VII
"You never came back to say hi," the cashier said, deftly pulling items out of the basket, scanning them, and bagging them.
Sid looked up from his phone and saw, with a chill that shook him to the bone, that it was the same cashier he talked with the day he tried to kill himself. She didn't look like she was mad, she just kept on scanning the items. Even though the items in the basket would have normally made him embarrassed to have a pretty girl look at them, the deep ache that hit his heart when he thought about that day blocked any other sort of emotion.
"I'm sorry, I wasn't doing very good that day, or for a long time after that," Sid said mildly.
The girl looked faintly familiar, and not because he had seen her once before already. Sid tried to place her, but couldn't. He glanced at her name tag: Nadine.
"You know, when I was little, a girl named Nadine would always chase me around the playground," Sid felt silly as soon as the words slipped out of his mouth.
The girl cracked a smiled as she rang up his final total, "I bet she liked you."
"Maybe she did, but I thought it was usually the other way around, you know, guys tease girls they like."
Nadine shrugged and grinned a bit, "I know because I would chase this little boy named Sid around, every day. I thought he was the cutest little thing."
"That's really funny, because my name's Sid."
"Did you go to P.S. 118?" There was a look of dawning realisation on her face.
"Nadine Jefferson?"
"Sid Gifaldi?"