Based on the song "Life on Mars" by David Bowie...
Someone is killing girls in the little town of Nowhere, South Dakota and they all look like Fiona Mars.
Fiona has a secret she can't quite remember. A secret her father, the Sheriff, is trying hard...
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Rick's Roadhouse was a dive. Sawdust on the floor. The kind of lowlifes on the corners who had escaped school by not attending it. Denim and cow shit was the dress code, and the ability to count to one was prerequisite. No one knew when a piece in shorts might stumble off the highway and need a dollar for french fries.
The neon beer sign behind the counter lit everything within its sphere a menacing limesicle. This included Janet; whose frosted tips drank up the off-color glow like a withered plant. She wiped the bar in circular motions, adjusting coasters and condiments, adding pretzels to baskets with worn napkins. She reminded me of Jamie Lee Curtis if Jamie Lee Curtis gained twenty pounds and worked in a truck stop.
"What can I get you, honey?"
I took up a barstool and grazed the menu. Fan blades turned overhead. The hot air slowly tangled into knots and hung, depressed, from the metal grid between the nicotine-stained ceiling tiles.
A Jukebox played a piano record.
Pool balls clacked together.
"Grilled cheese."
Janet called it in. Stacks of antique beer cans lined the shelves on the wall behind her. In the middle was a window; in the window was the kitchen; in the kitchen, someone was about to cook me breakfast.
"Anything to drink?"
I shrugged and hunched on the counter, my feet hooked around the stool legs. I was too short to reach the floor. Grilled cheese was the extent of my conversation. I was in a mood. When I was in a mood, my ears stuck out and my mouth became a ruler you could measure by.
Janet couldn't read Keep Out if I painted it on my forehead. She popped the top on a creamsicle soda and pulled a straw from her apron pocket. "Where's your daddy this mornin'?"
I thought about his note and ripped the paper off the straw, pushing it into the long neck bottle so I could slurp and not answer.
The straw fought me, wanting to come up for air. "Work," I said at last. I didn't have money in my pajama bottoms, I had to play nice. I didn't even have my driver's license. If I got pulled over now, my dad's department would have to ticket me. And then dad would have one more thing to soap from my record. I wondered what he did with his dirty sponges. Did he throw them away? Or keep them as trophies.
A year ago, I'd killed Janet's daughter, Busy. She didn't know it and I couldn't remember and I'd heard she had another kid somewhere so it wasn't the end of the world, but seeing her was like picking at a sore. I was oddly attracted to the pain.
My dad didn't want me seeing her which is why I did whenever he made me angry. (And he always made me angry.) He was afraid I'd tell.
I did things sometimes: told secrets or broke stuff or took too many diet pills and stayed awake for days, watching the hours run fluid through a straw. When I surfaced, I ate grilled cheese.
Once, I quit smoking and cut the sleeves off my Mickey Mouse Club shirt. I'd noticed the scissors were sharp and it wouldn't leave me alone until I'd done something about it.
