Girls called Alessandra

CHAPTER 01 - ENCOUNTERS

It must all begin with a crime.

And a girl who was just half as tall as the sliding door to a little convenience store along a nameless road. Her wallet was lost. Or rather, she dropped it on her way as she rummaged through her heavy backpack. She didn't notice it. She was fumbling for the phone she so cunningly hid in a book whose pages she cut off to have a place to sneak it in to school.

"Yes, I'm passing by there. Eggs?" She repeated as she spoke to her brother on the phone. "Okay, what else? Six? I'll see if I can buy six."

She stepped into the store, casually looked around and found eggs in the chiller. She stuffed a bag of sausages as well into her hands. There wasn't a long line in the cashier. She bravely walked up, putting down all the goods on the counter so she could get her wallet. The barcode scanner beeped for sometime. And when the teller looked onto her for the payment, she was still skimming through her things, vaguely having felt and feared that the worst thing had happened.

"Just a moment, it must be here somewhere," she said.

But it wasn't in her bag and after looking through them twice more, she had to accept it.

Someone was already waiting for his turn behind her. Gladly, she still had some change in her pocket.

When she walked out of the store dejected, she clasped a paper bag containing but three eggs. She abandoned the sausage because if she didn't, she wouldn't have enough for fare to get home.

"Ugh!" She grunted. "Alie, you're such an idiot!"

Alas, her name was Alie.

She backtracked on her trail, desperately hoping that no one had picked it up yet. 'Well, if someone had already, it got my picture and some ID's in it so maybe they'll know where to find me. Gosh, there's still some cash in it.'

Three hundred pesos and so. It could last her for the rest of the school week. And her ID's and the school receipts stashed in there. It gave her a headache just thinking about it.

She looked in open canals and poked around the bushes. But it was a busy town, bustling with people even as the sun had just set. She feared taking it back was a foregone possibility.

She never found it. Tired, Alie gave up and went home.

Of course, someone had picked it up. It was a cute purple leather wallet, utterly conspicuous on a gray pavement. It was hard to miss.

In fact there had still been time to return it because the stranger even saw it tumbling out of Alie's bag. Yet he hesitated to call out for her. A simple "Hey, you dropped it" would have been fitting for the moment. He could have chased her even when she had walked into the store which was merely a few steps away. As weird as it could be, he even watched her through the glass walls of that convenience store.

He unzipped her wallet and pulled out a library ID. "Alessandra," he read.

As Alessandra got into trouble over at the counter, he watched from outside with amusement.

And when she walked out in a frantic hurry to find it, he watched her pass him by.

And thus, the crime was set in stone.