CASPER by Gwen E. Kirby
The girls of the Unclaimed Baggage Depot – Greenleaf, Alabama’s, second- best and only other unclaimed baggage store – found Casper in a lime green suitcase. Like every Monday morning, the owner had unloaded a truck filled with bags from cut- rate airlines and a few bus terminals and left them in the hot back room for the girls to sort, putting underwear into garbage bags, clothes into categories, the unpredictable rest onto shelves. Since they’d been hired at the start of the summer, Brittany had found, among other things, a pocket watch, a left- handed bowling ball embossed with the name Porkchop, and a ziplocked bag of used condoms. Valentina had found a Tiffany’s letter opener, three Tarot decks, and a silver jar full of what they agreed were human remains. Amy Sue only halfheartedly participated. She’d found, and pocketed, a pair of gold stud earrings, and had gotten a rash from a half- used bottle of hand lotion. Mostly, she dawdled: watching Brittany and Valentina work, texting her boyfriend, who was ignoring her lately, and wishing that she were working at the Unclaimed Baggage SUPERSTORE™, the birthright of every thin, tan, popular teenage girl of Greenleaf, her destiny until she’d been caught shoplifting Red Bull and tampons from the local gas station. Girls who shoplifted did not work at the SUPERSTORE™. They sat in the backroom of the Depot, skin sweating against the concrete, digging through a bag clearly owned by a pervert. Amy Sue threw yet another sparkling thong, half its sequins missing, into a trash bag.
The SUPERSTORE™ was the only reason anyone came to Green-leaf, and the Depot survived, barely, by dint of its rival’s reflected glory. The SUPERSTORE™ was large and clean and popular. The Depot was messy and small, the last remaining shop in a failed gray- stucco strip mall. The SUPERSTORE™ got the unclaimed bags from every major airline and drew people from miles around, from states away, the parking lot always full, the license plates from Mississippi, Texas, Florida. People came for the fantasy that they would snatch up what some careless rich person had left behind – a designer coat, an antique watch, a brand new iPhone with kisses, Chastity engraved on the back – and though they usually left with nothing better than discounted jeans, it was still a righteous reclaiming. The SUPERSTORE™ played up the theater of it. Every few hours, they let a customer open a bag in front of an audience.
Early in the summer, Valentina had tried to impress Amy Sue with the story of when she’d won that Lotto. She’d been in middle school and it had been the most exciting day of her life. The girl working there had pulled Valentina’s name out of the bowl in front of a whole crowd of people, given her the latex safety gloves, let her unzip the bag. The lotto winner got to choose one thing from the bag to keep, free, and Valentina still had the paperweight she’d found, a glass sphere the size of a baseball, with a shard at its heart. A chunk of the Berlin Wall? A moon rock? When she couldn’t sleep, she held it in her hand until the glass was warm and she imagined that someday, when she needed it most, the heat of her body would crack it open and the shard inside would be a key to an escape, to an adventure.
“It’s all fake,” Amy Sue had told her. “They’ve already opened those bags. They take out anything really valuable and then plant mediocre shit.”
What did Amy Sue know? Valentina had thought, she couldn’t even get a job at the SUPERSTORE™. But, then, neither could Valentina. She wasn’t pretty or not pretty. She wasn’t a cheerleader, but she wasn’t in debate club or band, either, wasn’t sure what her interests might turn out to be, except that she knew she wanted to be liked. She had gone home that night and moved her paperweight from her desk into her sock drawer.
Despite all this, Valentina still experienced a small thrill whenever she opened a new bag. As Amy Sue flicked a thong at Brittany, Valentina pulled a lime green suitcase off the pile and unzipped it. She began discarding the wads of crumpled newspaper from inside. Why didn’t Amy Sue ever flick thongs at her? There was a lot of newspaper, and then, beneath it, an object almost the size of the suitcase. She pressed her palm against it. Solid. “Hey guys,” Valentina said, and for a moment no one paid attention. Brittany was making a point of ignoring Amy Sue. Amy Sue was checking her phone. Valentina pulled the large object from the suitcase, surprised by how light it was. She set it upright on the concrete floor; it came to about her waist and was practically spherical, wrapped in colorful scarves like a festive mummy. She unwrapped one scarf, then another, the other girls finally noticed and drifted to her, and the back room was suddenly quiet.
“What the fuck is that?” Brittany said.
All three girls hoped for something different from what turned out to be Casper.
Brittany wanted it to be a discovery. Not a discovery to them, but something a museum would want. She imagined an object stolen from the halls of the British Museum, a grateful curator weeping at the object’s safe return, promising to give Brittany anything she wanted, an internship, a tour of the back rooms. Someday, Brittany wanted to work for a museum, building dioramas and interactive exhibits, recording and sorting objects in a room that was cold and quiet and clean.
Valentina hoped it would be something she got credit for. Yes, any one of them could have selected the lime green bag, would have eventually, but it had still been her and that counted for something.
Amy Sue hoped for something spectacular. So spectacular that it would erase the summer up until this moment, the shit she was getting from her friends at the SUPERSTORE™, the long sweaty days in the failing Depot. But there was nothing under the scarves that could change that. “Maybe it’s half a dude,” she said. “Maybe his legs are in one of these other cases.”
Valentina stopped unwinding.
“Don’t be stupid,” Brittany said, but her heart sped up.
“I’m serious,” Amy Sue said, “last week, the Superstore girls opened this totally normal looking bag and they found a flare gun, five boxes of flares, porn mags, like old school, huge bushes, and a Big Bertha firecracker, the kind that blows your hands off.”
Brittany wondered how a suitcase full of explosives got on a plane. Maybe the bags were confiscated at the airport? Maybe Amy Sue was full of shit.
“We’ve got that one spear,” Valentina said.
“Wait a sec,” Brittany said. She went into the employee bathroom and put on the pair of yellow gloves they used to scrub the toilet. Valentina found herself pushed to the side and it was Brittany, not her, pulling away the scarves, one at a time, then removing more newspaper, peeling masking tape off bubble wrap, revealing bit by bit ears big as a cupped palm, white fur, a small and delicate face, studded with pink glass eyes. The animal sat happily on his haunches, his fluffy belly protruding over his feet, peaceful, plump, pleased, even, with how things had turned out for him.
“What the fuck is that?” Amy Sue said, echoing Brittany, but softly, with reverence, because they already knew what that was. That was proof that sometimes the world would give them more than they’d known to want. It was proof that they were meant to be in this back room at this exact moment. It was a reward for the summer of boredom and years of boredom and the size of the town where they lived and the distance of that town from any town where they wanted to be. It was a taxidermied albino wallaby and it was the greatest thing to ever happen to the Depot, until it was the end of everything.
Caring for Casper that first week involved some false starts. Brittany forbade anyone from touching him without gloves because she’d read in Smithsonian Magazine that this was what people did with truly valuable pieces. Once, Amy Sue strapped Casper into the passenger seat of Brittany’s car as a joke, scaring Brittany to death when she got in, the only time any of them had seen Brittany lose her shit – He’s not a toy! – and even Amy Sue had backed down, said she was sorry, geeze. Valentina, when no one was looking, did stroke the soft fur on his tummy because she knew she wasn’t supposed to and it felt so nice. Brittany caught her once, quit that, she said, slapped Valentina’s hand away, but Valentina deserved to touch him, because she had found Casper and she had thought of his name, and after they’d named him it was like he wasn’t dead, he was their companion, the mascot of the Depot. At first, they kept him by the register, but customers kept trying to touch him and Amy Sue almost fought a guy who perched sunglasses on Casper’s nose. He’s not a toy! she yelled. They moved him near the door, on top of a stack of old typewriter cases, very cosmopolitan, until a customer bumped into him and knocked him off his perch. This was when Brittany realized that the safest place for Casper was in the window, the star of a display that she would create. Last semester, Brittany had built a ten- foot- tall model of the Eiffel Tower for the school’s production of An American in Paris using chicken wire, a bucket of plaster, and sheets ripped into one-inch strips. She knew what she was doing. She cleaned out the space in the front floor-to-ceiling window, washed the window for the first time all summer, possibly for the first time in years. The Depot was so much brighter. Why hadn’t she thought to do this at the beginning of the summer? She regretted the displays she’d missed: Fourth of July, maybe a beach theme. This would be the first of many homes she would build for Casper.
While Brittany made the display, Amy Sue and Valentina sat on the curb outside, facing away from the window. They were not supposed to turn around until Brittany told them they could. Amy Sue lit a cigarette and dangled it from her fingers. She rarely inhaled and liked to see how long the ash could grow before it fell. It was a habit she’d picked up when her friends had started smoking and she’d gone along, not liking it much, but not wanting to be left behind.
Amy Sue got a text and laughed.
“What?” Valentina said.
“Nothing,” Amy Sue said. “People.”
Valentina pulled her phone out, wishing she had a text message to be secretive about, and since she didn’t, she bumped Amy Sue’s arm, making the ash fall to the ground. “Sorry,” Valentina said. She was happy to see that Amy Sue was freckling.
When Brittany came outside, Amy Sue said, “About time,” and rolled her eyes, like, god, who cares? except she was excited too, they all were, and they turned to face the display. “That’s awesome,” Valentina said, and Brittany didn’t pay that much attention to her. She was focused on Amy Sue, who took her time, didn’t speak right away, walked up close to the glass but didn’t smudge it. As always, Valentina felt she’d made a mistake.
Towers built of cardboard boxes were draped in salmon tablecloths and there were tablecloths on the floor, too, dusted with sand. On the towers, where the edges of boxes jutted out, she’d put the small rubber animals lost by some child. On the ground were shells laid out in spirals, a rubber snake, that spear. In her mind, it was a desert, a wasteland. Casper she’d added last, off center to the left, so much larger than the child’s toys that he was like a monster in the landscape, the pink of his eyes popping to match the background, his fur impossibly white.
“Casper looks happy,” Amy Sue finally said, and she meant it. It was beautiful. “He looks like fucking Godzilla!”
Yes, Valentina thought. That’s what I should have said.
That day, the Depot sold a broken pocket watch to a man who said he could use it for a costume. They sold a Discraft UltraStar regulation Frisbee. They sold a wooden falcon painted shiny black – an exact replica of the one from The Maltese Falcon – to a man who drove a motorcycle. He strapped the falcon to his back and revved out of the parking lot. They watched him disappear down the main street, and imagined they were the one on the motorcycle.
Three different people asked about Casper, and one man asked if he was for sale.
“No,” Brittany said, though of course he was. The owner of the Depot wasn’t there to contradict her. He was never there.
“Sorry,” Amy Sue said to the customer, and gave the guy a big smile because she could, because she enjoyed being beautiful. When the man left, Amy Sue gave Brittany her real smile, no tilt of the head, pure grin, and Brittany smiled back, and Valentina smiled too but no one was looking at her.
That night, Valentina made a box of mac and cheese. Her parents were out on their weekly date, dinner and a movie in the next town over. She always tried to enjoy having the house to herself – wasn’t that what all teenagers wanted? – but the truth was she didn’t like being alone at night. She ate the macaroni straight from the pot and played her music as loud as she could on her shitty little speaker. The house always seemed fragile when the windows were dark, the outside world pressing itself against the glass until she was afraid to stand too near, until she found herself paralyzed in the middle of the room. It’s because I have an amazing imagination, she told herself, though that never made her feel better and lately, since working at the Depot, she suspected that it wasn’t true.
Maybe, she thought, as she imagined the glass in every window exploding toward her, she was special in some other way. She lay on the carpet in the middle of the room and thought about her paperweight. She would get up soon, as soon as she could, and take it out of her sock drawer, put it back where it belonged.
Brittany ate spaghetti with her parents. They both taught at the community college one town over and talked about a student they shared – a boy who had outbursts in class, but was, they thought, well- meaning. How much disruption until it was too much? They did not ask her about her day and she didn’t tell them about the display; they would have asked too many questions and made too many suggestions. She felt trampled by their helpfulness, their pushing, as if nothing could be only hers, or exist solely for itself. She hated that during the summer she couldn’t pretend she needed to go do her homework and shut herself away in her room.
Instead, they watched television together, a documentary called Blackfish about Tilikum, an orca whale in captivity who had killed three different people. The whales were so sad, seen from above, trapped in what for them was basically a bathtub. That whale just wants to escape, Brittany thought, and found herself tearing up and looking down at her phone to distract herself, flipping through Snap-chats until her mother told her to knock it off. A whale looked at the camera through thick glass and Brittany thought of Casper behind the windows in the display, sitting in the dark on the tablecloth, his pink glass eyes glinting when the rare car passed. She wanted to go pull him from that display, but she didn’t. Instead she told herself that tomorrow she would build him a little nest, the way she would have when she was a kid and she still tucked her stuffed animals in, still left snacks out for them, in case they came alive while she was gone and woke up hungry.
Amy Sue went to the most cliché of parties: a friend’s parents were out of town. It was fine, nothing special and nothing bad either and she was a little tipsy and told some girls who worked at the SUPERSTORE™ about the Depot’s new window display, about Casper. “We’re coming for you,” she joked, except she wasn’t, and she couldn’t quite understand why she wanted to brag about the shitty place until she realized she was actually bragging about Brittany. Brittany was kind of amazing, an artist, and Amy Sue was tipsy enough that she wished Brittany were there, was tempted to text her, but didn’t.
The music was loud, Amy Sue was getting another drink while some guy threw up in the sink, when a girl came into the kitchen. She was breathless with excitement. She told Amy Sue that another girl had just walked in on Rayna fucking Amy Sue’s boyfriend in the upstairs bathroom. The red Solo cup of beer fell out of her hand. Well, that explains why he’s been ignoring me, she thought. Her flats were now wet. She liked those flats, had just broken them in. She walked out into the living room, and saw Rayna, guilty, coming down the stairs, and all Amy Sue could think was that Rayna already worked for the SUPERSTORE™. She didn’t need anything else. Rayna walked up to her, was about to speak, and Amy Sue did the one thing she could think to do. She punched Rayna in the face. Someone shrieked, what did it matter who, and the room spun a little as Amy Sue spun too, walked back out of the room, and, in the time- honored tradition of parties going wrong, locked herself in the bathroom to cry a little because she was hurt and cry a lot because she was humiliated.
It could have ended there but it didn’t. Her friends talked to her through the door. Her boyfriend arrived. She screamed at him. She took his phone and scrolled through his pictures and there they were, like she’d known, naked pictures of that bitch. She texted them to herself, dropped her boyfriend’s phone in the toilet, and then sent the pictures to a dozen different people. The rest of the night was a blur, she drank more, and though she insisted afterward that the slut deserved it, she woke up hungover and ashamed. She turned the shower on to try to cover the sounds of her throwing up from her parents. She wished she’d punched her boyfriend instead, sent the world a picture of his dick, which he’d texted to her so many times, thinkng of u, wher u at?, or no caption at all, only the image, the shaft a little bent to the left, its hardness meant, she guessed, to do the talking.
She splashed her face with cold water, and stared at herself. She looked the same. She rinsed out her mouth, spit, then brushed her hair up into the high, tight ponytail that meant business.
The next morning, the sky was blue and a brief rain had cleared out the humidity, a small, short- lived miracle. Brittany arrived at the Depot first, as she always did; she was proud to be the one the owner trusted with the keys. It was a big responsibility. She was listening to the radio, singing along, Tilikum out of her mind, happy enough that she didn’t see what had happened until she got out of her car.
The window of the Depot was smashed in. Shattered glass lay across the sidewalk where the girls liked to sit. The display was demolished, and not only from the rock lying inside but from hands that had rifled through it. The cardboard boxes were cracked open like skulls. The shells, every one, broken underfoot, mixed up with the glass and the pieces of the little animals, everything destroyed, horrible, but still there. Everything except for Casper. She didn’t need to go inside to know he was gone. If he wasn’t in the window, he’d been taken, and she couldn’t bring herself to go inside anyway. The violence of the scene frightened her; if she went in alone, somehow she would be the one blamed, she would be broken on the floor next to the objects she’d let be destroyed. So she stood where she was on the sidewalk, looking, her mind a blank, wondering why, why, because who would bother to attack something so totally unimportant to anyone but her.
Amy Sue and Valentina arrived together twenty minutes later.
“Jesus shit,” Amy Sue said. Fuck fuck fuck, she thought, as if thinking that word over and over would keep her from thinking anything else.
Valentina stared. Her heart was racing, the way people said it should during moments like this. She was excited. This was exciting. Horrible, but, still, it was like a movie. She looked at Amy Sue and Brittany and didn’t say anything.
There were wet spots on the tablecloths. The girls leaned as close as they could to the display. It smelled of liquor and piss.
“They took Casper,” Brittany fi nally said.
I knew this was going to happen, Brittany thought, even though that was crazy. I should have gone back for him last night.
Fuck fuck fuck, Amy Sue sang to herself. Fuck fuck fuck.
Fucking cool. Valentina smiled.
They called the cops, who took some photos. They called the owner, who said he’d have someone out as soon as he could to replace the window. He’d be by later. They swept up the glass. They folded the cardboard boxes from the towers flat, gently, though they were no longer useable. They tied up the debris in the tablecloths and hauled the salmon- pink bundles to the dumpster. Amy Sue reluctantly told them about the party, the fight, but not about the naked picture she’d sent. “I know they did this, all the girls who work at the Superstore,” she said. “To get back at me.”
Valentina had gotten the naked picture of Rayna on her phone from a friend in the small hours of the morning, but she didn’t say anything. Someone along the chain had made it into a gif, with fat slut written at the bottom and little tacos dancing in the background. Valentina had sent a boyfriend naked pictures of herself many times, didn’t everyone? and while she had always been intimidated by Amy Sue, a little in awe of her, now she was afraid of her and knew, finally, that she was better than Amy Sue.
“Those fucking bitches,” Amy Sue muttered as they swept up broken glass, careful not to get the small shards lodged in the thin rubber of her fl ip flops. It was her hangover that was making her feel so sick. She was sweating beer.
By noon, they’d cleaned the mess and taped some of the broken- down cardboard across the window with duct tape. They wrote OPEN across the panels in black Sharpie. The Depot, which had always looked ramshackle, now looked positively sinister. They went inside, turned on the overhead fluorescent light, and sat on the floor side- by- side, backs propped against a shelf of books. No one came in.
“We have to do something,” Amy Sue said. “My stepdad has cans of spray paint in the garage. We can write Bitch Sluts across the windows of the Superstore. Everyone will see that. Write Fuck You! in red letters.”
“That’s fucking stupid,” Brittany said. “What matters is Casper.”
Valentina nodded. “We should egg the place instead.” She hated bad smells more than anything else.
Brittany ignored her. “I’m not writing dumb shit on the wall. We need to get inside.” She turned to Amy Sue. “You’re there with them all the time. You know how.”
“If we’re inside we can throw eggs on the wedding dresses,” Valentina said. If there was going to be an adventure, Valentina wanted to come. And she’d always wanted to see the backrooms, the secret places. She’d loved her paperweight, but she was older now. There had to be so much more.
Brittany was going to save Casper and she wasn’t going to bring him back to the Depot, either. Casper wasn’t going to be trapped anymore. She wouldn’t tell the other girls her plans and she couldn’t give a shit what Amy Sue and her friends fought about. She was sure this was Amy Sue’s fault. Fucking Amy Sue who already had everything she wanted and had now fucked this up for Brittany and just as Brittany was starting to feel like they could be friends.
And Amy Sue, she had to retaliate. She had to retaliate because otherwise the other popular girls would know she hadn’t, and that would be admitting that what had happened to the Depot was not only because of her but her fault entirely, because she’d been drunk and angry, because it was easier to hurt another girl than admit she was hurt herself. It would be admitting that she didn’t deserve to retaliate. She pushed the thought from her mind. Rayna had fucked her boyfriend. She’d hold on to that.
“Back of the Superstore. Midnight,” Amy Sue said.
Valentina nodded. God this was great.
Brittany found a sliver of glass in the pad of her hand and pulled it out slowly, surprised by how much it stung and how little it bled. “We’re going in and out. Nothing stupid,” she said, and Amy Sue and Valentina nodded.
The SUPERSTORE™ looked different in the dark. Both less impressive – it was just a glorified warehouse, after all, grey cinderblocks, no windows – and more untouchable. The empty parking lot was like a moat around it, a field that had to be crossed before returning to the safety of the woods.
Amy Sue was there first. She pulled her phone out of her back pocket to check the time – five to midnight – decided she wouldn’t look at it again. Too bright. The cicadas were so loud she felt like she was drowning in them.
The plan was simple. She knew the employee code for the back door. Get in, get to the employee lounge, find something of theirs to fuck up no matter what Brittany said, find Casper, leave, quick as anything. She’d even brought the pair of yellow toilet cleaning gloves. No finger prints, she’d say to Valentina and Brittany, except they still weren’t there. Maybe they weren’t coming. Maybe they’d decided this was Amy Sue’s problem.
Next to the door was a wedge of concrete the SUPERSTORE™ girls used to prop the door when they stood out back having a smoke. If Valentina and Brittany came, they could meet her inside. She punched in the code, set down the chunk of concrete, and snuck inside.
Valentina was still at home. What did people wear to a break-in? She put on jeans and a black hoodie, but that was boring. She changed into a short dress. Like a James Bond girl, except those girls usually ended up dead, didn’t they? She tried again.
What had they done to Casper? Brittany was at home, waiting, picturing poor Casper sliced open, his guts spewing fluff. But was that even right? What was inside a taxidermied animal? She’d never checked. If they cut him, would his skin peel back over the mold, sagging, relieved to give up pretending to be alive?
She slipped on her flip flops and sat on the edge of the bed.
Her parents finally turned their light out. She was already late. She tiptoed, as quiet as she could be, though she knew that even if they heard a soft noise, they would never think it was her.
The employee lounge was the first door on the right. No windows, no one can see, Amy Sue told herself, though she felt panicky. Turning on the light was fine. The walls were bare except for a motivational poster that said, Dreams. Not Just for Sleeping! An eagle soared above a mountain. Rayna’s employee cubby was empty. Well, that was fine. This was about more than Rayna now anyway. It hadn’t been Rayna that she’d told about the window display. It was all of them.
Valentina arrived twenty minutes late, wearing black leggings and a tight black tank top. She was a freaking tomb raider tonight. She didn’t care that Amy Sue would laugh – she felt like a ninja, an explorer and an assassin, the sort of person who ought to work at the SUPERSTORE™, in fact. Better than Amy Sue. She would never send a picture like Amy Sue had. She wasn’t a bitch like that. When she snuck through the propped door and into the hall, she saw the light under a closed door and tiptoed past. She didn’t care what the other girls were doing.
The main room of the SUPERSTORE™ was enormous in the dark, the racks of clothes endless, but this wasn’t what Valentina had come for. This part of the store she could see any day. She walked down the main aisle, past Women’s Wear, Swimsuits, Men’s Shoes, a hat display that looked bouquets of exotic flowers in the dim light. Past the electronics counter, past the Happily Ever After grotto of lost wedding dresses (after some debate, she’d left the eggs at home). Finally, she found the side door she remembered from middle school. It was the door through which they’d carried her unopened bag, the paperweight undiscovered inside. This was the place. She turned the knob and, though she didn’t expect it, the door opened.
Brittany got to the SUPERSTORE™ forty minutes late and wasn’t surprised to find the door propped; Amy Sue wasn’t the kind of person who waited. Brittany slipped inside, saw the light under the first door, and opened it to find Amy Sue writing on a card table in ketchup.
“They only have ketchup packets so this is taking forever,” Amy Sue said, motioning to the squeezed out rectangles that littered the floor. Her yellow gloves were red. The letters on the table spelled S L U
“Have you seen Casper?”
“Not in here. Or Valentina either. I guess she got cold feet.”
Brittany looked around the little room, as if Casper could be there without Amy Sue having noticed. She hadn’t thought past this, had assumed Casper would be there, and she’d grab him and go.
“You mean you haven’t looked anywhere else?”
The truth was, Amy Sue had kind of forgotten about Casper.
“I’m sure he’ll turn up,” Amy Sue said.
This wasn’t what they were supposed to be doing. The SUPERSTORE™ was huge. Brittany would never find Casper on her own; Amy Sue knew the place better than she did. There was a little television mounted up on a wall. Brittany walked to it, unplugged it, lifted it – it was lighter than Casper, tiny really – and threw it on the floor. The screen shattered, the cheap plastic exterior cracked.
“Fuck,” Amy Sue said, her work on the card table made suddenly cheap and violent all at once.
Brittany looked down at the television, disappointed. No sparks, no explosion. It was the most dramatic thing she’d ever done and the TV hadn’t made a noise of protest. “There,” she said. “We’ve fucked their shit up. Now are you going to help? Or are you going to keep being pathetic? Because this,” she gestured at the table, “is fucking pathetic.”
Amy Sue straightened up, held her gory hands in front of her.
Through the door, down the stairs, and Valentina was in the basement of the SUPERSTORE™.
The ceiling was low and there were racks upon racks of unopened bags, stacked on top of each other, all colors and patterns. She had her cell phone pulled out, flashlight on, to see the wonders before her and she wished, for a moment, that someone else was with her so that she could say wow and this is so cool!
Valentina had never been well liked. Maybe in elementary school, but middle school, and then high school – she’d faded into the background. She feared she was closest to the girls at the Depot and the girls at the Depot didn’t like her much. They knew she was lacking something. Brittany was always fiddling with a project, organizing shelves, and then asking her opinion and Valentina never knew what to say. I think it needs more drama, she might offer, and Brittany would nod as if to say, obviously, but what drama? What? And Valentina had nothing more to add. And Amy Sue. Amy Sue, who wore the promise of a better life in her slender limbs and her confidence, who could have befriended her for real, but hadn’t because she too could sense Valentina’s deficiency.
But who could lack in the face of all of this? Valentina dragged her fingertips over the luggage. Her hands felt naked, daring, no latex gloves this time. Finally, she chose a blue suitcase, chose it because it seemed the most ordinary a suitcase could be; wasn’t that the way to find treasure, wasn’t the most precious thing always inside the most boring exterior? It was heavy as she lifted it and set it on the floor. As she unzipped it, her fingers shook.
The top layer was clothes. Soft, that made sense, to protect what might be underneath. The layer below clothes too. The bra of a woman with much larger breasts than Valentina’s. She dumped the clothes in a pile beside her. Beneath the clothes, toiletries. Two pairs of ladies heels. Two ten- pound hand weights. That was the reason the bag had been so heavy. The weights were the least romantic thing Valentina had ever imagined.
She took down another suitcase. Fancy looking this time. Fleur- de-lis or some shit on the outside. Opened it, the top layer clothes, clothes, more fucking clothes, men’s clothes this time, and a dopp kit with a small bottle of shaving lotion, nothing, nothing good, and she opened another suitcase and another, and she did find a few odd things – a bag of wheat pennies, a hair dryer broken down into ten different pieces, a dildo like a fucking horse cock and she put that in her purse because she didn’t know what else to do. Her phone’s flashlight cut across the debris, casting sharp shadows. There was nothing here. Her paperweight – it had been a lie. Not a medium thing, planted to represent something better, but a better thing, a best thing, because the truth was people were boring. They were predictable. When they traveled, they packed underwear and toothpaste and sneakers that smelled and then the whole suitcase smelled and no one seemed to care that they were ruining the little they had.
Valentina stood, stepped across the clothes until she was free of her own mess. At the end of the row of suitcases was a cage with a latch. She lifted it, heard its hard metal clang, cast her light across the shelves of confiscated items. A few knives that would be sanitized and moved to a locked glass case upstairs. That flare gun, the one Amy Sue had talked about. The girls would like to see that. She opened a box of flares, shoved one in the gun, stuck the gun in the back of her leggings, assassin! and that was when she saw him, sitting on the floor. Casper. Too white in the dark, truly a ghost. She went to him, held out her hands, paused because she wasn’t wearing gloves and what would Brittany say, then lifted him to herself and hugged him as tight as she could. Now Amy Sue would see that she could do something right, something better than Amy Sue had ever dreamed, and Brittany would be so proud of her, god, she would be so happy.
“I did it,” she whispered.
She held Casper close and walked out of the basement, leaving an explosion of objects behind her.
“You think this is pathetic?” Amy Sue was yelling. It was pathetic. She knew that. Fuck fuck fuck. But she couldn’t admit that, especially to Brittany. “What is more pathetic than you making a window display for a place no one is ever going to visit? The Depot is a shithole. This town is a shithole. Casper is probably better off here.”
“I’m going to find him,” Brittany said, strangely calm now that she’d destroyed the television. “I don’t need your help.”
Valentina listened outside, heard them yelling, and smiled. “Hey!” she said, walking in. She was too loud. Both girls shrieked and jumped and Amy Sue pressed a ketchup- covered hand to her heart, smearing her shirt and bare skin.
“Casper!” Brittany cried, and pulled him from Valentina’s arms.
“Fucking girl ninja here,” Amy Sue said, taking in Valentina’s outfit, happy to have someone other than Brittany to fight with, someone so easy to pick on. “Where the hell have you been?” Brittany was caressing Casper. “You’re like so late,” Amy Sue said, and all she could think was, I couldn’t even find Casper. Valentina, fucking Valentina, found him. She turned and swiped across the letters on the table with her gloved hand. Ketchup sprayed across the floor like blood and Brittany turned her back to shield Casper, then walked with him to the far corner of the room and set him down, knelt in front of him, smoothed his fur with the back of her hands, as if they were safer than her fingers, less dirty, less aggressive, as if she were trying to save Casper from the room, from Amy Sue’s contaminating influence.
Amy Sue watched Brittany caress Casper and felt close to tears. She wanted Brittany to touch her face. Did she? God. She wanted to be anywhere but here. She dropped her gloves to the floor in two wet slaps.
Valentina watched them. No one had thanked her. Brittany stood and walked to Amy Sue and asked, you finally done? and Amy Sue responded, whatever, and they looked ready to face off again, as though it hadn’t been Valentina, Valentina who had found Casper, who had saved the goddamn day. No one was paying any attention to her. Like she didn’t matter, wasn’t there, exactly like it had been the entire summer, except now she knew that Amy Sue was a bad person, and Brittany, well, Brittany was as wrong as she had been, enthralled by Amy Sue, thinking there was something there when there wasn’t. Both of them treated her like garbage. She felt like the glass of all the windows in the world was exploding toward her and the glass didn’t even cut her because she was a ghost like Casper.
Her hand shook. She pulled the flare gun from the band of her leggings, took aim, and fired.
Casper burst into flames.
Amy Sue would never go back to the Depot. As Casper went up, she reached both arms out, her legs frozen, her mouth open but no sound coming out. I’m in love with Brittany, she thought. Brittany will never forgive me for this.
Later, Amy Sue would date women and men, move to Atlanta, do fine for herself, and sometimes, rarely, think of Brittany and smile, then think of Rayna, who had never forgiven her, and feel ashamed for as long as it took her to push the memory from her mind.
Brittany would have expected to scream or weep. This was worse than her demolished window display, worse than being told she was a bad kisser. Worse than the time she’d found her father crying after her mother had slapped him. Instead, her eyes were so dry they burned with Casper. Perhaps that was the chemicals in the air. Perhaps she had discovered a talent for giving up what was already gone.
Years later, designing the set for a play in Nashville, she would walk down the street and see a taxidermied albino squirrel in the window of an antiques shop. She would touch the glass, look at the squirrel trapped behind it, and remember Casper going out in that blaze of glory, like a Viking funeral. Casper, that fluffy sweet goofball, a warrior on his way to Valhalla, and she wouldn’t believe it, but she was crying and it was because she was happy, a sweet memory when she had expected to feel sad.
None of them knew how long it took for Casper to burn himself out. The skin went up like newspaper, the glue beneath it flamed blue, his attentive ears gone in puffs of smoke, the wire cage that had held the skin taut folding in on itself as Casper made a last bow, died for a final time.
Amy Sue and Brittany did not speak as they left the scene. Casper’s sticky ketchup blood was splattered across the floor as if he had exploded, tiny droplets in a spray pattern, delicate except for where it was soiled by their retreating shoes. Only Valentina remained. She had never seen anything so beautiful. The shot itself had been almost quiet, a pop when she’d expected more, but the noise of the impact, something fast meeting something solid, it was like one man punching another and she knew it then, and it was true, that this would be one of the greatest moments of her life, not because she was proud of it, because she wasn’t, not exactly, but then, it was so rare to hold a moment in your hand, to be the one to make a finite amount of time last forever.
Gwen E. Kirby’s stories have appeared in One Story, Tin House online, Guernica, Ninth Letter, and Best Short Fictions 2018.