conversation where I came from, seemed like a nuisance to the cashier. "Forty years to life without parole. What about yours?"
Stunned, I stood there staring off into space. I had barely noticed that she was walking away from the line and pulling a cigarette out of the pocket below her nametag. With my bag in my arm and my ID in my pocket, I followed her as she speed-walked her way outside. By the time I was out there with her, she was crouched down by the wall of the building, the cigarette already lit and dangling from her hand.
"Sonata. It's a really pretty name. It has depth." I ran with the age old solution of covering up any questions I had asked before by complimenting her and trying to get her to forget that I had even said anything. Smart girl. I knew she wasn't buying it and I knew that it was stupid to try. Sonny took a drag from her cigarette. "Year fifteen. Robbed a bank, shot three people, two customers and a teller, and one of them died. He went to jail when I was four, so we came here to live with my grandparent. When I was younger he used to write to me about the musicians and composers his dad had him listen to when he was younger. He loved classical music."
With every word she said, I could feel the sting of peroxide in an open wound. It hurt. It really did hurt to hear her speak about her father. "What do you do?" Looking down at her all I could see was a mop of black hair and bangs, but I thought for a moment that I saw her smile. "Me?" It was definitely a smile. All she had to do was laugh, as cynical as it sounded, in order to give her secret away.
"I wake up every morning, make breakfast for my grandparents, and then go to the diner for coffee. Sometimes I stay at the counter and scribble all over my notebook, and sometimes I go help my mom at work. Then I go home, fix dinner for my family, and I come here. Then I do the same thing all over again just to save money to help the people I love and get the hell out of here." Sonny laughed that cynical laugh again. "I was planning on buying a bus ticket, like in the movies and that Guns 'N Roses video, but I don't know a bus that stops here. Now I have to buy a car and save for gas and all of that other stuff."
I might watch too many movies and read too many comic books, but as I leaned against the wall, and ashes dropped to the ground, I had a crazy little thought in my head. "Why don't you come with me?" Sonny scoffed in her crouched position, brushing off my suggestion at first listen. "Seriously. I'm travelling all the time. Right now I'm going to Tennessee and then I'm going to West Virginia. If you want to get out of here, I can drop you off along the way."
Sonny stood up, brushing stones and dirt from her jeans. I could tell that she was thinking by how her nose scrunched up in a peculiar way. "We're all alone in the middle of nowhere, late at night. Do you think I don't watch movies? You could just kill me right now and no one would know. You're not even from around here." True, but I could tell she was just saying things for the entertainment of moving her lips. While it was plausible, Sonny wasn't very concerned.
"I'm not a killer, I'm just a wrestler, which is the exact opposite. I get paid to be murdered every week." Informing people about my profession always came with the same couple of reactions. There were the people, mostly older women, that would shake their head and call me stupid, and there were the others that just stared. Sonny was one of those people. As she gave me a once over, I rolled her eyes and braced myself for the inevitable response. "You don't look like a wrestler."
Slowly I drifted to the car, dropping the bag in between the front two seats before settling myself in. Sonny smirked and dropped her cigarette, stomping it out with the bottom of her shoe. "Now you're in a rush?" She teased as she dropped her vest on the ground. She began to follow my lead, moving toward the car. "Sonny," I yelled from the crack of the window. She stopped and looked at me. "Can I keep the nametag?"
Within minutes, I was on my way out of that town and onto Tennessee with a strange girl and a nametag in tow. Sonny. I knew I wasn't going to forget that name.