Page 15 of It's Me They Follow
“My nephew killed a man up the street,” she said, nodding toward the train. “But he wasn’t just That Energy. That’s what the news wants everyone to believe. He was something much worse.”
“Oh.”
“We got you.” The round woman winked and then sloshed away.
The Shopkeeper didn’t know if that was a warning or welcome. Either way, she had to open her bookshop in twenty-five days, she thought. Either way.
“Did you order a veggie broth soup?” the pizza delivery guy called out from his passenger-side window to The Shopkeeper.
“Yeah,” The Shopkeeper called back, her stomach growling.
“Can you come get it? I never get outta my car out here,” he explained.
“You can just toss it to me.”
“Hot soup?”
“Yeah, it’ll be fine.”
The Shopkeeper caught her veggie broth soup and closed out the convo with her customer-service smile.
“Be careful out here.” The delivery guy pointed around in a circle. “It’s still The Land of Fishtown.”
Chapter 8
JANUARY 9, 2020
5:00 P.M.
The Shopkeeper was loving on her copy ofConversations with Sonia Sanchezwhen ME showed up at the bookshop door.
“I didn’t want to interrupt,” he said. “I could watch you do that for hours. You can keep on.” She didn’t want to be late for her writing group anyway, so she grabbed her coat, locked up early, and said, “It’s okay. Let’s go.”
He slipped an apple into her bag. “I washed it for you.” There was something else she wished he’d wash for her. Her mind wandered, but she shook it off as fast as she could.
He is a monk, she reminded herself.He is a monk in training.She grinned.
She looked away. Looking too long could be problematic. They ate apples together as he walked her to class.
“‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away,’ my grandmother used to say,” The Shopkeeper told him.
“Somehow people have given apples a bad name.” He grinned as usual, even when he was serious.
“Yeah, I mean, like,everybody thinks it was an apple that got Eve caught up in the garden. It’s the apple that’s poisonous in ‘Snow White.’ It’s Steve Jobs and Apple computers. It’s Johnny Appleseed colonizing everything. But apples don’t deserve that reputation. The narrative on apples needs to be rewritten,” she said.
“Speaking of writing, how’s yours?” He switched gears.
The Shopkeeper had been so focused on opening the bookshop that she’d barely picked up a pen. “It’s not.”
He laughed while they walked. “Where are we walking to?”
“I’m taking a writing class at the university. And I’m selling other people’s writing and critiquing writing, but I am not writing.”
“That’s DEEP,” he said, rubbing his beard and shaking his head. “I know that university.”
“I’ve just been busy opening the bookshop,” she said. “And trying to manage this stupid condition. And I’m scared I’ll fall asleep in the wrong place, and then,poof! It’s dangerous. You wouldn’t understand,” she huffed.
She was on the defensive as she walked down Broad Street toward the university. Over the years, she’d learned to duck and dodge, bob and weave across streets to avoid people touching her. He worked to keep up.
