Seventeen
Dana sat behind the counter, scanning books. It was the same thing that she did almost every day, and it was her least favorite part of every day. Completely mindless. It was the perfect time to spend time thinking about things. Sometimes that was beneficial. Sometimes it was even pleasant. More often than not, it was neither. She let out a long sigh. She looked over towards the door.
Nobody came in. Thursdays were never busy, but today had to be a uniquely slow day. There had been talk about the library closing down, or switching to a lighter schedule. Dana didn't like it, but then again, nobody had asked her what she thought on the matter. Officially, they hadn't even floated the idea.
But once talk like that starts to circulate, it's only a matter of time until someone tries to figure out how it would work out in reality. And once that happens, you're pretty much lost from the get-go.
She closed the cover of the book on the top of the stack, shifted it to the 'done' stack, and opened the next. Scanned it. Closed the cover. Shifted. Opened. Scanned. It was mind-numbing stuff.
There were a dozen projects she knew she should have been thinking about. She had a novel in the works. It was just a little dream now, and a few pages of outlining that she wasn't sure she wanted to keep working on. There were still questions that remained entirely un-answered, and she needed to think about how she was going to deal with that.
Instead, she was thinking about Evan. He was an asshole, she told herself. But that wasn't what she was thinking, no matter how many times she tried to bring herself back to heel. She was thinking about his face, and about how he was in bed. She was thinking about his taste in movies. She was thinking about books that she could have him read.
And she was thinking about the fact that no matter how much she might have wanted him to be interested in her, it wasn't going to happen.
Maybe he would change. Maybe she could fix him, or she could get him to straighten out his act. The reality was that it didn't matter, because she didn't want to put the work in. He didn't deserve her. That was what she told herself, and if she said it in her head a dozen more times, then eventually, she knew–eventually she'd actually believe it, too.
Evan drove aimlessly after class. He wasn't going anywhere. But even he wasn't stupid enough to think that was the truth after he passed her library the fifth time. His random circles seemed to be going to the same places over and over again, and no matter how much he tried to pretend that it wasn't intentional, he noticed the pattern.
There are only two ways to react to that sort of realization, and he knew what she would have wanted. So he turned the wheel and got onto the interstate. He drove until a name on the sign caught his interest, pulled off, and looked at the sign for the local attractions.
He'd lived in-state his entire life, but that didn't mean that he always had the urge to explore. He had only the vaguest idea where he was; as for what he could find around here, he knew nothing at all. They advertised a Motel Six and a McDonald's 2.2 miles to the east. He went west.
A mile down the road he saw a mall. That was the sort of thing he wanted. He pulled into the parking lot. The place was small, and it was more empty than it was full. He knew vaguely what that meant, in terms of the businesses inside. They were all dying a death in there, and the only people who went inside were people who weren't interested in buying anything they had to sell.
A trio of women in their sixties walked past in velour jumpsuits, holding pink two-pound weights in their hands like that kind of weight made a difference. He followed them through the doors, and then followed them until the mall split off in three different directions. They went left; he went straight-on.
He looked at stores. Tried not to think about anything at all. It wasn't going to work, though, and he knew it. With nothing to do and a whole lot on his mind, all he was going to find was that he wanted to think; since he didn't, that wasn't going to work.
He let out a breath and stepped inside a media store with a name he didn't recognize. It was almost surprising to see, but it soon became easy to understand how they kept themselves open when he noticed the curtained-off section in the back.
He let out a breath, kept his attention off the back area, and browsed their selection. Pulled a Criterion Blu-ray off the rack, and thought for a moment. No reason not to, he supposed. It had been a while since he'd watched Seventh Seal, and there was no time like the present.
It wasn't like he had anything else to do, after all.