Imagines

HOURS LATER, it’s well into your work shift and there is another balding male customer yelling at you about something. You’re not really paying attention. You’re still thinking about your interaction with your boyfriend earlier and feeling weird about how you left things. He drove you to work and you apologized a million more times, and you asked for more details about his day, trying to be very interested and supportive, but it didn’t help. You felt like his mind was still elsewhere.

You asked if you could hang out later and talk after work, and he said he had a project that was probably going to keep him busy. He looked at you and you had no earthly idea what was going on behind his eyes. But you knew that it was your fault. You knew you should just tell him. About Kim, about the phone, the file, everything. Why not just come clean and start again? Really do the work of proving your devotion to him.

On the other hand, it was all going to be over soon anyway, so why even make a big deal about it? Kim would sneak back in after your shift, you would give her the phone and the information, and she would sneak back off to her life of illegal selfies, while you returned to your life of . . . whatever it was. To this. To getting yelled at by some customer because he didn’t like your tone.

You stand there and let the customer’s anger wash over you. You are a rock. His anger is a stream, traveling swiftly around you. Only wearing away at you on the smallest, most microscopic level. It would take years of this man yelling at you before it caused any visible damage. You have built up a thick, callused layer of emotional skin over the years of being yelled at IRL and on the internet. There is no way for you to exist, either corporeally or electronically, without being a vessel into which people can empty their anger.

Yes, okay, you are saying to the angry man, who hasn’t stopped to take a breath in as long as you could remember. You nod. Encouraging him. Letting him know that you are sympathetic, which you aren’t, and actively listening, which you aren’t.

It isn’t as though this is going to go on forever. The customer yelling, sure, he’ll lose focus and end the discussion and decide to be mad at someone else eventually? Hopefully? Although some days there seemed to be no bottom to the well of male anger. But also this, your job at Best Buy. Eventually something will happen. Maybe you’ll find another job? Or maybe when you marry your boyfriend you’ll have him and the house and the kids to focus on. That would save you from this job, anyway. Kind of a decent escape plan. Or is it? Is that your plan? Work at Best Buy until you have to get married and pregnant? Why does it all seem so inevitable? It shouldn’t feel inevitable, right? It should feel like there’s some kind of choice involved. But maybe that’s what love really is: not seeing any choices. Seeing only one way forward for your entire life.

Now the customer is demanding to speak to your manager. Which is excellent.

“Okay, I’ll get my manager—wait right here,” you say, and walk away.

You do a slow loop around the perimeter of the store, not looking for your manager but not not looking for him either. Nothing is going to help; this man is always going to be mad at you, and his anger will always be directed at you, and there is nothing you could have done to prevent it except not have been born. It’s dark out, at least, so soon the store will be closing and the angry man will have to leave. Although the store seems a little busier than it normally does this time of night. Lots of men kind of standing and hovering around, idly looking at video games or toner cartridges or GPS systems. Their glances shifting from one to another and then back to whatever. At least none of them seems interested in yelling at you. Small favors.

You decide to go back into the storeroom and hide until the angry customer is gone. As you’re leaving the showroom floor and turning down the hallway that leads to the storeroom, someone comes up behind you, uncomfortably close. You turn and try to distance yourself from them but they’re practically on top of you. They’re dressed all in black, hooded, and with a scarf obscuring their face.

“Um, excuse me, it’s employees only back here,” you say. The person lifts their hood and pulls their scarf down and you see, peeking out at you, the wickedly conspiratorial smile of Kim Kardashian.

“Kim!” you practically shout as Kim’s gloved hand shoots up to cover your mouth. You are weirdly delighted to see her. She nods and pushes you farther away from the showroom, following close behind, her hand on your lower back, guiding you where she wants you to go, but gently, affectionately, not aggressively.

She stops you behind the office, out of view of the showroom.

“Kim! What are you doing here?” you ask. “I thought you were coming by later.”

“Sneaking in after hours is hard, and we had that close call with the security guard. I like to change up my schedule and try to never do the same thing two days in a row. And I’m kind of worried about my timeline, so I thought I would try to catch you early. But now I’m kind of regretting the decision—is it always this busy in the store this late?”

You frown. “No! It’s weird. Definitely more crowded than normal.”

Kim looks away, chewing over something mentally. You just keep staring at her because, ugh, Kim Kardashian. For the first time since this morning, you feel happy and kind of relaxed, which is weird and makes no sense, except this very famous and notorious illegal celebrity has come to visit you at work twice in two days? And it all feels kind of magical? She smells amazing, btw.

“Did you have a chance to look at that file?” she asks.

You nod. “Yup. It was definitely an encrypted file. It was a location and a time. It didn’t turn out to be super difficult to crack the encryption; it was just having the phone in general that was the problem.”

Kim hesitates and then smiles quickly, knowingly. “Why’s that? Were you tempted to take a selfie?”

“No, no, not really. Just that my boyfriend caught me with the phone, and it was a whole thing.”

Kim makes a sympathetic face. “Sorry. Boyfriends are trash; they don’t know anything.”

“Well, mine kinda does. He’s on the task force.”

All light and joy immediately disappear from Kim’s face, and it’s kind of heartbreaking for you. “Wait, what? The task force that’s looking for me?”

You nod.

Kim’s eyes glint like light reflected off knives as she turns to look back to the store, worrying at an idea. “You said there aren’t normally this many people in the store this late.”

“No. Why? Is that important?”

“What would you say is the average number for this hour?”

“I don’t know, like three or four?”

“I counted fifteen men. Is that about what you counted?”

You realize that the showroom has become oddly quiet. Normally, even back here, you can hear all kinds of blooping and bleeping and yelling, the low murmur of people trying to assuage their vague unhappiness with rampant consumerism. But now there’s suddenly nothing. Just quiet.

“Um. I didn’t count the men. I spend my life trying not to think about them more than I have to.”

“They hate that,” Kim murmurs. She pulls her bulky jacket off, revealing a skintight black bodysuit. It looks like it’s been molded to fit her perfectly waist-trained hourglass shape. “We’re in trouble,” she says as she takes out a phone and begins swiping. She’s suddenly all business, highly focused. “Do you still have the phone I gave you?”

“Yes, in my bag,” you say. “What do you mean we’re in trouble?”

“And where?

?s your bag?”

“Just there, in my locker.”

“Okay, let’s get it. Stay low and quiet,” Kim says, ushering you back down the hallway.

This is suddenly weird, and you have no idea how stressed you’re supposed to be relative to how stressed Kim suddenly is. You both go to where the lockers are, between the storeroom and the showroom, and there’s a man standing there, a customer in an employees-only space. He’s one of the men who was browsing the store earlier. As soon as he sees you and Kim, he runs, practically diving back out into the store.

“Crap, hurry hurry hurry,” Kim whispers.

You fiddle with the combination, not totally sure what’s going on or whether it’s okay for you to ask questions, or why you have to be quiet or why the customer was being weird. You hear voices, whispers, coming from the showroom, and then footsteps, heavy boots, running, getting closer.

You have the locker open and your bag in your hand and then there’s a spray of red light across your face and then there’s a little red laser dot humming across Kim’s chest and she shouts, “GET DOWN!” and pulls you to the floor just as bullets start flying through the lockers behind you and ricocheting off the metal shelves.

You stay low, crawling with Kim back toward the storeroom. “I’m guessing that’s your boyfriend,” Kim says, already on her feet again.

“Um, that’s not my boyfriend,” you say.

A voice, distorted by a megaphone, calls out, “KIM KARDASHIAN, WE HAVE YOU SURROUNDED.”

“OMG, that’s my boyfriend,” you say.

Kim makes a very emphatic and wordless gesture that says SEE, I TOLD YOU.

“PUT YOUR PHONE DOWN AND COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP,” your boyfriend’s megaphoned voice says.

Kim shakes her head as she swipes across her phone and holds it up to her ear. “See? What’s he talking about? Put your phone down? It’s not a gun; they’re the ones with the guns. What do they even think I’m going to do, exactly? Come on.”