Poor Cynthia, she didn’t know a thing. She was mad because she spilled her pink coffee all on her shoes, which is why we were at Nordstrom Rack in the first place. Balboa bought her new ones. He was a good guy, Balboa was, and Cynthia was, yeah, she was there too. We walked around the store and me and Cynthia pointed at things that we liked but wouldn’t buy, like pastel plexiglass flowers for your desk, or candles molded in the shape of desserts, or strawberry milk body lotion, and Balboa floated behind us and carried Cynthia’s purse. Now no matter how I feel about her, Cynthia was not stupid, so she must have been feeling good, must have been pretty damn happy to not even notice when the mall cop started following us. The mall cop in the kitchen aisle. The mall cop behind a rack of purses. The mall cop watching us in that big ass line. Still, she didn’t notice, or if she did, she didn’t really. Run away, girl, I thought, and tried to get her to read my mind, but she wasn’t paying attention.
We walked through the door and the alarm went off.
Balboa held up his plastic bag of new shoes and said, Hey, I have a receipt, but the mall cop, you know, they got these great big guns now, just walking around the mall strapped to hell, and he was telling us to start walking, and everyone was looking, and shit, we weren’t gonna try the guy. So we went with him to a little cinder block office behind the store, and the mall cop said Okay empty your pockets, and Cynthia had nothing but $14 in ones in hers, and I had my debit card and my ID and my vape and some warm mint gum, and Balboa had a wallet that said Officer’s Son on it. And then the mall cop asked for Cynthia’s purse, which Balboa was still carrying, and Balboa handed it to him, and from the purse the mall cop pulled a bottle of Marc Jacobs Daisy. What’s this, said the mall cop, and Cynthia, who did not wear Marc Jacobs Daisy, she was looking at me, and I was looking at that bottle, and Balboa was looking at his feet. And because he was not the kind of person to lie, Balboa said, That’s the perfume that I stole. And the mall cop turned to Cynthia and said, Did you tell him to take this? and Cynthia was like, Who the fuck is that for? And the mall cop said, Did you? And Balboa was like, Nobody told me to do anything, and the mall cop was turning to me, and I should’ve brought a purse, Nobody told me to do anything, Balboa was saying, and the mall cop said, Did you tell him to do it? And I didn’t, I swear I didn’t, but what could I say? We all knew who it was for. Cynthia was already standing up, and maybe the mall cop wanted to see what she would do, because he totally could have stopped her, and he didn’t.
And what she did was grab the bottle of Marc Jacobs Daisy and she threw it at my head, and you bet it hit, it hit right beneath my eyes and shattered against the cement floor. I was clutching my face and everywhere, the smell of flowers and blood, and my nose was bleeding and my lips were bleeding and my legs were bleeding and everything sparkled with flecks of glass, everything smelled like flowers, like a long day in June, and guts, too, slippery, wet, and through my fingers I could see Balboa scramble in his mind, but it was too late, my nose was broken, Cynthia was crying, the mall cop was pulling out the handcuffs. And everywhere, sweetness and iron, all around, Cynthia’s tears, all around, Balboa on his hands and knees, and the new shoes, they were ruined, now, too.
Kathryn Ward is a Twin Cities-based writer. Her work has previously appeared in Every Day Fiction, as well as the Summit Avenue Review and the Catherine G. Murphy Gallery.
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