June 25th - "White Rabbit"

"The unemployed friend at 2PM on a Wednesday"

For someone with no job and no responsibilities, summer simply rolls along, an array of blue skies and yellow suns that all simply blend together with no beginning or ending in sight. For someone with the above qualifiers and also not actively looking for a job, summer takes on some sort of abstract, guilty pang to it, because all those endless wasteful days could be spent doing something a lot less wasteful. For someone with all of the above qualifiers who’s also facing bankruptcy and debt collectors in a little more than two months, the whole thing just becomes enveloped by a fatalistic, nihilistic undercurrent.

Lucille was somebody with all of the above qualifiers. Not in Education, Employment, or Training as the saying goes. The most common symbol NEETdom in anime was the tracksuit; Lucille didn’t own one, and even if she did, she’d boil alive in the summer heat. Instead, she repeatedly wore her East Eden High School shirt, a white one with green letters across the front. Combine that with a pair of basketball shorts and the fact that she didn’t need to go anywhere or see anyone - she had very little reason to ever change her clothes.

The morning sunlight awoke her. Lucille’s mouth was dry and the dehydration made her head pound; she smacked her lips, welcoming the day. When she checked the time on her phone, the sunlight took on a more sinister element - this wasn’t morning sunshine. It was already 2 in the afternoon. Lucille groaned and pushed the bangs off her face, but her overgrown hair tumbled back down anyway.

She slipped out of bed, scratched her back, and wondered what she ought to do for the day. Yeah, she could’ve updated her resume like she was supposed to do a few months ago, but China was probably going to launch their nukes about Taiwan in the next few years, so there wasn’t really a point. She could’ve updated her Great American Novel, but she couldn’t get the characters just right, and it had been rainy for a week straight now, so she was pretty bummed out about that.

No, she had something far more important to do! She had two hours before her parents got home from work, so-

Towel at the foot of the door.

Fan blowing out the window.

White Rabbit on her speaker.

LeBong James for three!

She leaned back in her chair, watching smoke drift out of the window. Regina was at work; Jackie was at her new job, leaving Lucille to hang out on this Wednesday afternoon by herself. Maybe she could strum the guitar she bought three years ago and hadn’t played since then. It was in the corner of her room; she couldn’t reach it from her chair; she decided there wasn’t a point.

Paralysis by analysis. There were so many things she could do, but none of them seemed particularly appealing. Resume and writing and guitar were a bust; video games required too much effort; reading wasn’t as much fun as it used to be. What to do, what to do…

The answer was obvious.

LeBong James hits another three from downtown!

Now thoroughly focused, Lucille looked up things to do for fun online. That just got her scrolling, because those video essays on YouTube don’t watch themselves. She was knee-deep into an episode-by-episode recap of Wow Wow Wubbzy(!), a beloved staple of her formative years, a show meant for children seventeen years younger than her current age, when she realized the time had somehow shifted from 2 PM to 5 PM. No warning, just like that.

Want a secret for dieting? Heavy nicotine usage. Lucille wasn’t all that hungry, but, for some odd reason, she was now in the mood for LeBron James Ruffles. The convenience store was a good fifteen minute walk away, but it was finally sunny out, so she slid on her sneakers and sniffed herself. The sweaty, skunky smell didn’t cling to her all that bad, so she tried in vain to push her hair out of her eyes and left her private womb for the wider world.

Lucille went down the stairs to the kitchen. She dreaded this moment, because her mother was in the kitchen.

“Lucille,” her mother said, not looking up from the pile of bills. “You update your resume?”

“...no.”

“You write your novel?”

“...no.”

Lucille didn’t want to talk to her mother while under the influence (or in general, for that matter), especially in a situation like now, because she knew for a fact what was coming. She knew it before even walking down the stairs.

Her mother raised a finger and pointed at a wall. “Do you pay the mortgage?”

“...no.”

Her mother rested her case and went back to looking at bills. Lucille kept her composure until she fled out the front door; while the sunlight beat her like a redheaded stepchild, she let out a long sigh, wishing she could be anywhere but here. When she was in Vegas, maybe she should’ve killed that man. Or just drove a car out into the desert, into the endless sea of stars and sandy oblivion.

But she was here (not that she asked!), so she went out to grab her bag of chips. Cars drove by and people walked on the other side of the street; they weren’t that far from the center of town. Lucille kept her eyes on the ground. It felt like everybody was staring at her. Maybe they were. She couldn’t tell.

The air-conditioned interior of the convenience store brought her some much-needed relief. Lucille supposed she needed to look at the positives. This very much felt like LARPing as a Japanese person, and that was kind of neat. And chips were always good.

She needed to get out of there fast, though - she could’ve sworn the group of high schoolers in the candy aisle were staring at her. Lucille only felt that way when she under the influence of LeBong James, but she was under the King’s spell all the time now, because it’s not like she had anything better to do. His smiling, 19x All Star face gazed up at her from the bag of chips in her hands. She decided to flip the bag over and hold it from the other side. Ray Allen did save his legacy, after all.

The cashier brought up the total. Six dollars for a bag of chips in today’s economy - for shame. Her credit card debt wasn’t looking so hot right now, so she slipped in her bank card. The machine blinked once, blinked twice, and then-

CARD DECLINED.

Lucille let out a chuckle in the direction of the cashier and tried again. It was an old card, after all-

CARD DECLINED.

She didn’t have enough money left to buy a six dollar bag of chips.

Lucille didn’t look back, but she knew for a fact those high schoolers were staring at her - they had to be. She bit her lip to keep the frustration down and told the cashier to forget about it all, cancel the transaction. The King’s eyes followed her mockingly as she stepped back outside.

The sunlight and summer heat pummeled her. She didn’t want to go home, she didn’t want to be at this convenience store, she didn’t want to be in East Eden or this country or this planet. Where to go? Nowhere to go, so she just rested her back against the brick corner of the 7/11. And it’s common knowledge, at least in these parts, that anybody who loiters around a suburban 7/11 is clearly having a rough go of things.

“Lucille?”

Her ears immediately perked up. That soft voice - she hadn’t heard it in years, because the person behind it hadn’t been in East Eden for years.

Fiery red hair. A puzzled look on her face. None other than Francesca Silvestri. Lucille used to be taller than her - they stood at the same height now. Fran used to walk with her head down all the time, too, but she now looked Lucille in the eyes.

“Fran?” Lucille immediately became aware that the sweaty, skunky smell definitely, definitely clung to her. In contrast, Fran smelled like fresh lavender and mint in the summer sunlight. Another woman emerged out of their car, and Lucille unconsciously tugged at her own collar at the sight of her.

The woman stood close to Fran, who gestured and smiled at her. “This is my girlfriend, Melissa.”

“Ah, nice to meet you,” Lucille said, nodding at Melissa, who said the same thing and nodded in turn. Such a relationship didn’t raise Lucille’s eyebrow, nor did it for most people in Massachusetts - but the appearance of Melissa did. If Lucille cut her unkempt hair, if she got out into the sun more, and if she wore slightly nicer clothes - Melissa would be her doppelganger, right down to the brunette hair and dreamy smile, the same kind of smile that often appeared on Lucille’s face in high school. Fran had a type, alright.

“So, how are things going?” Fran asked. They hadn’t seen each other in four years, because Lucille was her type, but Fran wasn’t her type. Yet she acted like no time had passed at all.

“Ah, well, you know.” Lucille rubbed the back of her neck, then immediately ducked her arm back down to put a lid on the chemical warfare spilling out of her armpit. “Just graduated from school.”

“That’s great. Melissa and I just graduated, too.”

“You’ve been living out there, right?”

Fran looked at the common suburban sights - the 7/11, the Walmart parking lot, the main avenue running next to it all - like she hadn’t seen them in years, which she hadn’t. Her eyes indicated everything had a shine to them; everything seemed increasingly worn down to Lucille.

“We’ve been renting in Northampton,” Melissa said, and that made sense. Lucille went there once and it reminded her of how San Francisco must’ve been in the 1960s, right down to the love, peace, acoustic guitars, and LSD. “Fran’s visiting home for a few weeks for the holiday, and I’m here to visit.” She looked around suburbia. “This seems like a nice place to grow up in.”

Lucille supposed it was a nice place for your adolescence, less so for a burnt-out graduate in her early twenties. But that just further emphasized the contrast between Lucille and the two women - Fran and Melissa both shined. They were living their lives - Lucille was just getting dragged around by hers, the tail wagging the dog so to speak.

“Since I’ll be here for a few more weeks, we should catch up,” Fran offered. “We got jobs near Northampton, so we’ll be living out there for a long while. But it’s nice to come back to East Eden once in a while.”

Lucille had never left it - she had lived in her childhood bedroom her entire life. “Yeah, sure. Still got the same number?”

Fran smiled and nodded. “It was nice to see you, Lucille. Take care!”

“Yeah…you too.”

The moment Fran and Melissa stepped inside the convenience store, Lucille knew she needed to get out of there. The offer to catch up bounced around inside her skull - Fran was a nice woman and an old friend, after all. But she was clearly onto bigger and better things like being happy, while Lucille was too busy trying to search for some sort of intangible Eden.

The pedestrian crosswalk blinked red. Lucille sighed and waited. That’s what life felt like in a nutshell.

A man in old clothes approached her. He glanced at her, then at the 7/11.

“Can I borrow five bucks?”