The Oblivion Society Read online

  “Oh my Gaaaaaawd, ” one of the girls mewled. “So, I was talking to Kevin in homeroom, and he was all ‘Do you want to go to senior class beach party this weekend?’ and I was all like, with you? As if! ” For reasons that were not readily apparent, all of the girls ripped into a peal of screaming laughter. Sherri didn’t give them the courtesy of a sour look. She just kept scanning the bottles and staring blankly into the burning red lasers of her checkstand.

  “He’s just so wrong. Like, really, ” one of the other girls agreed. “Like he’s really cute enough for you to like, go swim in the red tide and get like, a bacteria infection or whatever. I’m so sure. But it’s not like it would be the first time he ever gave a girl an infection.”

  The girls burst into laughter again, this time so high-pitched that there were parts only very small dogs could hear. Sherri scanned the final bottle and held out her hand, and one of the girls deposited a wad of perfumed bills in it.

  “Oh my Gaawd! ” the blondest of the girls gasped, pointing to Sherri’s outstretched arm. “I luuuuuve that bracelet! The plastic one with the barbed wire stuck in it, right? I have one exactly like that!”

  Without lifting her eyes from the conveyor belt, Sherri pulled the bracelet from her arm, held it at arm’s length between two fingers like a sitcom bachelor holds a dirty diaper, and dropped it with a heavy plastic clunk in the garbage can.

  “Ugh, speaking of ‘red tide’ …” the cheerleader smirked bitterly. “God, why do goths always have to be such bitches?”

  Sherri’s empty eyes snapped up from the belt, locking on to the giggling girls with a glare like a thousand death threats.

  “I am not a goth,” she said coldly. “I am an individual.” The cheerleaders were all suddenly, and perhaps for the first time in their lives, completely silent. After a long moment, one of them finally mumbled a numb rebuttal.

  “Well, you’re still a bitch.”

  Sherri handed the girl her change with an unfazed shrug.

  “At least my biggest accomplishment in life won’t be getting date raped under the bleachers at the homecoming game.”

  The cheerleaders released a chorus of incensed gasps.

  “You … you bitch! ” the leader squeaked. “We’re like, never shopping here again!”

  The infuriated cheerleaders rushed out the front door in a clucking mass of fair hair and pleats. Sherri smiled wryly and looked at her watch.

  “Three … two … one.”

  “God damn it, Becquerel! What the hell was that?!”

  Boltzmann waddled up to the front of checkstand two like an obese penguin, his jowls slapping furiously against his neck.

  “What’s the matter with you?!” he bellowed. “That’s no way to treat a goddamn customer! That’s strike two, missy!”

  Sherri blinked. “You already did strike two, fat-ass.” Boltzmann leaned forward and spoke with a dark, seething menace.

  “What did you just say to me?”

  Sherri’s words came in slow, staccato syllables as her fingers flexed in a parody of sign language.

  “I saaaaaid, ‘You … already … did … strike-‘ ”

  Boltzmann pounded his blubbery fists on the checkout counter.

  “That’s it! I’m not taking any more shit out of you!” he wailed. “You’re fired, Becquerel! Get out of my goddamn store!”

  With an overstated disinterest, Sherri pulled a cigarette out of her coat pocket, lit it up, and stuffed it into the corner of her mouth.

  “Well, it’s about time,” she said coolly, throwing out a sarcastic salute. “See you in Hell, motherfuckers.”

  Without another word she exhaled a long yellow blast of smoke and walked out the exit for the last time. A fat purple vein throbbed in Boltzmann’s forehead as Sherri’s unscheduled exodus led his attention directly to the pile of fish crates near the front door. There he found Vivian nauseously returning the decomposing bodies from the old man’s cart to their wooden sarcophagus.

  “Vivian!” he barked. “Quit screwing around with those goddamn fish and come work the register!”

  An unrecognizable tube of scaly meat slipped from Vivian’s fingers and splashed down in the crate. She looked at her oil-smothered hands in disgust.

  “Hold on,” she choked. “Let me wash my hands first.”

  “When I tell you to do something, I mean now, missy!” Boltzmann screamed.

  “Are you trying to get your ass shitcanned too?”

  A thousand sardonic one-liners flashed through Vivian’s mind, any one of which would have ensured her permanent liberation from Boltzmann’s Market. A series of words clinked together like train cars in her mind, racing down the tracks of her central nervous system, through her voice box, and out of her mouth.

  “No, sir. I’ll be right there, sir.”

  With a shameful bow of her head, Vivian wiped her hands on her vest and took her place at the register of checkstand two. She needed this job and she knew it. Unfortunately, Boltzmann knew it too.

  “That’s what I thought,” he said dominantly. “Now if you think you can keep your head screwed on straight for five minutes, I’m going back up to the office. Somebody’s got to actually get some work done around here today.” With that, he executed a turn like the Queen Elizabeth 2 coming into port and squeezed himself up the creaking staircase to his office. Vivian leaned back against the register, closed her eyes, and thought for a long, hard moment about where exactly she had gone wrong in life.

  There was no doubt that she was too good for this job. Too smart for it. She knew that there was a whole world out there just waiting for her. But she also knew that at the end of the day she’d go home, collapse into bed, and ignore her problems until they came back the next morning.

  Just like she always did.

  “Are these the right kind of plugs for this?” an ancient voice croaked. Vivian blinked twice and tipped her head downward. A dusty, hunched old woman barely taller than the checkstand counter was piling D-cell batteries on its belt with shaky, arthritic hands.

  “Plugs, ma’am?” Vivian asked.

  “For this machine. Are these the right plugs?”

  Vivian looked at the large box perched at an awkward angle across the top of the woman’s shopping cart. Judging by the diagram on the side, the box contained some sort of hideous cyclopic robot head. She scanned the single row of English text adrift in a sea of foreign characters.

  Hibakusha Electronics 5-in-1 Camping Lantern

  Vivian was hesitant to believe this claim. It didn’t look like any lantern she had ever seen. Whatever it was, she knew that this wouldn’t be the last time that she saw it.

  Every so often, Boltzmann’s grocery suppliers would give him a good deal on some shoddy, off-brand electronics. As a general rule, about ninety-eight percent of the items sold at Boltzmann’s Market that required batteries would be returned by naïve, elderly purchasers within a week. This rule had held true through all of his previous experiments in electronic gadgetry, from portable CD players (“I don’t understand where the tape goes”), to VHS tape rewinders shaped like sports cars (“I can’t make it hook up to the television set”), to Windows 95 compatible flatbed scanners (“I thought this was a toaster oven”).

  “It’s for my grandson,” the old woman said slowly. “He said he can hook it to his satellite machine and watch the ball games when he’s on his class trip.” Vivian felt the need to intervene. She wanted to save everybody the trouble of a return visit.

  “Ma’am, I don’t think you can watch a ball game on a lantern. Maybe he was talking about something else. In fact, I’m pretty sure he was talking about something else. Do you want me to put this back for you?”

  The old woman raised a brittle, shaky hand and looked at a crumpled note.

  “Five to one camping lantern,” she said, holding the note out for Vivian to see.

  “That’s what he wants. You kids, you all think that all us retired people are all stupid, right?”

 
“No, ma’am,” Vivian said. “I was just trying to-” The woman looked at her note again. “Five to one camping lantern. It says so right here!”

  Vivian sighed. There were some battles that weren’t worth fighting.

  “All right. Whatever.”

  She leaned awkwardly over the checkstand and grabbed the heavy box by its corners. With a wrenching of her lower back muscles, she hauled it over the side of the counter and across the price scanner.

  BLEEP!

  Vivian turned to put down the box, but her fish-oil-slicked hands slipped against the smooth cardboard, dropping the heavy load on the price scanner and jamming its corner harshly into her left breast.

  BLEEP!

  “Ow! Son of a …” Vivian grumbled, subtly rubbing away the dull pain of her injury with the back of her fist. “Here, let me take care of that.” She punched the key on the register that would negate the next entry and ran the box over the scanner a third time, neutralizing the effect of the errant scan. BLEEP!

  “You did that three times,” the old lady said. “Are you trying to rip me off?”

  “Not at all, ma’am,” Vivian said. “I just made a mistake. I fixed it. It’s okay.” The old woman shrugged disapprovingly.

  Vivian scanned all of the batteries. “Your total is $98.73, please.” The woman looked skeptical but quietly pawed through her purse and exhumed a musty one-hundred-dollar bill. When the transaction was completed, the old woman rolled away with an unspoken sense of quiet, uncertain dissatisfaction. Vivian wiped the last residual fish funk on her pants as she glanced at the large analog wall clock clicking away all too slowly on the wall above the entrance. There were only fifteen minutes left in her shift. She was in the home stretch now. She lowered her eyes and peered dreamily through the glass doors and into the outside world.

  An elderly woman with a permed puff of snowy white hair drove a gigantic and equally white Buick into the blazing parking lot. She scrutinized the aggressive orange Hummer nervously before turning her attention to Nick and his one-man party.

  Sensing the fresh meat, Nick bounced up to the side of the Buick and began rocking out to the corporate grunge music, pointing rhythmically to himself with the index and pinky fingers of both hands and waggling his tongue like a lunatic. Smoke poured off of the Buick’s whitewalls as the terrified woman peeled out of the parking lot and onto Bayshore Boulevard, fleeing for her life in a squealing reverse.

  Vivian smiled.

  “Well, at least that’s one less for me to deal with,” she thought.

  “Vivian!” Boltzmann barked.

  Vivian jumped out of her skin. How could he always sneak up on her? It was like being snuck up on by a dump truck full of barking dogs.

  “Vivian, could you please explain why you charged this nice young woman three times for this camping lantern?”

  Behind the enormous bulk of the manager, Vivian could see the old lady with all the batteries glowering with disapproval.

  “I didn’t,” Vivian explained. “I made an accidental scan, then I took one off.”

  “I can see that,” Boltzmann said, waving the receipt in her face. “But there’s three charges here, each for $79.99. You need to refund her money twice. She only bought one lantern.”

  Vivian puzzled.

  “No, I’ll show you,” she said, reaching for the slip. “One is a negative scan of

  $79.99; it’s all taken care-”

  “Oh no you don’t,” Boltzmann said, pulling back his doughy hand. “Don’t try to confuse this nice lady by talking nonsense. Just open your drawer and give her back the $159.98 that you ripped off from her. Or should I say, open your purse. ”

  “But it’s not … I mean, there’s the two positive scans, and one negative . One plus one minus one equals one. It’s all taken care of.”

  “Vivian,” Boltzmann seethed, “I’m going to count to ten, and if you don’t …”

  “Fine,” Vivian boiled, opening her register drawer, “here’s the hundred dollars back that she gave me, and here’s another sixty just for being so good at math.”

  “That’s more like it,” Boltzmann nodded. “You’re lucky she’s such a good sport.” He snatched the bills from Vivian’s hand and gave them to the old woman. “There you go, ma’am. Keep the change. I hope we’ll see you in here again real soon.” He turned with a knifelike glare at Vivian.

  “I’ll be watching you, missy. You watch yourself.”

  With a humanity that he reserved only for customers, Boltzmann escorted the old woman to the front door before shoehorning himself back into his office. Vivian slipped her fingers under her glasses and rubbed her tired eyes. There were only four minutes left in her shift.

  Nothing else could possibly happen to her in only four minutes.

  “Ripping off old ladies. Ouch, that’s a real hit on your karma points, Red.” Vivian pulled her hands from under her glasses to see Nick leaning rakishly on the end of her checkstand next to four jars of Beta Burn.

  “This lane is closed,” she said.

  Nick’s eyes floated to the illuminated sign above the register. Vivian clicked it off.

  “Aw, come on now. You know I’m just kidding around. I saw that whole thing go down,” Nick confided. “Don’t sweat it. That fat bastard just ripped off his own store, you know? No skin off your ass.”

  “There’s not a lot left to take,” Vivian sighed. She ran the first jar of Beta Burn over the scanner.

  BLEEP!

  “Whoa whoa,” Nick said, pointing to the register display. “Those boxes are tagged $10.99. Why are they ringing up as $16.99?”

  “I’d tell you,” Vivian sighed, “but then I’d have to kill myself.”

  “Okay, so you’ve had a rough day working point of sale,” Nick laughed. “I can definitely help with that. You know what you need to pick you up and get you back to the top of your game?”

  “Oh, let me think,” Vivian said airily. “Could it possibly, possibly be an ice-cold bottle of Fusion Fuel?”

  “Is that what you think of me?” Nick grinned. He grabbed her sticky hand off the countertop and cupped it between his own smooth, hairless fingers. “You think I’m all work and no play, huh? Well, you’ve only seen the parts of me that come out when I’m on the job. Let me take you out tonight and show you my private parts.” Vivian blinked. “I’d rather have the Fusion Fuel.”

  “You got it, Red!”

  With a slight bend of his knees, Nick plucked a hidden six-pack of Fusion Fuel from the floor at his feet and hung the cardboard handle over Vivian’s outstretched fingers.

  “Why don’t you slam a coupla bottles of Fusion Fuel and then tell me what you think of its extreme blast of citrus flavor over dinner tonight,” Nick smiled. “How about we grab some chow around nine? I know a place up in Port Manatee that you’ll go totally mental over.”

  Vivian blew a long breath through her bangs.

  “Okay. Nick. Listen. Let me put this into phrases small enough that they can be absorbed through the dense filtration of your frighteningly minute attention span. You are not my type. I am not going out with you tonight. I am not going out with you ever. I would not go out with you if you were the last living man on the planet Earth. Do you understand?”

  Nick nodded.

  “So would ten o’clock be better for you? Because I’m totally flexible.” Vivian’s throat caught a scream and hammered it back down into her lungs as the long minute hand of the store’s clock finally pointed to freedom.

  “My shift is over,” she said calmly. “Goodbye, Nick.” Without another word Vivian turned, exited the checkout lane, and stormed out the front door.

  Once outside, she was relieved to see that the blistering sun had disappeared behind a cover of thick black clouds. She kicked her way through the debris field of shattered Fusion Fuel samples only to find her tired old Rabbit sagging against the pavement. Sticking out from the flaccid heap of a flat driver’s-side tire was a jagged shard of orange glass branded with the im
age of a spongy sort of molecule.

  “Well, that’s it then,” Vivian thought. “Today officially can’t get any worse.” At that precise moment, the storm clouds overhead tore themselves open, letting fly the kind of Florida thunderstorm that makes God Himself unplug His electronics from the wall socket. The rain was thick and sticky, and it gave off a faint odor of evaporated salt and stale cabbage as it saturated Vivian’s clothes.

  She pulled her cheap sombrero onto her head and slouched in utter defeat.

  “Correction: Things can always get worse.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Do you think that Obi-Wan Kenobi changed his name to Ben Kenobi just out of convenience?” Bobby asked.

  “Convenience?” Erik replied.

  “Yeah, like can you picture him on the phone trying to order a new droid from QVC or something? He’d be all ‘Send that to Obi-Wan Kenobi. No, I’m sorry, not Joey Kenobi, Obi. Obi-Wan Kenobi. No! Not Juan Kenobi! Do I sound Colombian to you? Look, just send it to Ben, okay? Ben Kenobi.’”

  Erik shook his head.

  “Come on. Everyone knows that Obi-Wan changed his name to Ben when he went into hiding after the Clone Wars. It had nothing to do with convenience; it was for security.”

  “Security?” Bobby laughed. “The man is trying to lay low from the most powerful evil empire the universe has ever known, and he doesn’t even bother to change his last name? ”

  “Well, maybe ‘Kenobi’ was a common last name in their universe,” Erik shrugged.

  “I mean, there’s a Captain Antilles and a Wedge Antilles who aren’t related, right? Obi-Wan probably didn’t change his last name because he knew the rebels would come looking for him someday. Luke would have never told R2-D2 about him if he was ‘Old Clark Kent who lives out beyond the Dune Sea.’”

  “Wait-so let me get this straight,” Bobby argued. “Because he only changed his first name,

  Darth

  Vader-the

  meanest,

  most

  powerful,

  most

  dark-side-of-the-Force-havin’ bad-ass in the galaxy-can’t find him for twenty years, yet it takes only five seconds for a dumb-ass, desert-dwelling teenager to get from