She was just old enough to drink, but no one, any age, deserves to experience that kind of torture. The flashbulbs that go off immortalize the memory and she lives it over and over again. Coming to the end of the reel, it rewinds, and shows again. Forever she is trapped in the cinema of his malevolence.

The Supervisor had a mysterious appeal. There was nothing upstanding or special about her. She would not stick out of a crowd. Tourist season was approaching and management needed someone with a strong tolerance to stupidity to manage the summer help. New England only peaked its head into the sun for a few months of the year to bask in the good weather, and all of the coffee shops and bakeries that barely scraped by in the winter had a short amount of time to make enough revenue for the year. They asked the Supervisor, who at the time wasn’t a supervisor at all, if she could handle that kind of power. She took all of this in stride without so much as a smile, which is why They liked her to begin with. And so it was that the Supervisor came to power.

( The Cashier despised her, although the Supervisor could never figure out exactly why. )

The Supervisor had a mysterious appeal. There was nothing or upstanding or special about her. She would not stick out of a crowd.

She was nothing at all like the Cashier, who fancied herself a charcoal sketch on a very pale canvas. The Cashier was talented with eyeliner, a skill she had perfected in three hours on a rainy weeknight, and she adored the way it gave her eyes a dark, seductive, smoky emergence. The Cashier liked to think she had molded her personality into a type of fashion. She loved thin, clingy-cotton shirts that made loud statements and pants with legs so wide they could be considered skirts: the more zippers, straps, pockets, and chains the better. A most recent purchase was her favorite: a pair of dangling black earrings with shiny ebony beads at the bottoms of black chains that clinked and jingled when she shook her long, dyed locks. She was certain that she was unique, dark, and poetic.

( Not that They would let her wear anything like that at work. )