Chapter 1
I was standing in a Perry's convenience store when the robber entered.
In one hand I held my purse. In the other I held the reason for the visit to the gas station—a bottle of Coke for my boyfriend Gerald. The radio behind the counter was on and playing Don't Stop Believin’ by Journey. The TV above it was on and muted, and showed a football game.
There was a man in front of me when the door burst open. A man with a black ski mask. He had his right hand tucked into the pouch of his hoodie. I shrieked.
“Everybody freeze!” He barked. “This is a stick-up!”
My first thought was Gerald. Where was he? Why wasn't he in here beating that man down? Then I remembered: we'd parked on the other side of the store. There was a good chance that Gerald hadn't seen the robber come in.
The robber gestured to his pouch pocket. “I have a gun!”
I winced. There was a sound like distant static in my head.
The robber turned his attention toward the clerk. “I don't want to hurt anyone,” the robber said. “I just want the money. Open the register!”
The static disappeared.
As the clerk started to empty the drawer into a brown paper bag, the robber turned his attention to the two of us in line. The guy ahead of me had his hands up. The thought had occurred to me, but I had my purse in one hand and the soda in the other, and for some reason the thought of setting them down didn't occur to me. I was afraid and paralyzed. It's funny what fear will make a person do—or keep them from doing.
“Give me the watch,” the robber growled at the man ahead of me.
I looked around. I could make a break for it, but suppose the robber came after me? No, he wouldn't. This was an opportunity of attack; he was after the contents of the cash register. If I took off, he might be angry with me, but he wouldn't leave the cash behind. Then again, he might shoot at me. While this guy didn't come across like a Navy SEAL, he might get lucky. And the last thing I wanted to do tonight was take a bullet to the back in the middle of a Perry's parking lot.
That was assuming he had a gun. And he had a gun—right?
I took a deep breath and swallowed hard. “Do you really have a gun?” I asked.
“Huh?” He glanced up at me. His attention was on the man's watch. “Yeah, I do!” The static returned, bubbling up from somewhere deep inside me. It wasn't the radio, or the TV. It was a hissing, scratchy static buried somewhere in my mind. “I have a gun and I'll shoot you with it if you don't cooperate!” The static intensified.
“Why don't you just walk out? You can still save yourself,” I said.
I didn't have any delusions about being a hero then, though later they would call me one. They would call me ‘Laura the Fearless’ and write me up in the newspaper, and do a two-minute interview on me on the local news.
They asked how I stayed so calm in the face of danger. I told them it just seemed like the right thing to do, which was sort of the truth, but also sort of a lie.
Actually, I knew he didn't have a gun. I suspected he had something shaped like a gun at best, but I knew it wasn't a real gun.
And that's where I got hung up. That's where I decided I wasn't going to tell the interviewer the whole truth—because then they would ask how I knew. That was the question I couldn't answer. Not because it was some big secret, but because I simply did not know.
“Why don't you shut up?” The robber retorted. “In fact, give me your purse. Hand it over!”
The clerk looked at me. The gentleman ahead looked at me. Here I was, a twenty-six-year-old woman, standing face-to-face with a masked robber in defiance. They looked terrified and I could feel them urging me with their minds: Hand over your purse! Give him what he wants before something bad happens!
“Or else what?” I asked, as nonchalantly as I could.
“Or else I'm going to shoot you!”
I could barely hear him over the static in my head.
“And you have a gun in your pouch?” I asked while pointing to his pouch.
“Yes! Give me your purse!”
The static was a deafening roar—I only really knew his response because I can sort of lip-read.
Instead of giving him my purse, I reached into it and pulled out a container of pepper spray. “Okay, shoot me,” I said, raising the spray.
“Don't make me! I'll do it!” The robber was backing away from me.
The guy ahead stared at me, wide-eyed. “Do you have a death wish, kid? Give him the freakin' purse!”
“Death wish?” I asked him. “No, you think he's going to shoot me? He's not. He doesn't have a gun. See?”
I took another step forward and pressed the trigger on the pepper spray. The robber screamed and stumbled back toward the counter.
The clerk ducked out of the way of the acidic airborne stream. The robber struggled to protect his face but he only had one hand free and the other was tangled up in his pouch. I angled the stream directly into his eyes. He finally freed his other hand from his pouch pocket and when he did, a cylindrical piece of metal—about the size of the barrel of a gun—fell out and clattered across the floor.
The robber clawed at his face as he stumbled toward the door. The clerk had retrieved a baseball bat and looped around the counter to chase him out into the parking lot. The static abated.
Gerald came running in a minute later. “Jesus, Laura! What the hell happened?”
My hands were shaking. The pepper spray clattered to the ground. My heart beat a hundred miles an hour in my chest and my mouth was dry. I twisted open the Coke—which I had yet to pay for and for which the clerk would later tell me not to worry about—and took a swig.
“You didn't see that guy coming in here?” I asked, once I regained my bearings.
Gerald shook his head. “No, I didn't see him.”
The static started again.
I felt dizzy and my legs were like two pillars of jelly. Maybe I had a stroke of genius, or maybe I was in shock. But it needed to be asked.
“Do you love me, Gerald?”
Gerald looked shocked. “What? Do I love you?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Do you love me?”
“Yeah, I love you.”
The static was a roar again.
A minute later, the clerk returned to the store.
An hour later I was giving a report to a police officer.
Fifteen minutes after that, the robber was arrested. He was not hard to identify with his red face and pepper-spray-covered ski mask.
The next day I was interviewed by the news reporters. That was the day I broke up with Gerald.
Two days later I was on the Internet looking for a new home, somewhere safer than the city.
A week later, I moved to Strawberry Shores.
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