wild life | l.p

Chapter Two.

"Don't wander off," Arianne's mother reminds her as they walk through the sliding doors into Oscar's Grocery Store. Ari rolls her eyes, wondering for the hundredth time how her and her father could have ever split apart. They're practically the exact same person. They say the exact same things, shop at the exact same stores. They walk the same, have the same mannerisms, the same friends, and find the same things annoying. They're the type of parents that refer to things as, "charming", "tasteful", and "respectful", rather than "cute", "fun", or even "awesome". For those same reasons, Ari had no idea how she grew up to be the complete opposite of them.

"Cauliflower for dinner?" Her mom asks her casually, placing florets of the white vegetable into a produce bag before Ari could say anything. She asks as if she cares, but she never really respects Arianne's opinion anyways. So Ari finds herself walking away from her mother despite her wishes.

She peers down the aisles until she finds what she's looking for. The chips, candy, and cookie section of Oscars usually sucks. For the most part everything is healthy, with large 'Non-GMO' labels and 'Cruelty-Free Facility' stickers plastered on the front of the raisin bran, bland ass looking boxes they come in. Not that Arianne is supportive of animal cruelty or eating GMO's, or gluten, or whatever it is-- she just wants an oreo sometimes without having to justify it by telling people they're vegan.

They're fucking oreos.

She grimaces at the small assortment of cookies and decides to walk a few paces further to see if there are any half-decent chips available to her. She likes veggie sticks sometimes, but she would kill for a bag of dill pickle potato chips today, and she doesn't really want to show up to Zayn's house with gluten free salted coconut chips.

"God, this place is disappointing," Ari says out loud to no one in particular. She turns on her heel and walks through the so-called snack aisle and decides to find the frozen food section instead. It's small, unsurprisingly, and consists mostly of frozen vegetables and fruits for smoothies. At the last second though, her eye catches a glimpse of Halo Top ice cream and she breaks a smile for the first time in what feels like that entire morning.

She realizes maybe she should consider smiling more, because at this rate she'll have frown lines by the time she's twenty two. But if ice cream is what it takes, maybe she should pick up more than two pints.

She grabs a couple-- one for her, one for Zayn-- and then a couple more, for good measure and because well, smiling and whatever. When she closes the door, she's startled however, and the first two pints that she had maneuvered underneath her arm and against her chest slip out from her grasp and onto the ground.

Arianne was startled because she was at Oscar's with her mother at 10:00 in the morning and typically the store is fairly empty. The last thing she expects to see is another person, let alone another person standing right behind her waiting impatiently for her to get her arms out of the freezer and stop stealing all the ice cream.

There's a blonde girl wearing a light grey Juicy tracksuit and fuzzy pink slides standing there with her lips pursed and her eyes slightly narrowed. Her hands are on her hips, like she's an impatient bitch and has been waiting for Arianne to move for four days rather than four seconds. Ari smirks at her, debating on whether or not to tell her that Juicy tracksuits were out of fashion maybe ten minutes after they came into fashion. She decides not to instead though. She steps out of the way, muttering her most ingenuine, "Sorry," As she grabs the two pints of ice cream off the ground.

The blonde rolls her eyes, scoffing and changing her stance from her right hip jutting out at an impossibly angry angle, to her left hip jutting out so far that Arianne could probably hop onto it and be carried out of the store like a toddler.