Sprites 1.5.1

E's ankles began to bleed. She was on hour 11 of a shift with no end. The first five hours went fine, but she'd been too cheery, burning energy with smiling and idiotic things like remembering orders. She was crushing, Reaganing, Dragonballing; whatever you like to call a roll. She felt like she was on rollerskates until hour 9, when her legs began to cramp up. Now, it was agony, a pure workout hell without a break. Two servers had failed to show up, so even smoke breaks were out of the question. She hadn't eaten. None of this was legal. In her mind, she murdered everyone she'd ever met, just in case they'd led her down this road. Instead of going to college she got a job. She had two letters of acceptance and had physically burned both in the alley behind her parents' garage. She stomped on the ashes. E felt stupid, defeated, dry beaten, and now, of course, bloody. This was a bad job and she had nowhere to go.

In three hours, she'd be asleep. She'd forget about hating the job, and she'd happily go back to work the next day. Her feet would only hurt for another hour. Before she went out to fetch another drink order from a table of 13, Carly approached her.

"You're limping," she said, examining her leg. "Are you bleeding? Is this your blood?"

E shrugged it off. "I'm fine. I'm good bread."

"Here," Carly motioned to her outstretched hand. "They're prescription. They're good. You'll sleep like you're five."

E looked down at the little yellow pills in her hand. "Different," she said, scooping them up and into her mouth in a single motion. She asked, "You take these a lot?"

"I mostly just smoke weed," Carly said, grabbing a new serving tray. "But sometimes, yeah. When it gets to be a lot."

Neither thought to get a band-aid from the kit, because neither knew where the kit was, if there was a kit, if the kit was any good, and if the band-aids were from the previous century. At the last place, where S still toiled in the kitchen presumably, the kit was well stocked because the busboys were constantly running into shit, breaking plates and stepping on glass. E wondered if it was the drugs everyone was on that led to all these minor injuries, but then she thought, wouldn't the absence of drugs empty out all the restaurant staff? Who could do this straight? Wouldn't they all just try harder and get real jobs?

Hour 11 ended with a rancid tip, but E didn't care. She'd been useless as a waitress The meds had kicked in and she was fairly numb from the eyeballs down. She kept up the strength to see through to the end. When her last table finally kicked out at 3 and a half in the morning, she leaned against the coarse brick of the back alley wall and let out a short wail. She had 40 more fucking years of this to go before she could respectably die. Her hands met her thighs and she let her hair fall in front of her face and dangle. It wasn't the long shift that gave her the deep. She could handle the work, and even the long hours weren't too punishing, even though it was difficult to see through that in the moment.

E had lacked any ambition in high school. She spent most of it high, and got through it largely on curve grading. She did not want a real job. She did not want to spend four to seven years in school to spend the rest of her life paying off debts. But she didn't want to be a model either, or anything to do with just being pretty and selling things. It's not that she looked down on any of it, but the thought of doing anything like that left her feeling like life just wasn't worth it. She would feel depressed whenever the idea of a career track would come up. But not working at all seemed even worse. What was she going to do? Find a rich husband? She'd never seen any evidence of their existence. There were rich guys out there, but their money seemed to come from working shifts like the one she'd just endured, only wearing a suit, shouting at other assholes, drinking the saddest drinks.

The only real career path that gave E any excitement was building her own thing. Not selling it, whatever it would be. But just building her own little thing and having that take care of her. It was such a lame abstract idea that materializing anything in the name of it was a pained waste of time. E did not want to make doing life decisions while leaning against brick walls in dark alleys, alone, and held up by borrowed pills. But it was often the only time she did.

She'd been fired from half a dozen shitty restaurants since she left high school. She was a failure on her own, but she did not want to be a success because of others. She'd refused money from her judgmental and grey parents. She'd refused loans from friends. When she couldn't make rent, she moved to a shittier place, and found a shittier job to support it. What money she made went to alcohol and weed, video games, and birth control. If she ever wanted more, as she did at this moment, she did not know how to get it. Whatever money she could take from the people she knew wouldn't help her get more. She didn't know what the more was, but she knew it was out there. She did not know if she would ever get it. Her ankles told her she couldn't.

When she eventually found herself breathing the air of home, she found J on her living room floor, punching in Gameshark codes.

"I think I've got the one that gives you unlimited feathers," she said, in a tone that said she'd spent the last hour trying it.

E collapsed on the couch above her, her legs spread on either side of J. "I'd take off my shoes but I'm legitimately scared of everything below the knee ripping straight off."

"It's really only good for the haunted house," J continued. "But I can never get the thing through legitimate channels. I want to make that jump. Also you smell terrible. What peed on you?"

"Everything," E said. "Everything peed on me."

"Yeah, that checks out." J then jumped. "I did it!" Her hands gripped the controller. "This is it. Pay attention. I'm so glad you're home for this, rankness notwithstanding."

"Are you high of course you're high why am I even asking,"

"Shhhh, you're tired," J said. "I'm performing amazing feats."

"You're cheating."

"I still have to hit the jump! That's the important part. Gamesharks got such a bad rap."

"Did they? How old were you in 1993? I'm assuming that's when it came out."

J shushed E again and focused on the screen. She'd picked Koopa, who she thought was the fastest and cutest and never understood why they dropped him in future installments of Mario Kart. An argument about this happened at the beach once which led to them being hit on by guys who thought they were being ironic.

E was barely awake, but mustered the appropriate enthusiasm for her best friend trying to do a somewhat difficult manuever in a 20 year old video game while using a cheat code and a controller with an X button that would only occasionally fire. She sat up, slightly and said, "I believe in you 100%."

J drove half the lap, and made a bee-line for the shortcut. You had to line up the kart perfectly and hit the jump at exactly the right time. If the jump was successful, the koopa would land on a thin strip of surface that would shave upwards of ten seconds off her time, guarantee a first place, and give her something to brag about for two to three weeks, depending on how many individual and separate conversations she might have.

Landing the kart was most of the work, but she would still have to steer the kart straight for a few seconds before turning back on the course. She'd seen other people fail at this, so she considered slowing down when she got to that point. She'd watched videos. She felt like she could handle this.

"I saw my brother do this when I was five and I've wanted to hit it ever since."

"Barely care, hurry up. Sleeping in ten seconds." E murmured.

In a moment of pure cocainic thrill, J swerved slightly too far to the left, and when she hit the button, the game glitched our for a split-second, the gameshark causing a bug J would look up later and confirm, which caused her little driving turtle teleport to the other end of the lap, dead last, upside down, and unable to move, just sitting there blinking in a way that made it look so sad.

E said, "Do you think we're wasting our lives?"

"You can't say that wasn't an impressive move," J said. "I'll take it. Besides, I was cheating anyway."

"I'm going to sleep on this couch until a prince comes to wake me up," E said, laying down. "Actually, strike that. Anyone from the gentry. I'm not that picky. If he's got a horse he can wake me up."

"Got it," J said, ejecting the cartridge from the slightly yellowed and yet perfectly functional Super Nintendo.

"J?" E asked, just a little bit left in her.

"Yeah?"

"Why isn't there a way to make me better?"

J put a blanket over E and tucked it under her feet. "You're perfect. That's why."

E smiled, and only believed J because she was already asleep.