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Frankie hasn't talked to her best friend Kit since Kits mom killed herself earlier this week. She vows she 11 call today from work. She has to. She's already waited three days-way too long.
She unlocks Videos and Beyond at ten. She flips on the lights, parts the shades, and heaps Friday night's returns on the counter. A few transparent boxes slip off the lacquered surface and thump on the carpet. She builds them into a stable pile, calming herself with the soft click of plastic. Then she boots up the monitor and cashes in.
The counter is crowded with posters creased with lines where the color's been folded out. There are bad checks, suspended membership cards, invoices voided with ballpoint swipes. Frankie clears a patch for herself, then chooses a movie for the in-store set.
On Tuesday, during the slow afternoon shift, around the time Kats mom died, Frankie played Deliverance. There was a feeling about the morning that made her feed the tape to the VCR, like part of her sensed what was happening with Kit a mile away. A child came in during the backwoods anal rape. He stood under the monitor that showed the square of sunbleached deep American jungle and said/'I want a hug, too, Mommy." Since then Frankie's stuck to cartoons.
She slips in Bambi. The movie opens with an owl flying through the night woods. Shapes that could be trees or upright carcasses shift in two planes across the screen, as though the forest itself is parting. Doesn't someone die in Bambii She remembers hunters, an oily fire. Either the mother dies or the father, or both. She hits eject.
Kit's mother only died on Tuesday, but Frankie already knows the story. Some sophomore knows Kit's cousin. Frankie should've heard the news from Kit directly. She should've been the leak at school.
Frankie can't stop imagining Kit's reaction: her eyebrows drifting apart in sorrow. Frankies tough, hard-bitten friend with her short black curls and perpetual orange vest, hearing the news and changing, suddenly, in unknowable ways. Changing in ways that will push them apart. Thinking this way is selfish, but she does.
This is the story: Kit was home after school, making her favorite sandwich of kale and...