I am visiting the house of an ex-girlfriend, my first love, and we can now speak to each other. Or, more accurately, I can. The appropriate amount of time has passed. We are nostalgic, smiling, but still hot behind the face when we skirt forbidden topics. Why don’t you love me anymore, was I not enough, the usual.
I am at her house, and she was a rich girl, so it is in the Highland Park, McMansion style. I notice that she has put on some weight as she leads me to a bathroom. Apparently, I need to shower. So I do, and there is an ecstatic, awkward moment where she peeks her head in to ask if I need a towel. I don’t bother to cover up, and for that moment I recover the pscyhe of us, together, with no modesty. After I am fresh and clean, I find myself in some sort of game room. We discuss our current lives. She has forsaken theatre, and I explain that I am considering the military (I had no job or other ambitions at the time). We’ve both left our dreams behind.
Then, we are clothes shopping together, and she is yanking everything name-brand and expensive off the rack. The same clothes I remember her wearing, chiq, pale pink, stylish. She leads the way, whisking right past the registers and out through the automatic doors. My double take is mirrored by some incredulous cashiers. She shoplifted? There is a trail of breadcrumbs in my ex’s wake: magnetic shoplift prevention tags. A la Hansel & Gretel, I follow her breadcrumbs outside to a Ryder box truck, where I am yanked inside by a firm, calloused hand, a man’s hand. The interior resembles the set dressing of a Sopranos episode: racks of expensive clothing in plastic protectors, tetris-stacked.
Apparently, my ex has taken the liberty of folding me into a conspiracy, because an imposing man appears with a pistol trained at my head. He looks exactly like Jacob from the Mass Effect games. In my death throes, I dare him to shoot me in the head, and he obliges. A miss, though the bullet shears off a good bit of my hair, and a splatter of sickly green blood follows behind it. Then, another shot, this time at the opposite side of my head, again producing the sickly green blood. I dive for the gun, and in the commotion a final shot strikes me in my side, this time producing the right color of blood. He warns me to keep my mouth shut and storms out of the box truck.
The wound is superficial, apparently, as Lily and I are speaking as if no partner-in-crime just shot me.
I ask: “Do you actually enjoy this?”
She lets in a sharp gasp, and her eyes well up with tears exactly as I remember them, and she replies: “No.”
I am given a cut of their fenced clothing shortly before I wake up.