Authors: Noel Merczel
A few minutes after nine, Lisa got a call on her cell phone. It was her
geeky skinny friend Drew.
Lisa liked to hang out with girls who were l
ess attractive than she was
.
And Drew with her
straight up and down body and stringy hair fit the bill perfectly.
Patty worked well as a "less attractive friend" too, since she was on the pudgy side with
frizzy hair.
Andrea, on the other hand, had become a little too cute for Lisa's taste. Lisa consoled herself with the fact that Andrea
didn't know how to dress sexy; always wearing those lame girly dresses with tons of flowers and lace
.
"Hey, Lees!" Drew exclaimed
. "How would you like to go to a party tonight?"
"You have no idea," Lisa replied.
Then Lisa saw her boss peeking over at her from behind a rack of women's bathing suits.
"I am so bored I could die," Lisa said softly into the phone. "Will there be champagne and hot guys at this party?"
"Probably not," Drew replied. "But there might be a bag of Cheese Doodles and some soda if you're lucky. It's at Andrea's house. Her parents are away for the weekend."
"Really?" said Lisa, noticing her boss starting to move closer to the fitting room, while pretending to arrange bathing suits.
Stupid dumb Andrea. Lisa could swear the girl had a thyroid problem.
She was convinced Andrea used her oversized peepers to look super young and cute all the time, like an innocent fairy princess with those annoying poofy dresses and her ridiculously immature fascination with mermaids.
But hey...a party is a party.
And Lisa was between boyfriends. Her last boyfriend, Cory,
insisted on
anal sex all the time. It was like, "What? My vagina isn't good enough?"
At first, Lisa went along with it. After all, she didn't want anyone
calling
her a prude. But then she got worried that the guy was going to stretch out her butt hole, and besides, maybe he was gay.
So, she ditched him.
"Patty's coming?" Lisa asked.
Lisa
paced nervously around behind the counter, feeling fidgety.
Her boss was closing in on her
. A
lthough she hated this job, she needed it to buy make-up, clothes, and accessories.
Lisa had learned that a well-placed Maybelline’s scarf or a cheap pair of bright dangly earrings had the power to elevate a boring outfit into a semi-couture looking ensemble.
She also needed this lame job to save for plane fare, so she could fly to where ever they were holding tryouts
for Next Top Model. Chances are,
they wouldn't be held here in Boringsville, Illinois!
"Yea," Drew concurred. "Come right after work
.
And Lees...try to get along with Andrea
. Y
ou can do it."
Drew was always trying to mediate; desperate to make their foursome as wholesome, fresh and innocent as it was back in third grade when the girls pretended Lisa's garage was a Hello Kitty Clubhouse.
All the girls had grown up in the Shady Oaks development right down the road from Maybelline’s. They had all known each other since Kindergarten.
"Of course!" Lisa lied.
Lisa's boss was now in hearing range of her conversation, so Lisa wanted to make it sound like she was on the phone with a customer.
"We close at ten!" Lisa stated into the phone, in an overly polite voice.
"What?" Drew asked. "I already know that...oh, I get it. Your boss."
"That's right!" Lisa chirped. "We have a lot of women's bathing suits on sale now."
"Gee, thanks for the info," Drew said. "I'll go buy ten of them tomorrow. See you at Andrea's!"
Before Lisa left Maybelline’s for the night, she picked up five packages of glow sticks and glow stick jewelry. She also bought a new tube of Volume XL lip gloss and some Elf gold glitter eye-shadow for herself.
On the way out to her car, Lisa noticed something strange. As she got her keys out to unlock her 2009 Ford Focus (it was only temporary until she could afford a Lexus or something more prestigious) Lisa saw a person lurking over by the woods next to the parking lot.
The person appeared to be female, because it had long tangled hair hanging down in a messy disheveled way...like it hadn't been brushed for a month. She was also wearing huge oversized glasses; fake looking, like the kind the hipsters were sporting as an accessory.
The woman did not look like the typical Maybelline’s customer, that was for sure.
"Gross..." Lisa said, staring at the odd sight
. "That is definitely not normal."
The person wasn't exactly acting normal, either. She was just sort of shambling along. Lisa wasn't quite sure what
"shambling" meant, but the word seemed to fit. Lisa assumed the word meant
walking in a wobbly, jerky sort of a way.
The odd disjointed woman looked completely aimless, like she had absolutely no purpose hanging around a strip mall in Poplar Grove, Illinois at 10:00 at night.
Must be drunk
, Lisa thought.
And yet, this person wasn’t even acting normal for a drunk person.
F
or a brief moment, the woman stopped her aimless shambling and just stood there staring at Lisa.
Lisa felt a bolt of fear slice through her body as though she had just been struck by lightning.
“
This is some creepy shit!”
she said.
It was dark in the parking lot since a few lights had burned out, and Lisa was the only employee around
. And now
, this strange person was just standing there... staring.
Li
sa wasn’t sure why, but this freaky woman had an aura of evil about her.
"What the fuck?" Lisa exclaimed, feigning toughness to alleviate her fear.
She
tried to put the key in the lock, but her hand fumbled. The creepy woman was now walking towards her in a slow, methodical, almost robotic way.
Lisa had never seen anything like it before. Not in real life, anyway. Only in horror movies. She suddenly felt like she was in the middle of a horror movie. And she knew this moment all too well, it was such an overused cliché.
It's the moment when the pretty young girl is about to be killed.
"Damn!" Lisa swore, trying to get the key to fit into the lock. Her hand was shaking so badly.
The creature (that’s how Lisa thought of her, since she didn’t even seem human) was moving across the grass slowly, yet in a very determined fashion.
Finally, Lisa got the key in the lock. She opened the door and flew into the car
, slamming the door shut behind her and quickly locking
it. Then she made damn sure all the other doors were locked, and checked the back seat for good measure.
She
had watched enough horror movies to know that often things hide in your back seat waiting to kill you.
Lisa
felt unusually panicky. What should she do? Should she call 9-1-1? What would she say
... that some strange woman with messy hair and oversized glasses was making her feel uneasy?
Wait a minute. She would call Drew! Drew would know what to do.
Damn! What? Now her phone was turned off? God! Maybe she shouldn't have forgotten to pay the
frickin' bill.
Well, she didn't exactly forget. It's just that she needed to buy the black halter dress and the black leather boots at the mall last week. Those items seemed a bit more urgent than paying a boring old phone bill.
Now Lisa questioned the wisdom of her decision.
What if her car doesn't start
?
There’s a horror movie cliché if ever there was one
, Lisa thought.
She turned the key and floored the accelerator. Whew. It started! Lisa screeched out of the dark parking lot, feeling more jittery than she’d ever felt before in her life.
”
Frickin
’ drunk homeless people!" Lisa barked, as she roared out onto the highway.
She looked back in her rearview mirror. The thing...the creature...was just approaching the edge of the pavement.
Homeless people were rare in those parts
. It's not like Poplar Grove was a big city. Unless the bad elements of
nearby Rockford were starting to infiltrate...
The odd disjointed way the woman was moving kept weighing on Lisa's mind. It didn’t even look human. Even though the ride home from Maybelline’s was short in distance, to Lisa
,
it felt endless.
When Lisa finally got inside her house, she half expected to see the homeless woman hovering by the bushes that lined the side of her yard
. Once she was inside, she strode purposely into the kitchen, stealing
one of her dad's beers. Lisa popped the top and gulped the whole thing down at once, only stopping a few times to take a deep calming breath
.
Then she burped loudly. Embarrassed, Lisa slapped a hand over her mouth since she wasn’t prepared for the offensive noise to come bursting out at such a loud decibel.
"That was classy!" Lisa announced to the empty kitchen.
Lisa's Dad was in the den watching his favorite reality show, Mountain Men. He had the volume turned up so loud, Lisa was sure he couldn't hear anything except his dumb-ass show.
Lisa heard the sandpaper voiced narrator say, “
Marty is checking his trap line."
Oh, whoop-dee-do
! Lisa thought.
Why do you need to trap animals anyway
?
Doesn't everyone just buy fake fur these days
?
Trapping is cruel.
Screw you, Marty, whoever you are. You probably stink because you never take a shower
!
L
isa felt the beer warming her insides and relaxing her fucked-up brain.
No wonder people drink
! She thought.
God. It was just a stupid homeless person. No big D. Get over it
!
She would inform her boss on Monday about this problem, though. There might be a whole gang of derelicts casing Maybelline’s, getting ready to pull off some shoplifting organized crime thing.
As much as Lisa hated her job, she didn't feel like dealing with low life shop-lifters on top of everything else she was expected to do.
She grabbed some clothes and her bag of make-up and hair
extensions from her bedroom. Then she ducked into the guest bathroom, which was really her own bathroom, since they never had
any guests.
First, she removed her boring tan kakis and green T-shirt (the requisite "Maybelline’s uniform”). Then Lisa wiggled into tight jeans and an even tighter short hot pink top.
Next, she removed her eighteen-inch
straight extensions and clipped in two rows of twenty-two inch curly black hair extensions, which set her back a hundred bucks a pack at Sally Beauty Supply.
The extra money was worth buying the more expensive real human hair extensions, though, since the synthetic ones frizzed up too quickly. Unfortunately, getting the pieces clipped in just right was a pain in the butt.
Lisa poofed
up her own thin glossy black hair with the blow dryer. Then she shook her head, causing the long glistening banana
curl hair to bounce all around her shoulders.
"Bouncy, bouncy!" Lisa said, fingering the shiny springy curls.
Too bad her own hair was just a little on the sparse side. Lisa reflected for a moment on Andrea's super thick honey blonde hair that was completely natural and looked better than most
hair extensions or wigs.
"Oh well...it doesn't matter if you have thin hair as long as you can afford good quality hair extensions!" Lisa
informed her reflection.
Although no guys would be at the party, Lisa was one of those girls who believed in looking her best at all times... even for her girlfriends. She swiped
gold glitter eye cream onto her eyelids
. Then she
applied a generous coating of heavy duty lip plumper to her already plump lips.
After that, she
spent a few moments posing in the mirror. Truthfully, Lisa was a very attractive girl. She possessed a smooth creamy complexion without a flaw to be found
. Plus, her eyes tipped up at the ends, lending her face an exotic look. Bo
th the mirror and the camera adored her.
After Lisa was satisfied that she was the most gorgeous creature on earth, she snuck back into the kitchen and snagged two six packs of her dad's Leinenkugal beer out of the fridge.