Hitchers by Will McIntosh

two National Guard troops stopped me.
    â€œMask,” one of them said, pointing at her face.
    â€œI know, I forgot.”
    She jerked her thumb at the doorway. “On your left. Put one on right away.”
    A mountainous display of pale blue medical masks met me just inside the door. I grabbed two boxes, opened one and retrieved a mask. It smelled like rubbing alcohol.

    Half of the shelves were empty in the grocery area. Most of the basics were there—milk, water, cereal, ramen noodles—but non-essentials like olives and Snickers bars were pretty much nonexistent. Signs beside each item listed the maximum number you could buy. Mostly that number was one. Troops patrolled the aisles, evidently making sure no one took more than their share.
    When I finished grocery shopping I didn’t feel like going home. After a week in solitary I wanted to be around people a while longer. I pushed my cart around the store, feeling punchy as I wandered past laundry detergent, between walls of pink girls’ toys. My Little Princess. Barbie Snip ’n Style Salon. A dozen big-screen TVs flashed identical Dentyne ads. In the pharmacy area I discovered licorice toothpaste. That was a new one. Or maybe I just hadn’t noticed it before. I picked up a tube, then sought out the candy aisle, suddenly craving real licorice.
    They had licorice, both black and red. I chose the black, opened it with my teeth and pulled out a fat stick. I felt like a rebel, the way I was opening packages before I’d paid for them.
    I hadn’t eaten licorice since I was a kid. Kayleigh and I used to each take an end and pull, stretching the stick until it snapped. We’d compare our stretched pieces to see who got the longer.
    I’d been thinking about Kayleigh a lot lately, I realized. She was never far from my mind, even now, eighteen years after her death, but usually her presence was just an untethered ache of guilt. Lately I was getting more concrete flashes, like Mom taking the call from Grandma, dropping the phone when Grandma told her Kayleigh had drowned. Or the moment I realized it was my fault. Kayleigh agreed to jump off the thirty-foot pier if I did first, but she hadn’t really expected me to do it, and she’d chickened out. Kayleigh didn’t like to chicken out—she was the fearless one, the athlete, the doer. I told everyone about my courageous feat, rubbing it in, so she stayed behind when we went out to eat.
    And she jumped, and she died.
    Kayleigh, who was beautiful and outgoing, who always watched
out for me. When she died I escaped into comic strips. Not even comic books—the cool nerds went for Spider-Man and The X-Men , I went for Peanuts and For Better or For Worse .
    As I dropped my purchases on the conveyor belt and nodded a greeting to the exhausted-looking cashier, I realized that despite all of the awfulness of the past week, despite the recurring thoughts of Kayleigh, I felt okay. Maybe I was simply feeling grateful to be alive. Everyone around me had lost someone now. Some had lost whole families. In the face of that, my own losses didn’t seem as staggering as they used to.
    â€œYou look tired. You near the end of your shift?” I asked the cashier.
    She shook her head mournfully. “I’m on till four a.m.”
    I winced in sympathy. “That’s got to be rough.”
    â€œMm hm,” she nodded, working her gum as she jiggled the licorice across the scanner, trying to get the price to register. It must be maddening to spend eight hours waving packages in front of that scanner, trying to get it to beep so you can move on to the next package.
    â€œ I never said I was perfect ,” I said. The words burst out in a deep, horrible croak that raked my throat.
    The cashier looked stunned.
    â€œSorry,” I said, my voice returned to normal. I had no idea why I’d just said that. It had just come out. I rubbed my twitching throat, swallowed.
    I got out