They Met in a Supermarket

It starts like this: a hum, low and dizzying in pitch.

"It gets better, you know."

The words hang, stretch, and I feel a tight coil of worry twist in my gut when he stops dead in his tracks. It snakes around my lungs and squeezes as the seconds tick by.

---

This is not a love story.

Ollie Parks is a "troubled" teen. He's what suburban mothers grimace at on the street and what teachers sigh about in the privacy of their empty classrooms during lunch hour. He's played hopscotch with multiple foster homes, jumping from family to family like he's trying on different hats. It doesn't matter; none of them want him anyway. His social worker calls it "acting out", he calls it being authentic.

Winnie Rosenberg is mind-numbingly, exhaustingly average at nearly everything she does. As other kids discovered their talents, she fell flat in almost every category-- she can barely draw a stick figure, athletics is entirely out of the question, and she isn't even close to being top of her class. She blames it on faulty genetics; her sister got all the good genes, she reminds people. Allison Rosenberg is a knockout, sings in choir, and can bake a mean lasagna-- Winnie can barely microwave her own mac and cheese. But she's fine with it, because that's her talent-- kindness, compliance, adaptability.

Their lives are stationary, unchanging. And for the most part, they've accepted it. But when fate throws them together in a chance encounter at the grocery store where Winnie spends her nights, something changes.

This is not a love story. At least not the kind you're used to.