June 18th - "Wasteful Days"

The beach episode. An anime classic. In Lucille’s preferred genre of slice of life, you’d have a group of idiosyncratic girls load up on the train, head to the beach, smash a watermelon, have a bunch of still-frame shots of the girls frolicking in water accompanied by a soft-pitched noise of pleasure from the seiyuus to save money on animation, perhaps a rather unnecessary shot or two of their feet, then night hits and they light little sparklers on the sand, and then they take the last train home, the more energetic members of the group falling asleep on the straight man, who, despite her scruffy exterior, sighs in comfort at having such a nice group of friends.

It’s good stuff. Lucille knew she wasn’t going to get the exact same experience going to one of her local beaches - she’d have to wake up at 7 just to get parking, since the beach was an hour drive away - but it’s the thought behind it all that accounts. Of course, when Lucille, sleeping comfortably in bed, felt the sunlight on her, she rubbed her eyes and checked her phone.

10:30 AM. She overslept by three and a half hours. In terms of leaving by 7 to get there by 8, she wasn’t making good progress.

She slipped out of bed, cursed like a sailor, and went to see if Regina texted her. It was just the two of them and Regina was driving, after all. But when she checked - no messages from Regina whatsoever. A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, that Regina was.

Unsure of what else to do, Lucille did something she’d been slacking on. She slipped the band over her upper arm and hit the on button - twenty seconds later, she got a blood pressure reading of 145:92. The ideal was less than 120:80.

The sight calmed her nerves. Her numbers were lower than yesterday, and that deserved a reward, waking up late be damned.

Five minutes later, Lucille sat in her empty kitchen, slowly eating a bowl of cereal. Her parents were at work; this was a Wednesday, after all. She had the whole house to herself until 5 PM.

Maybe I oughta throw a party.

Before she slid across the kitchen in her socks, she got a message on her phone.

Regina: Yeah just woke up.

No beach today, but twenty minutes later, Regina was sitting next to Lucille, eating her own bowl of cereal. It was so hot out they kept the lights off in the kitchen; sunlight streamed in through a nearby window, casting a glow over their bowls. They ate idly, in silence, just taking the morning in. Some birds chirped outside. Trees swayed in the breeze.

“No better way to spend one of my limited vacation days from work,” Regina mumbled. She poured more cereal into the bowl, the little flakes making a rattling sound as they descended down the white ceramic.

“Ahaha, yeah.” Lucille rubbed the back of her neck a little sheepishly. “I guess that’s just every day for me now.”

Regina raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t you just get a job to afford Vegas?”

“Yeah, and we went already.” Lucille avoided Regina’s stare by looking at her own reflection in the milk. She had a sort of stupefied expression on her own face. “Look, in anime, those girls take part-time jobs all the time just to afford the newest game or something, and then after that, they’re out! It’s just like me.”

Regina didn’t say nothing, because nothing needed to be said. Lucille rubbed her eyes. “I guess that was dumb of me. Credit cards are a slippery slope, and now I gotta start paying student loans again and all that. But stocking shelves wasn’t really my thing, you know?”

“I don’t think stocking shelves is anyone’s thing,” Regina, who stocked shelves at the local grocery store for a living, answered.

“All those poor Bohemian artists. I could be just like one of them.” But then Lucille thought about how much cereal like this costs in today's economy and frowned. She sighed and let her head droop to her palm. “60k in student loans. I really thought they would get canceled. Well, only a third of it, but still.”

A silver spoon appeared near Lucille’s forehead. “I didn’t go to college,” Regina reminded her. “So why should I pay for your liberal arts degree?”

The two girls stared at each other for a moment, Lucille’s reflection appearing in the spoon. They locked eyes, mano-a-mano, but then they both let out stupid laughs.

Regina spun the spoon around. “Hell, I already pay for the military, I can pay for your sorry ass as well.”

“Thank you.” Lucille clapped her hands and bowed her head in prayer towards her savior. “My mom’s been nagging me. I guess my uncle can get me a job as a clerk at the company he works for. But they say to write what you know. How can I know anything if I’m locked in a wage cage all day?”

“Are you writing right now?”

“I’m eating cereal right now.” That was a complete deflection, since Fallout New Vegas had owned Lucille’s complete heart, mind, and soul these past few weeks. She had put blood, sweat, tears, and other fluids into her Level 56 (mods) Courier. You don’t fuck with the Mailman, and Lucille was the Mailman.

Then she frowned, because even the character she had been basing her entire personality off of recently had a job.

“Let’s do something right now!” Lucille declared with a raised fist. “Let’s…let’s…let’s eat more cereal!”

Regina shook the box. “Empty.”

“Let’s go get more cereal!”

Twenty minutes later, they were back with more cereal. Not only that, Lucille found the opportunity to use ⅕ of her remaining bank account to buy a watermelon. Out in her backyard, she placed the watermelon down and rubbed her hands.

“In anime, the girls always smash ‘em,” she reminded Regina. In the garage, she moved the lawnmower, shovels, rakes, and a spare table out of the way until she found a dusty sledgehammer. She hauled the heavy thing out into the backyard, then eyed her target. Then she eyed her flip-flops, and then she eyed the giant slab of hard metal she had in her hands.

“They do this fucking blindfolded?” she asked aloud. Regina remained mute the whole time, eating from a bowl of cereal she brought out to the backyard. She was slurping on the last of the milk by the time Lucille came back out in her dad’s Timbs. She lined herself up in front of the watermelon and tied a thin towel around her eyes.

Within the darkness, flayed fingers flashed in her mind, and she immediately slipped the towel off. But without any further ado, with a one, and a two, and a-

The sledgehammer felt heavy coming up. It felt even heavier coming down, as gravity and kinetic energy and all that scientific mumbo-jumbo slammed into an innocent watermelon. Her fruit killing skills were remarkable. Lucille once read a story about the Pacific War where a foxhole received a direct hit from a mortar strike. The crimson carcass and result scarlet mist lingering from the smashed watermelon in front of her seemed reminiscent of it.

Lucille ran a finger along the splash of red on the sledgehammer, then glanced back at Regina. “Holy shit,” she mumbled. “I see why they do it now. Is there anything else I can smash?”

Her mute companion retrieved an empty plastic soda cup from her car. Lucille flattered it into the earth. Then she found some empty beer cans in her room and, to put it bluntly, made those her bitch as well. As she slammed the hammer down, over and over, the old song “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” popped in her head. The sun was beating down, she had her trusty hammer in her hands. She could’ve been John Henry, the Steel-Driving Man, who died with a hammer in his hand, having proved flesh and blood could do just as much as modernity, yet modernity - the new era - won anyway.

Something like that (and the most physical exertion she had in weeks) made Lucille lose her appetite for hammering. While Regina held the empty cereal bowl over her own head for shade, Lucille wiped the sweat off her forehead and kicked off the Timbs. “Now what? I guess the anime girls usually go in the water by this point, but we don’t have any water.” But then she eyed her hose. “Unless…” And then she recalled the items in her garage, and an idea popped in her head.

“Jackie would love this,” Lucille declared as she set up the folding table in backyard. She tested it with a push, then slipped on top of it, laying flat, feeling much like a fish stick in the oven, fried overhead by the blazing sun. Rather than tie the towel around her eyes, she placed it over her entire face. It offered the tiniest hint of shade and coolness.

Next to the table, another bowl of cereal crunched. The nozzle of the hose squeaked as Regina placed her trigger finger on it. “You sure about this?”

“It can’t be that bad.”

“Uh-huh.” Through the towel, the dark outline of the nozzle was visible. It aimed squarely down at Lucille’s face. Without any further ado, with a one and a two and a three-

Getting waterboarded was indeed that bad. The hose sprayed at full-strength, full-clip, fully-automatic, gushing and pouring right into Lucille’s covered mouth. She knew she wasn’t drowning, but she definitely was. No water entered her throat, but it definitely was. Lucille was no stranger to denying her brain oxygen, but the drowning part was a new experience. The water kept coming, and no air did, and Lucille felt like a balloon just being filled to the brim with imaginary air, ready to burst. Perhaps her eyes might pop out and she’d slip away into the depths.

With an explosion of coughs, Lucille rocketed upright. As Regina stopped the hose, Lucille gasped for air like a dying fish. Black spots were in her vision and for a rare moment, suburbia had seemingly placed her on the knife’s edge of life and death, an utterly unheard of phenomena. She always wondered if the reason her life lacked any spice after graduating high school was because there was no possibility of death. Life was milquetoast, and Lucille was gonna be somebody. Hemingway and Orwell got shot at by the fascists in Spain, for crying out loud! D’Annunzio and Mishima led actual coups! All Lucille had was 900 hours in a video game.

Anime girls don’t have to worry about things like this.

But in any case-

“As fun as Waterboarding at Guantanamo Bay might sound to the uninitiated, it actually sucks,” Lucille concluded.

“Scientifically proven,” Regina said, nodding at the table.

“Yup.”

“Yup.”

Lucille sat on the grass. It felt cool below her palms. “Remember when every summer used to be like this? Just wasteful days of doing nothing. What fun we had. What happened?”

Regina tilted her head. “We grew up.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s the problem.” Lucille gazed at the clouds in the sky. They certainly had scientific names, but at the moment, they were just fleets of white battleships slowly steaming across the summer blue. “Just a couple months ago, I was so concerned about getting older. About becoming an adult. And then it happened. I want to go back.”

That raised Regina’s eyebrow. “You’re an adult?”

“Well, yeah. I graduated college. That makes me an adult. And look at this bod of mine! It has adult written all over it.”

Technically, her shirt had East Eden High School written on it in green letters. Regina gave her a quiet look as she mulled it over. “An arbitrary line like that doesn’t make you old or an adult. I’d say I’m an adult.”

“And I’m not?”

Regina didn’t answer. Lucille stared at her, pressing her for an answer, until her friend just shrugged. “I feel like being an adult is about progression. Not saying it has to be the usual benchmarks of marriage and stuff. But it’s about working toward something, vague as it may be.”

“But I am,” Lucille protested. “I’m gonna write the next Great American Novel.”

She said that with a straight face.

Regina eyed her with a neutral face. “I mean little things. I’m working to be a manager by this time next year. When I do that, I’ll have enough to move out of my parent's home. Maybe I’ll go to the community college they got around here.” She pushed strawberry blonde hair out of her eyes. “I’m not explaining this right. You’re the one good with words, after all. But I think, at the end of the day, being an adult is about trying to stand on your own two feet. Not necessarily succeeding. Just trying. Or at least acknowledging you’re in a rut and are having trouble with it all.”

Standing on your own two feet. Lucille remained sitting. The grass felt quite cool, after all.