For Ever, Forever

Lighter

August, 2011

    "Goodnight, Valerie!"

    Doogie turned and waved to the third-shift cashiers at Super 8 Supermarket. They were three elderly women — swallowed up by the checkout lanes and magazine racks that were as tall as they were — who insisted on calling Doogie by her birth name. When Doogie first started work at the cozy Super 8 who housed more character than it did canned corn and sat on the corner of Eighth and Jefferson nestled between a car wash and Al's Carpet Emporium, she found it difficult to respond to anything but the nickname Ever had given her in high school. Her co-workers would often repeat "Valerie!" countless times before Doogie would remember to respond. Finally, after almost four months at the supermarket, acknowledging both names became as instinctual as breathing.

    "Goodnight, ladies," Doogie smiled, and then she hung her apron on the hook beside the manager's office door.

    The manager of Super 8, Mr. Clarke, had been a childhood friend of Doogie's father. That was how she was able to charm her way into only working the weekends while she earned her bachelors degree before packing her bags and leaving Seabrook for an exuberant medical school stationed somewhere perennially sunny. She heard it was always sunny in Philadelphia, but that may have just been the moniker of a TV show. Either way, she wasn't interested in any of Philadelphia's schools. She used to have her heart set on Seattle, but it rained too much. Her parents and brothers found it especially comical that she would base her academic career on the weather, but Doogie persisted in her studying of the weather patterns in the areas of the nation's best medical programs. After Ever told Doogie, "The sun looks good on you," Doogie decided that she would follow the sun to whatever medical program it lead her to.

    With Ever in mind, Doogie wondered why she still cared about what Ever thought. It wasn't like their friendship ended on a bad note — it sort of faded away like the end credits of a movie after Ever met her boyfriend, Reese, during her freshman year of college and found herself too busy to spare Doogie a call— but Doogie hoped she was over that phase of her life. The phase where everything she did was in hopes of pleasing Ever and Iggy. Ever never pressured Doogie to be anything but herself, but it's hard to be yourself when your two best girl friends are absolutely gorgeous, unbelievably popular, and infinitely interesting, while the reflection staring back at you is mediocre, you're only relatively popular because of who you're friends with, and you think you're about as interesting as watching paint dry. Doogie hoped she would've gained more self-esteem by now. The only friend she still kept in contact with was Milo, and every once in awhile she would call him crying at three o'clock in the morning when her insecurities crept up on her like a thief in the night.

    It was cool and starless on this night in Seabrook. The roads were virtually empty, save for the bearded trucker that whizzed passed Doogie, who walked among the cracked cement of the sidewalk. Doogie smiled to herself at the thought of her brothers chanting, "Step on a crack and you'll break Mom's back," when they were kids, and so she hopped over each fracture in the pavement.

    A cool rush of late August air swept through Doogie's hair. She subconsciously wrapped her   pea coat tighter around her. She thought that maybe she should start driving her car to work in the coming chilly months, but she only lived a few blocks away and gas was too pricey to waste. Plus, her car's heater was in the midst of a six-month long temper tantrum with no signs of a behavioral adjustment in the near future, so she let the idea drift away on the breeze.

    Beneath the bright, buzzing streetlights, Doogie turned the corner where her apartment waited down the street. The tall buildings on either side of the street were so dark and daunting, with a network of narrow alleys in between, but she got used to them after awhile. When day broke and the shadows were cast away by the golden chariot of the morning sun, they were just oversized mounds of cut-out rock with cracks in between. Nonetheless, she remembered the can of mace her father forced into her purse the last time she went home for dinner. She never thought she would need it, but she hadn't had the heart to throw it out.