From behind, some shadow emerged and placed one of his hands on my shoulder, the other on hers. She spun around first and laughed in the most ridiculous manner. I was silent. “Heyyy,” she said, stretching the “eyyy” part for about thirty seconds. Her voice was raw.

She, at some point I suppose, declined whatever he was offering, and we continued walking, with only the sound of her giggling filling the streets. She talked about creativity: “Don’t you love metaphors?”   I wanted to shoot her, metaphorically speaking. She was walking fast and had flip flops on, so she sounded like a duck fresh out of the water.  

We entered a house, and by entering I mean entering. There was the ringing of the doorbell, the pushing of the door, and the buzzing of the sound. After stepping in, I stopped like old people stop when they enter any building, when they wipe their feet even though it hasn’t been raining.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“The Northern Hemisphere.” She smiled. I took some Advil.  

She continued into the other door and walked up some steps, her bags giggling behind her. She came back down some moments later. I thought she was going to say something, but she giggled at me. We left.

We walked some more. There were rats all over the place. It was trash day. She seemed comfortable with them, and my level of exhaustion enabled me to overlook them. Once in a while we would simultaneously stop, wait for a rat or two to pass us, and start up again, as if they were cars. I almost got used to it after a while. She giggled sometimes. The rats scurried, zipping from bag to bag.   

We ended up in a McDonald’s. It was open and bright, what heaven looks like in the movies. I was sincerely happy to sit down at a red, glossy table. She looked around and suddenly put on a pair of white, sparkling sunglasses. They covered most of her face. Across from me was now half-human, half-fly.  I ordered some fries and spilled them all over the table.

“Why would you do that?” She became almost serious all of a sudden.

She was appalled. Cool and collected in front of rats, agitated by fries. “Ironic,” I smiled. She raised an eye brow.  I couldn’t stop smiling at her, because she really looked like a fucking fly.

I took the fries and arranged them in little vertical dashes across the red plastic table.  I wanted her to understand me.   I aligned three fries in front of her and pointed.

“We’ve got problems. We need a place to sleep. And some cash to get home.  We need…” I said slowly.

I was trying to be clear, but she kept darting her head here and there. Finally, she looked like she was going to answer me but instead she pulled out a cigarette from her bag.

“You can’t smoke here,” I said.

“Pretend smoke, don’t you know?” and she placed the cigarette in her mouth, bathing it in her saliva. She giggled again. I became somewhat anxious, because we looked suspicious. There were fries everywhere. She poked at them.

“I can’t believe you are going to Penn,” she said.

I didn’t reply because I didn’t believe it either. I wish I could have swiftly, with one fluid gesture, gotten us out of here: been able to fast forward, or better, rewind.  But I couldn’t think clearly because she continued her periodic giggling, or more precisely her buzzing.

Suddenly a man nodded in our direction, as if he was acknowledging the wall behind us. He went into the bathroom. People are strange, so I though nothing of it until she said, “Okay, give me your bag.”

“Why?”

“I put something in there that I need right now.”

“Why the hell would--?”

But she was gone. She knocked on the bathroom door, and went in. I was left with the fries and some diluted tobacco on the red table. She came out of the bathroom. She sat down quickly and smoothly.

“We’ve got cash. I am very happy.” She giggled.

“Why would you put that crap in my bag?”

She paused.

“They wouldn’t search you. You look more innocent. Younger. Less like trash.” As she spoke, she slowly pulled her sunglasses off and they fell to the ground, the plastic cracked. She grabbed my hands, dug her nails into my skin. She didn’t giggle. She leaned over the table. Her skin was gray, her hair dry, there were fine lines on her forehead, smeared brownish eye shadow on her inner checks and eyelids. Lips crackled, eyes red.

It was Alice, all of a sudden.

“When you’re rich and smart, you’ll get me out of here, right?”

She banged my hands into the table. The pain in my hands didn’t register right away. To see Alice resurrected! Awful looking, voice shrill, real as the rats outside, her arms seeping into the fried food on the table, so free,  yet so stable.

I wanted to ask her what was so damn funny this whole time, why she hadn’t been honest, why the hell couldn’t she change.  

“You’ve got to clean up…,” I replied. 

But with that, Alice disintegrated. She picked up her trashy sunglasses, put them on, and giggled. She titled her head to the side, and pulled out a new cigarette. She strolled out of the McDonald’s, buzzing back out there, trashy and trashed.  She didn’t clean up the table. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. The table wasn’t plastic, it was glossy like plastic, but it was really hard. I couldn’t move one or two of my fingers, but I wanted to.