Roseanne's Summer Vacation- Chapter 2
The first day of vacation began like any other free weekend for Milena Malinowski. She got up, went to a mirror, and looked at her 17-year-old sleepy face adorned with dark blonde hair, blue eyes, a turned-up nose and stiff lips. She had to stand on her toes due to being 5 feet tall. After eating breakfast with her mom, she then helped with doing the washing and vacuuming. Before noon, she put on her glasses and went shopping.
Her hometown of Aleksandrowo was quite small. One could even go so far as to say it wasn’t a town, but a village, yet it didn’t suffer from shortfall of supermarkets. This was another distinctive charm of the Land of Po. Even in the remotest areas of the country, you could find Biedronka, Dino, Leviathan, and the whole shebang of other chain stores with their quirky names, waiting for you by side of a dirt track or at a street corner.
The Carrefour supermarket was no longer than 100 metres away from Milena’s house, but the girl was willing to go another 200 metres past the dilapidated shopping facility to Netto. The competition was part of a larger convenience complex known as the Aleksandrowo Shopping Centre. At least, Netto had more reasonable prices, the aisles were cleaner, and the meat section wasn’t stinking with rotten fish.
As always, she relied on a list made in a notepad app. It was important for her to avoid forgetting about any important product. Milena remembered from her childhood how she used to go to the local open-air market with her mom. Many times upon returning home Hannah Malinowski would throw the uncomfortable plastic bags, slap her forehead and exclaim something along the lines, “Goddammit! We forgot the mustard!” or “Goddammit! We forgot the mirepoix!” Her mom never made a to-buy list.
When the contents of the basket were gradually increasing, Milena made her way to the stationery section, where she grabbed a handful of adhesive tape. She looked with pity at a collection of notebooks, knowing she would have to buy them in two months’ time.
At the opposite side of the section, there was a quiet corner devoted entirely to books. Sometimes Milena liked to go there and just stand among the paperback stillness that would only let in copyright-free music from the omnipresent speakers. Except for her, no resident of Aleksandrowo in their right mind would dare to visit the book section.
Her eyes examined the colourful mosaic made of fancy covers, the purpose of each to encourage the potential reader. For example, there was a WWII novel called The Parisian Connection with a woman in an elegant coat looking at the Eiffel Tower while an aircraft is hovering in the sky; or there was a romance with a flaming title Her Thrust with a man and a woman in a passionate embrace surrounded by the sea of ships on fire.
Hesitantly, Milena took in her hands a book with the most simplistic cover design. It just presented a drifting Skyline R-34, and the thunder-like title read Let Me Cry, written by a certain Anna Dalgliesh. Milena’s eyes flicked through the synopsis, from which it seemed it was yet another girl-meets-boy story. But in this novel, the bad boy wasn’t just bad. He was a hothead in R-34, taking part in illegal racing across the United States. The girl knew she should stay away from the bad boy, but the thrill of being in a race was too irresistible.
“Oh, please,” Milena almost threw the bulky volume away. What is this? She thought to herself. A book written by a moron, edited by a moron, only to be read by… a teenage moron? Or maybe a moron going through menopause? Who prints stuff like that?
She looked at the title page and it said the book was published thanks to the tremendous aid of Patreon supporters.
“Please give me a break!” Milena put the novel back on the shelf and let out a deep sigh at the displayed paperbacks. She knew she shouldn’t have, but she judged them by their covers. As a matter of fact, she was in the mood to read a captivating romance story, but how could she find one?
“Mr Orville, I wish you were here, so you could recommend some good romance novels.” Milena gently pushed her cart away from the book aisle, but it was suddenly blocked by someone’s big black boot.
“We’ve had classes with our homeroom teacher barely two days ago, and you miss him already?” a familiar voice asked.
Milena looked up and saw her classmate Thalia Kowalski towering over her. They have just finished the third year of school in medical class and are about to enter the final grade. However, Milena and Thalia have known each other only for a year because Thalia transferred from the IT class. She appeared to be the total opposite of Milena: plucky, outspoken, loud, and well-versed in English. But beneath the vivacious shield of the high school’s sweetheart, there was also kindness and gentleness that made her become Milena’s best friend.
All of a sudden, Milena recalled that they had made an arrangement for a sleepover “Thally,” she addressed her by the preferred diminutive. “I thought you would come over in the afternoon.”
“I’m an early bird, babe,” Thally’s brown eyes winked at Milena, and she flicked her long dark hair back. “Whatcha looking at in the books sec?”
Thally Kowalski just couldn’t help mixing Po language together with English. Many teenagers in the Land of Po did this very clumsily, but not Thally. Whenever she spoke English, she sounded as if she were a real New Yorker. It was beyond Milena how Thally had learned to speak like that, especially when the friend claimed she had never set foot outside the homeland.
“Oh, what have we here,” Thally continued her tease in English as she grabbed the hardcover, “It’s a Let Me Cry novel! Is our little girl Milena in the mood for passionate, overpowering, wickedy slick love?”
“No, I’m not, as a matter of fact,” the girl in glasses responded seriously. “I would never buy a piece of crap like that, and stop having a laugh at me in that posh American accent of yours.”
Thally looked at Milena and raised her eyebrows. After a while, she threw the book into the trolley. “Well, I’m gonna buy it for myself then.” She switched back to Po language. “Now where’s the booze section?”
“We’re not buying any booze! My mom will kill me!”
***
Instead of alcohol, the two opted for macaroni and sliced Gouda cheese. There was no automated till in Aleksandrowo’s Netto, so the friends had to take a spot in a long queue to a shop assistant who scanned the products manually.
When their turn came, the assistant registered the products at the till and declared the price, “That’s 94,99 Po credits, please.”
Milena looked at the receipt and then at Thally. “Are you going to pay for your book? It’s 49,99?”
Thally shrugged her shoulders. “Don’t look at me. I’m completely broke.”
“So it’s on me in that case.”
“Yeah, you multibillionaire plump.”
Milena reached for her wallet and paid by credit card, but it was declined by the terminal.
“Oh my god!” Milena screamed. “What happened?”
“It’s all scratched up,” Thally declared. “There are two things you can’t keep in a wallet: a credit card and condoms.”
“Jeez. Give me a break.”
Milena tried paying by her phone, but there was no internet connection. As a result, the application wasn’t working at all. In the meantime, the queue of irritated customers behind Milena grew longer and longer. She felt a wave of embarrassment overwhelming her.
“I’m sorry,” she said to the shop assistant, who was also annoyed, “I’m going to pay by cash.” She opened up the wallet again, but there were banknotes and coins amounting to only 15 Po credits.
“Okay,” Milena’s panic mode was kicking in. She could barely breathe. “Please subtract the adhesive tape, the toilet paper, iced tea, and the book.”
“Not my book!” Thally intervened.
“I don’t have the money, stupid!”
“That’s 20 Po credits,” the shop assistant declared after removing the products.
“But I have only 15!”
Milena looked at the two things left: macaroni and cheese. How was she going to prepare mac and cheese without either of these two ingredients? But she had to choose something. Her back already felt the inevitable force of human rage building up like magma in a volcano.
“Please take away the macaroni,” she said with a wince.
“That’s 15 Po credits.”
“There you go…”
***
“Girl, haven’t you seen the movie Shoplifters? We could walk away with all the stuff easily,” Thally said while they were walking back home.
“I’m not a thief you know!” Milena nearly screamed. “That’s my luck, I guess. Something bad always happens to me.”
“Oh, come on,” Thally hugged her in mid-walk. “I’m just pulling your leg, that’s all. Though I remember the time when I tried shoplifting.”
“Is that so, Thally?”
“Yeah. But I didn’t try to steal because I was bad to the bone. It happened two years ago in a DIY store. It wasn’t a small store, but a huge market with a garden section and all that jazz. So I am in there because I promised my dad to buy a silicon sealant. I go to the aisle, grab the damn tube and head to the cash register, but the queue was e-freaking-normous! As if everybody in town decided to renovate their houses! Meanwhile, there is pressure building up in my bladder, and I also need to collect takeaway lunch in like five minutes across the street! So what do I do?”
“What do you do?” asked Milena, adjusting her glasses.
“I run to the garden section, which is like outside of the market, but surrounded by a fence. I make sure there are no cameras in sight and I push the tube through an opening in a fence.”
“And you got away with it?”
“I did say it was my attempt at shoplifting, baby. I got out of the market clean, circled around, and retrieved the tube from the bushes. But then, I noticed there were three big ass cameras pointed at that fence spot! I was literally gobsmacked. So what I did was collect the takeaway, take a piss, then get the hell back to that fence, push the tube through the fence again, enter the market, pretend as if nothing had happened, get the bloody thing from the garden section, and stand in a queue to pay for it.”
“So at the end of the day, you didn’t steal it!” Milena smiled.
“Nah, I got shit-scared they would show my face on Facebook or something: ‘Thalia Kowalski, THE SHOPLIFTER’. If worse came to worst, I had to have a receipt to prove my innocence.”
“Still, you were a quick thinker. If something like that happened to me, I would agonise for hours about what to do, and I’d probably admit everything to my mom, who would have beaten me with a belt.”
“Milena, my baby!” Thalia ruffled her hair playfully. “Don’t think like the culprit, think like Columbo!”
“Like… Columbus?”
“Columbo! It’s a TV show about an American detective in a raincoat. He drives in a super old car, has a cute Basset Hound, and talks about his wife all the time. I watch the episodes with my dad.
“Well, you sure know a lot about old movies and TV shows.”
Milena tried to picture the quirky image of Lieutenant Columbo as they were walking through the house gate.
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