I’m better now

Lori vaped behind the CVS, tucked into the narrow strip of space where deliveries came and nothing lingered long enough to matter. She stood with her back to the brick wall, which had a feebly graffiti-ed penis outlined. Her hood up, she watched smoke dissolve into the gray. She knew Tommy was there even before she saw him.

Tommy stood just inside the loading dock door, half-hidden, pretending to check something on his phone. He was watching Lori through the glass, through the angle of reflection, through the excuse of supervision. He stayed inside because of the rain and because of his hair. He’d combed it back carefully that morning, the way that suggested fullness if you didn’t stare too long.

He watched the way Lori held the vape like it was an extension of her hand, the way she leaned her weight into one hip. He watched because watching was easier than speaking, because it gave him time to rehearse. He told himself he was a manager. Nineteen and already responsible. Nineteen and already exhausted by it.

Lori knew she was being watched. She didn’t turn around. She let him have the outline of her back, the red puff of her jacket fading to something pink with a few holes where feathers exited. She thought she looked like a broken version of Red Riding Hood, the kind that never quite gets to the forest or the wolf.

She had slept at Rodney’s. She could still feel it, the stale beer, the couch smell. No shower. No food. Just the aftertaste. She felt hollowed out, like a room someone had moved out of too quickly.

Inside, Tommy felt himself tightening. The watching was supposed to give him strength. His chest buzzed. The sweater itched. He pictured himself stepping outside, imagining the sentence forming correctly this time.

He pushed the door open and let the rain hit his scalp before he could stop himself.

“Don’t do it on the clock,” he said too fast, the words tripping over each other.

Lori turned just enough to flip him off. Not dramatic. Efficient.  Tommy sighed with exasperation.

“Hey,” she said, almost kindly. “You’ve got a stain.”

A string of curses blurted out of his mouth before he abruptly cut himself off, rose onto his toes, and took a breath that didn’t fix anything. Then he turned and went back inside.

Lori watched him retreat. She watched the door close. She watched the reflection swallow him. Watching him leave gave her something solid to hold onto. It made her feel briefly in control.

She wasn’t gonna take her jacket off today. Yesterday’s clothes felt like armor. She vaped and thought about the band from the night before, The Last Train to Albany; they were nothing special, covers mostly, songs that wandered too far from themselves. Accidental Experiment, That’s the part she liked. Things that didn’t quite land.

She exhaled and watched the smoke thin out, the way Tommy’s confidence had thinned when he stepped back inside. Strong, bitter, and natural, she thought not the weed, not the night, but the feeling of being seen and choosing not to care.

Inside the store, Tommy stood still longer than necessary, pretending again. Watching again, even though he couldn’t see her now. Both of them are waiting.

A car pulled into the lot. Slow. Careful. A turn signal is ticking longer than necessary. A flurry or two fell through the air, mixing with the rain. It idled longer than normal, the way people did when they weren’t sure they meant to stop.

Inside the car sat Tommy’s mom. Lori’s sister.

Small town stuff. No matter how far you stood from something, you were still inside it.

Tommy saw the car through the front windows and felt something drop in his stomach. He watched it the way he’d watched Lori. hoping it would do something different than what he already knew it would do.

Lori stayed where she was. She didn’t hide. She didn’t wave. She let the vape hang at her side and watched her sister through the windshield, watched her sister watch her.

She’d missed family dinner to hang with Rodney. That sentence kept repeating itself, stripped of excuses. As if that were the crime.

The last song from the night before slipped back into her head, uninvited. The lyric lodged there like a splinter:

I’m better now
I’m better now
I’m so much better now
and when you look at me, you..

It cut off before finishing, which felt right. The band had done that too. Left it hanging. Let the room decide what came next.

Her sister didn’t get out of the car right away.

Inside, Tommy pretended to straighten a display he’d already straightened. He watched his mom through the glass, then flicked his eyes back toward the loading dock, trying to triangulate where Lori might still be standing. He felt caught between them, a hinge nobody asked to exist.

His mom finally opened the door. The cold rushed in. She paused, looked toward the back of the building, then inside at Tommy. A look passed between them not approval, not anger, just recognition.

Outside, Lori took one last pull from the vape and let the smoke drift where it wanted. She let herself be seen. She thought about the lyric again, about how sometimes “better” was just what people said when they wanted the watching to stop.

But the watching never stopped. Not here. Not in a town this small.