April woke up to sunlight in her eyes, coming through the window at a low angle. Her head was pounding and her muscles ached. She got up slowly and went to the bathroom. It seemed like she could still hear the echoes of last night's sobs in her ears.
What was it she was supposed to do today? As she stood in the bathroom with her bare feet on the cold tile, she realized that there wasn't anything she had to do. Normally that would be cause for happiness, but now it was different; she had no job, and she and Andy were separated. What to do was up to her, but this was a cruel joke; it was only up to her because there was nothing worth doing.
She wanted to go wake up Ann, but she knew it was far too early for that – Ann would be working the late shift again tonight. She wanted to go back to sleep, but she couldn't; the rawness of being awake didn't leave her with enough peace of mind to go back to bed. She thought she might be able to fall back asleep, if only she could sleep in Ann's bedroom. If she could hear the soft inhale and exhale of her breath, and be just an arm's length away from her, she could sleep. God, how pathetic had she become? Not only did she need to be around Ann all the time, now she had to sleep next to her, too.
If she was going to stay up, she'd need some music – in fact, there was one song that she wanted to hear. She looked around the couches and the coffee table for her iPod, but she had set it down at Leslie's when she saw Andy, and hadn't brought it home. If she went back to Leslie's, she might run into Andy. Could she deal with that?
She sat down on the couch. What would she do for the next six hours while Ann slept? She took in the stillness of the room, and everything was a vacuum, a place for Andy's pained voice to echo loud against the silence. No, she couldn't be alone that long – she'd have to take the chance. It was a long way to walk to hear one song, but she needed to do something, and this was the only thing she could think of. With Ann asleep, it was the only thing left.
She quietly closed the front door and started on her way to Leslie's. The day was warm and bright, and it took a minute for her eyes to adjust. After a while, she was outside of Ann's neighborhood, and walking on the edge of the sprawling shopping center. To her right she heard an awful high-pitched grinding, and saw someone pushing a shopping cart far from the store. The cart's wheels had locked up. The man shoved the cart forward push by push, the wheel screeching against the concrete. He kept his head down, putting his shoulder into the bar of the cart to make it go. Of the few people crossing the street, none paid attention. The man looked up at her; she realized she had been staring, quickly looked down, and kept walking. There wasn't much to see, anyway. There was nothing in the cart.
There weren't any clouds in the bright blue sky, and she was starting to sweat through the back of her dress. She noticed absentmindedly that a rock had lodged itself in her shoe, and walked for a block debating whether she would get it out or not before she got to Leslie's house. She didn't exactly mind the discomfort , and after last night, she figured she had no more pain left. It was an interesting sensation, after all. The pain wasn't sharp – that would have been too vivid to get through the wall she had put up. The rock in her shoe reminded her that she could feel something, after all. Maybe that's why she didn't mind the discomfort.
Or, she thought, maybe she deserved it.
It was getting closer to midday and there were more people out now. Everything she passed she regarded with a blunt, detached annoyance. The strip mall to her left was full of nail parlors and 24-hour check-cashing stores. Most of the activity was at the center, where there was a line out the door of the Paunchburger, as people stood in the sun, sweating. There was another line, almost as long, in front of the Glitter Factory. April squinted, and realized that there weren't two lines – people were filing from the Paunchburger into the Glitter Factory, and back again. It was a mistake to have left Ann's. Ann would be up soon, and she wanted to be there for it. She wasn't sure for what – she didn't have anything she needed to tell Ann, or do. She just wanted to be with her. Ann would wake up and April would make her coffee, and they would sit down at the couch and plan what they would do after Ann got back from the hospital. Ann would put her hand on April's and thread their fingers together; April would lay her head on Ann's shoulder, and let herself drift off to sleep.
Something was wrong with her. But she couldn't get too worked up over it; the numbness she felt towards the world extended toward her own mind now, too – it wasn't as if it were any less strange than the dingy scene before her. Thoughts about Ann kept coming unbidden, and it was strange. Not because she was feeling them about Ann Perkins – that was the only thing that made sense about them. It was that she was having them at all. Since when did she obsess about what it would be like to spend time with her friends? Or sleep next to them? But now it seemed obvious to her that she could never quite get rested, never fall asleep like she used to, unless she was with Ann. It's a compulsion, she thought – I've got a compulsion. OK – that's pathetic. Her own thoughts were like a stranger's; what she felt, she felt secondhand. She noted without much interest the beginnings of a headache.
By now the world was hot and noisy. A huge SUV laid on the horn at another car as it drove past her. April knew this town was made for cars. There was a dull irritation toward the cars driving past her, filled with people completely unaware of what it was like to walk this town slowly, and look lingeringly at the cheap dirtiness of it all. Life was different for people who only existed in places that were their own. Walk anywhere in this town, and you knew you weren't at home. There was still more irritation at the feeling of being out of place. As if she needed to feel any more of that.
April hadn't had any coffee before leaving Ann's – she'd been drinking a lot of it lately – and now her head was beginning to pound with each step she took. She felt tired and edgy.
As she came within sight of Leslie's house, her heart began to race. She couldn't deal with seeing Andy again; she couldn't talk with him any more right now. She walked around the side of the house, trying to look discrete, and peered into the windows. It was dark in the front room; no one seemed to be there, but she couldn't be sure. She resolved that if he was there when she opened the door, she would just turn around and walk away.
She slipped the key into the lock and opened the door quietly. It creaked a little, but only softly. The front room was empty, and she saw her iPod on the couch, and darted over to grab it. She turned and went back out, and as she closed the front door she thought she heard someone cough, but it could have been her imagination. She walked quickly across the street and around the block, head down, just in case Leslie or Andy had been somewhere in one of the bedrooms.
As the small burst of adrenaline wore off she felt exhausted, and sat down on the curb. The sun was still high in the sky and the concrete felt hot through the skirt of her dress. Across the road there was a playground with a metal chain around it and a sign that said DO NOT ENTER. She looked left and right; hardly anyone was around. She stepped over the metal chain, which swung slowly as her foot brushed it, and climbed onto the orange slide, covered in a cheap plastic arch. The arch shielded her from the sun and the rest of the world, and she shifted onto the slide, her feet dangling down, her back feeling good against the cool plastic which gave way just a little. She closed her eyes; she needed to recoup some of her strength, and then she would have the energy to make it back to Ann's.
April woke up to someone clawing at her shoulder and screeching.
"That's my spot! That's my SPOT!" An old lady, her face windbeaten and sunburned, framed by a plastic bag, screamed again.
April got up as quickly as her body still numb from sleep would let her. "Sorry," she muttered. "You should write 'Crazy bag lady's spot' so people know not to sleep here."
The old lady took the plastic bag off of her head and put it on the slide, next to the tattered backpack she had put there.
April walked away, hands in the pockets of her cardigan, and as she looked back, she saw the woman counting the meager change in her pockets, and felt sorry for her.
She checked her phone; it was nearly 5:30. There was a missed call from Ann, and she kicked herself for falling asleep. She would call her back when it was closer to her break; Ann would be at the Hospital by now.
April watched the ground beneath her feet move, and thought of the look Andy had when she had left. He was so confused, so unsure. Everything she had said had hurt him, and she didn't even say everything she could have. If she had, he would have broken. And then he would have hated her. When he reached out to her that day, she saw his hand, it had been shaking—
She forced herself to stop thinking about it. As she crossed an empty parking lot, she stepped over the remains of several ripped garbage bags, spilled out onto the pavement. A raccoon sauntered over to her left, grabbing an old bag of chips and joining a group of other raccoons by the dumpster. The trash extended to the sidewalk, and crunched under her feet.
After walking a while, April realized the feeling low in her stomach was hunger, and went into the gas station on the corner. The speakers were faintly playing a pop song from years ago – not an oldie, but definitely not something anyone listened to now. She couldn't quite place it, but maybe that was because of the fogginess in her head. She went up and down the aisles, and out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw a package labeled HARM CRACKERS. She looked closer; no, it said "Graham Crackers." She rubbed her eyes. Everything in the two aisles seemed to have meat in it. She picked up a small pack of crackers – somehow even they had chicken in them. (What a wondrous world we live in, she thought.) She settled on an apple pie slice that was pre-wrapped, and paid for it with the change in her pockets. She ate it as she walked; it tasted like freezerburn.
She put in her earbuds and flicked through the songs on her iPod until she reached Cold White Christmas by Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. She wondered how many times she could replay it before she got to Ann's. It fit in every way, except that, unlike in the song, here it was boiling hot. She snorted humorlessly at how nothing could manage to be perfect – not even misery.
Ann took her hand off the steering wheel and shook it out as she drove. Her wound still stung – a careless intern had left a surgeon's scalpel on a tray balanced on the edge of a bed, and when she picked it up the scalpel sliced the outside of her thumb.
She checked her phone; she would barely have enough time to call April, who had called her when she was on shift. Ann needed to be back at the Hospital before her break ended. She had enough time to pick up some groceries (which she knew she was running low on), or get a copy of her housekey made for April – but not both. So far they'd just been leaving the door unlocked for her. But even though April hadn't said anything about it, Ann wanted her to have a key. Ann didn't need to think about it; the choice really was simple. Ann pulled into parking lot of the hardware store.
April woke up from her nap on the couch when Ann came in the front door.
"Hey," Ann said.
April smiled as she opened her eyes to see Ann's face. She was tired, and there was a bandage on her thumb, but April thought she looked beautiful. She wanted to reach out to her and make her hand better; it was the compulsion again.
"Hey," April said, and watched Ann put down her bag. "What's up with your hand?"
Ann just shrugged. "Stupid mistake."
April hesitated. "Are you OK?" Had April done something wrong? April's mind raced across the possibilities, and immediately settled on one: Was her strange desperation evident even to Ann, and weirding her out?
"I just got some bad news today." April relaxed a little – maybe it wasn't her. "It looks like I'm going to be working the night shift from now on. 4:00 PM to 3:00 AM, every day."
"Oh," April said. "You're not going to be able to see Leslie, are you?"
"It's not that. Leslie texted me today, she's obsessed with getting the budget reversed, and that's all she's doing. It's hard to see her anyway. No, it's…" Ann was feeling sheepish about saying it. "I won't be able to help you study if I don't get home until 3:00 AM."
"Oh," April said, trying not to hide her disappointment. "Yeah, you'll probably be too tired..."
"No, I'll adjust, I always do. I just mean, well, you won't be up."
April sat up straight. "No, I'll be up. I'll be up, Ann. I'll just sleep when you sleep."
Ann bit her lip, and felt bad. "You don't have to do that—"
"It's what I want. I want to be awake whenever you are." April was still worried about sounding too desperate, but she couldn't quite dial it back yet.
Ann looked into April's eyes for a second, seeing something there she hadn't seen before. Finally she smiled: "Cool."
April couldn't help but smile, too. They stayed like that for a few seconds, though to April it felt longer.
"Oh, before I forget…" Ann reached into her pocket with her good hand and pulled out a key, "I thought you could use this."
April took the key from Ann's outstretched hand. "Wow, nice." A key to Ann's house. She hadn't even asked for it, but here it was; the key felt warm in her palm. "You didn't have to do this…" she said.
"I know, but I was thinking of you today while I was working, and I wanted you to have it." Ann said simply.
April suddenly felt desperate and needy – she realized it was her debt to Ann, a debt she was completely unworthy of. All she could say was, "Thank you." Ann just smiled, and God she looked beautiful.
April leaned over, and after a second realized she was moving to kiss Ann on the cheek. She felt that odd detachment from her own body again. I want to kiss Ann, her thought echoed, feeling like it was coming from somewhere far away. It shouldn't surprise her, really – she had been behaving strangely lately. And at the moment she didn't really care. Kissing Ann might look weird to other people, but right now what they thought didn't matter to her in the least. Everything had faded away that wasn't Ann. She felt only the compulsion driving her on, and imagined how soft Ann's cheek would feel against her lips.
She leaned over.
There was one thing she did care about – what Ann wanted. Ann was the only one she had left. If she ruined the friendship they had made, by doing this and freaking her out, there would be nothing. So she changed her trajectory at the last minute and brought Ann into a hug.
Ann felt soft against her, and April's cheek rested on the warm curve of her neck. It wasn't what she wanted, but it was good, and it would have to do.
