Muse

Chapter 18

It had been a long morning at Enterprise Car Rental. The cold rains of April made every leap in and out the parked cars feel drawn out as one unlucky placement of my foot inside a puddle by the service center parking lot soaked through the toe of my right shoe and made the rest of the day feel like I was stepping in mush. Thankfully, I had my music and my phone to keep me calm since no one cared if you wore headphones at work as long as you did your job. The only caveat was that drivers had to keep up an average quota of twelve to fourteen cars per hour- which wasn't nearly as bad as the cleaners who were more time sensitive and had more duties to deal with. It was forgiven if it was a particularly slow day, but unless it was a holiday or a lull in specific times of the day between airline flights, it wasn't likely that would get too many of them. I preferred it that way most days. A lot less time standing around, appearing like you weren't working while you were on your phone trying to kill time. Plus, I wouldn't have to make awkward small talk with the other drivers and cleaners that lingered with names I could barely remember. An exception came towards the tail-end of my shift, standing at the edge of the gas station waiting for a freshly cleaned car to take back to the parking garage with Bluetooth earbuds blasting a mixture of R&B, Pop, and show-tunes in her ears.

"You heading up towards the terminal for lunch?" my sister asked, eying the black lunchbox swinging in my hands.

"Yep. Wanna head up together?"

"Sure." Both of us climbed into the first car that pulled up in front of us, a black Nissan Versa, and instinctively made quick adjustments to our seats to accommodate our long legs. The interior was clean but the upholstery had a sickeningly sweet scent of of cornstarch and aerosol cleaners. Someone must have been vaping in the car while they cleaned again. Running yet another car through the car-wash, I whipped out my phone to figure out what I wanted to read or listen to while carefully toeing the brake with my foot. Most of my playlists contained audio-books, ASMRs, or podcasts about writer techniques- video essays on YouTube that broke down film or television shows and analyzed what made them compelling. My current predicament was that I had to write a first date and needed to figure out what it was about the characters that made them catch feelings for each other but in a superhero setting. But for whatever reason, I just wasn't feeling it today. It was one of my more anxious moods where I felt so keyed up that anything I did with it would be done at full-force one hundred percent or not at all- a good mood to have when a project needed to get done but a terrible beast when I was unable to properly vent it. Normally I would have used it to fully immerse myself in a new TV show or return to a classic favorite and dive headfirst into that for months, but nothing wanted to stick and new pathways forward seemed to be dogging me at every turn. Guess I had to hope that idle distraction would steer me towards a more constructive outlet.

Finished with the car-wash, I decided to settle on listening to Thrawn for the third time and fiddled around anxiously with the gate-pass that hung from the lanyard around my neck. A key-chain bearing an almost exact likeness to my mystery hero, the main instigator of my plight, swung freely as I raised the pass towards the censor while Jo-Elle messed around with the Bluetooth settings of the car. Thirty seconds in and I was already bored, pausing the audio-book in the middle of an epic star-ship battle involving space pirates. Even the talented, melodious voice of Marc Thompson was unable to calm the torrent and turmoil of my mind, the dissatisfaction leaving me feeling more restless than ever. My eyes flickered towards the Patre0n notification at the top of my phone, alerting me to another message in my inbox from SmallMight39 congratulating me about the exciting update. I smiled at the notification but was too preoccupied to go over it now, setting my phone down on the console and saving it to read for later.

Victorious in linking up her phone to the car, Jo-Elle sang along with her playlist like she was trying to teach a seminar, gesturing wildly in beat with the music as she locked eyes with me. I hummed sporadically and bopped my head along with her in time with the music as she waved her arms in the air, waiting for the lyrics that I knew as she danced her seat to lazy R&B beats about Cuco tripping on 'shrooms. The mini dance party ended the moment people began staring in the parking garage as I immediately turned down the volume like drivers were supposed to when leaving a car for a customer- there had been one too many complaints of customers being startled by radios being turned all the way up, since the cleaners often did this to hear the music while the worked -and reset the Bluetooth before expertly backing up into the closest free Compact Car labelled spot. Jo-Elle giggled at my reaction as we made our way towards the terminal, pretending like we hadn't done anything out of the ordinary.