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Lakeisha leaned on the counter, in just the spot where the surveillance camera couldn’t pick her up as she messed with her phone. She had no less than two new entries for her Tumblr about Tony Stark’s junkfood addiction. Of course she knew that half the time, his security staff was buying crap for each other, not Tony himself, but it was much more entertaining to speculate that the relatively petite Stark himself was chowing down on all that crap. She knew firsthand that all the Rollos were really for him, though; she’d overheard as much.
They sold a damn lot of Rollos here.
She got the posts edited and queued, and checked through the queue to make sure she had enough material for it to update consistently through her next couple of hellish days. Just the way Wednesdays and Thursdays worked out, with her mom and her brother’s schedules, she had to either be at work or watching Jimmy pretty much 30 hours straight with no real time to sleep, and he was old enough to play quietly by himself for short periods now but that didn’t mean she could properly go to bed. Anyway it was some of the only time she got to spend with him, and he was also old enough to be really interesting by now, and she didn’t like to sleep through it. But it meant it was hard to get anything done online.
She wished she had better access to the surveillance footage from this place. She could do some really funny shit with it. She had a couple great ideas for compilation videos she could make. But she’d only managed to hack in and steal it the one time, and repeating the feat only risked discovery. The only way she’d gotten out of it after the Tony Stark footage had gone viral was that nobody had believed she could possibly have done it, and they’d gone off on some wild goose chase after hackers.
Motion through the window drew her eye, and she watched the couple walking by to see if they’d come in. White people, a dark-haired man and a red-haired woman, young and pretty, stylishly dressed, both in leather jackets and jeans. The guy was really striking, with a full red mouth curved in an unfairly sensual pout. He was clowning with the girl, probably his girlfriend; Lakeisha couldn’t see her expression as her face was turned away but she caught a snippet of the sound of her voice, raised in playful rejection of whatever he’d said.
They were coming in. Lakeisha slid her phone back into the pocket of her smock and looked busy, straightening the chip rack.
“Evenin’,” she said politely.
Both of them had already noticed where she was. Sometimes people ignored her greeting, other times people looked wildly around, but both of them knew where she was. “Evenin’ to you, ma’am,” the man said, with a flirty head-tilt. He had long hair in a neatish ponytail, but it was glossy and well-taken-care of, at least.
Lakeisha smiled back, but with the reserved coolness of a girl who had just firmly told herself that she was not allowed to thirst for white boys anymore. Plus she had a better look at the girl now, and she was vaguely familiar in the sort of way that suggested she was maybe on TV or something. Which wasn’t uncommon, in this neighborhood.
The song flipped; the best part of this job was that they had a boom box you could plug into, and the day manager had donated an old iPod and they all made one another playlists. This was Sandy’s newest offering, and it was mostly oldies, but Lakeisha liked it. Elvis came on, growling soulfully about a hound dog, and she smiled; she and Sandy had a running joke about dogs in their two-ships-passing-in-the-night relationship.
The man and woman had gone down separate aisles; the woman was staring raptly at the magazines, which had a headline about Captain America-- Lakeisha had already bought a copy for Jimmy, because maybe the Falcon was his favorite, but Cap was a close second and he was on more covers. The man, however, was sorting through the bottles of headache remedies and painkillers in an efficient fashion, clearly looking for a specific ingredient.
“Oh,” the woman said conversationally, just loud enough for him to hear her, “this is that song.” He immediately began lip-synching, and as the woman looked over at him he went into a pretty skillful dance routine, similar enough to Elvis’s type of choreography for Lakeisha’s untrained eye. The woman laughed and rolled her eyes. “I knew it, you practice when I’m not home too.”
He laughed, and flung his head back to dance wildly to the drum fill. “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog,” he sang along, and he had a passable voice, similar enough to Elvis’s.
“You gonna moonlight at a Vegas chapel?” the woman asked. She had a faint hint of an accent, French possibly.
“Could be,” he said, not stopping his dance.
“He’s pretty good,” Lakeisha observed. He was; he was really fluid in his motion, really on the beat, a lot more abandoned to it than most white guys could usually manage.
“You into conspiracy theories?” the guy asked her. She must have looked alarmed, because he laughed and said, “I mean, about Elvis. Where like, aliens took ‘im or whatever?”
Lakeisha smiled. “I love conspiracy theories,” she said. “I run a couple websites about conspiracy theories.” She didn’t usually admit that at work.
“You heard the one where the Winter Soldier’s really Elvis?” the guy asked, pausing in his dancing and walking closer to her. He really could be an Elvis impersonator, he was handsome and built about right for young Elvis, long and lean and clean-featured, long-necked, straight-nosed, with a cleft chin and that mouth, man, that mouth was unfair.
“I did hear that one,” she said. “I like that one.”
“Oh, don’t,” the woman said, resigned; he must be the type who struck up weird conversations all the time.
“Me too,” he said. “I think that’s amazing. It’s just the kind of fucked-up thing that totally could’ve happened during the Cold War. A beloved pop star’s death is faked and he gets secretly abducted and brainwashed and made to act as an agent of chaos!”
“That’s what you’re goin’ for, isn’t it,” Lakeisha said, eyeing him appraisingly. “You’re not gonna be an Elvis impersonator, you’re gonna be a Winter Elvis impersonator.” She gave him a thumbs-up. “That’d be a sweet gig. If I ever had parties I’d book you for my party.”
He looked pleased. The woman looked blank. Disbelieving, probably. He probably playfully embarrassed her all the time which was too bad, but given her earlier smirk Lakeisha would lay odds she was a secret dork and liked it. “You think so?”
“You got moves, man,” Lakeisha said. “Take your hair down and look scary, get a metal glove, you got a pretty good YouTube act. You can make money that way, even if it doesn’t really go viral, but I bet it would.”
“James no,” the woman said. “James! No.”
He grinned at her. “You think the real Winter Soldier would get mad?” he asked. “I bet he’d come after me!”
“Dude has plenty on his plate,” Lakeisha said, then considered it. “He has a verified Twitter account, though. I don’t get that at all. If he’s a fugitive from the law and legally dead and all?”
“I wondered that too,” the woman said, with a sidelong glance at the man. “It makes me not believe it’s real.”
“Real enough for Reddit,” Lakeisha said, “and they’re pretty good at that shit, though it’s attracted the wrath of 4Chan-- I saw a thing, they’re out to prove the guy’s a fake.”
“Really,” the man said.
“Oh yeah,” she said. “They had a call-out thing, and it got reposted to Tumblr, and it was a shitstorm. Half the fangirls think he’s a fake, half think he’s real, everyone won’t shut up about it. It’s a tempest in a teakettle but I pity the fool who actually really hacks the Winter Soldier’s phone.”
“Do you think he’s real?” the woman asked.
Lakeisha considered it. “I mean, the guy with the metal arm who threw Captain America off a bridge is real for sure,” she said. “Whether he really breakdances on surveillance cameras or has a Twitter account and flips off cameras, I reserve judgement.”
“But what about if he’s Elvis?” the guy said. “Let’s get back to Elvis.”
“It would be rad beyond belief if he’s really Elvis,” Lakeisha said. “And yeah, I do think if he were really Elvis he’d totally dance on surveillance videos. So you should totally do it. Put your videos on YouTube and come back to me and I will totally teach you how to make a meme viral.”
“You an expert?” the guy asked.
“I am,” she said.
“Why you wastin’ your time workin’ here, then?” he asked, not unpleasantly, gesturing around the little store. He looked interested, not like he was fucking with her, and God, he was way too pretty. His maybe-a-movie-star girlfriend was a good match for him.
She pasted on a smile. “Marketing companies look for college degrees,” she said. “I got a kid, I can’t afford college. But I run a bunch of really popular blogs and every once in a while I get to sell one, and then my kid gets new shoes. Sometimes I get enough for it that I get new shoes too.”
The man blinked, then looked over at the woman, as if for confirmation. The woman was watching her, but caught his glance and nodded. Like he couldn’t tell if Lakeisha was for real or not about this. The woman looked wry.
“I’m amazed they didn’t want a college degree for this job,” the woman said. “It’s ridiculous nowadays.”
“Oh,” Lakeisha said, “I know.”
The man looked incredulous, but if he’d come up rich it was perfectly possible he’d never have realized how hard the job market was. “That’s fucked-up,” he said.
“James,” the woman said, “go and get whatever it was you wanted, we’ve got to keep moving.”
“Oh yeah,” he said, a little blankly, and looked around. “Do they still got Heath bars?”
The woman rolled her eyes and gave Lakeisha a weary little smile. “Whatever you like, baby, I know you have eyes in your head.”
Her accent had faded to near-indistinguishability. She had a handful of candy, a couple of bottles of random quack herbal supplements, and a bottled coffee drink, and reached over to grab one of the magazines featuring Captain America on it, sliding it deftly under her pile of purchases. “He’s a very good dancer,” Lakeisha said kindly with a glance at the man, the way one would speak of a rather difficult child to its weary mother.
The woman laughed, mouth twisting into a smirk that looked genuinely amused. “He’s very talented,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“I got a lotta talents,” the man said, a little wounded, playing it up. He came up to the counter with a couple of candy bars and the pill bottles that must have been the result of his search, though Lakeisha hadn’t seen him pick them. “Most of ‘em ain’t suited to civilian life or polite company, but I got ‘em anyway.”
“Someone has to,” the woman said soothingly. She took his candy bars and paid for the whole thing with a wad of cash, small bills peeled smoothly off to pay in exact change to the closest dollar, the coins she got back tossed carelessly into the penny jar even though they included quarters which were like gold for the laundromat. “All set, James?”
James had frozen at some point, and Lakeisha looked curiously at him. He was staring fixedly at the magazine. The photo on the cover was a good telephoto closeup of Cap sitting on a broken chunk of concrete with his shield leaned against his leg and his helmet-thing in his hands, face smudged with dirt, looking off to one side with an air of weary disgruntlement, mouth slightly open, a crease between his eyebrows. He was an unreasonably attractive man, but all Jimmy cared about was that he really did look nobly heroic, it was a good shot. The headline said “Back On The Job” and the article was gossipy speculation about why nobody had seen Cap for a while and where he’d been.
James was staring at the photo like it had kicked him, dumbstruck and a little forlorn.
The woman scooped the magazine up, having disposed of all the small items in her various coat pockets (she had more pockets than it looked like, for how tight her jeans appeared to be and how tailored her expensive-looking leather jacket was), and threaded her arm through the man’s left elbow. “C’mon, James,” she said. “You’re not getting out of spa night.”
James blinked, and looked up at Lakeisha. He suddenly looked a lot older than he had earlier, a lot more world-weary, and his eyes were a disconcertingly empty pale ice-blue. Lakeisha stared, taken aback, but he broke the spell by winking and saying, voice a little too hollow to be playful, “Catch ya later, doll.” He gave her a mock-salute, or maybe mimed tipping a cap, but it was oddly formal, his face blank and devoid of sparkle. He turned and walked out, arm in arm with the woman.
“Have a good night,” Lakeisha said mechanically, as most of her brain worked on turning over exactly what was so very, very weird about that whole encounter. Next to her, the playlist had moved on, and an elderly, weary Johnny Cash crooned, from near death:
What have I become? My sweetest friend
everyone I know goes away in the end.
Lakeisha went to stand in the surveillance camera’s dead spot to look at some animated gifs of kittens until the inexplicable chill creeping down her spine abated a little.