“What was in that sludge your girlfriend was trying to feed me?” Paige asked Harrison as they walked from the only café in town to the only clothing store in town.
Harrison rolled his eyes. “She’s not my girlfriend. It was juice crystals dissolved in water.”
“Juice crystals? What are those?”
He laughed. “You’ve never had juice crystals? Well, I guess if you’re used to unsweetened, freshly-squeezed orange juice then I guess you’ve never been subjected to the glories of flavored sugar water that never goes bad—ever.”
Paige didn’t say anything else, but she felt flat. The pancakes were good, but now her stomach turned since she had no idea what was in them. She hadn’t grown up anywhere special and her family wasn’t rich, but there was an orange tree in her backyard growing up. Looking out at the prairie, she knew there would be no more orange juice. It was stupid, but that fact hit her harder than anything else that happened since she had woken up. There was no going back and this new world was… dismal.
Her hopes had plummeted since breakfast and now she was feeling suspicious about the prospective shopping trip. If that was what breakfast was like, could clothes shopping be much more promising?
Harrison suddenly stopped her in the middle of the street. “Listen,” he said, turning to face her. “Before we go in, I have to tell you the conditions of your shopping spree so that you don’t get too excited.”
“I doubt I’ll be too excited,” she said, sniffing back a little condensation in her nose. It was cold out.
Harrison said gruffly, “I only have two hundred dollars for you to play with and that has to buy everything you need.”
Paige thought she was going to faint. It wasn’t enough money to buy a pair of jeans. “Everything?”
“Well, this is a discount store, so you can probably stretch the money a bit,” Harrison said positively. “You know how to do that, right?”
Paige scanned her memory. She didn't know if she knew how to make money go further. She had no memory of handling her own finances. She did understand math, so she guessed that would have to be enough.
Harrison put a friendly hand on her shoulder. “Are you okay? Are you having a hard time remembering how to do normal things, like how to shop?”
Paige didn’t answer him.
“You’ve got to be kidding me. Is there a woman who doesn’t know how to shop left in this world?” He chuckled.
“No,” she said, tugging on his sleeve. “It isn’t that. I was trying to remember the last thing I wanted to buy.”
“Diamonds?”
“No.”
“Rubies?”
“No.”
“Emeralds?”
“No! Quit with the jewels and let me think for a minute!”
Just as Harrison shut up, the clouds in her head parted and she remembered the last thing she wanted. Then she described it for Harrison. “It was a camel hair coat with massive flare sleeves and it was sort of double-breasted, but both buttons were only on one side of your chest. It cost a small fortune, but…”
Abruptly, Harrison grabbed her by the arm and hauled her bodily into the store.
“Hey! What are you doing?” Paige complained, just before Harrison spun her in front of the mannequin display set up in the entrance of the store. Paige couldn’t believe her eyes. There it was. Her coat! They had a huge display and they had it in red, gray, navy, yellow, white, and cream. They were on sale for thirty dollars apiece. “Wow…” she mouthed.
Harrison rested his elbow on the shoulder of one of the headless mannequins. Then he grabbed its empty sleeve and tossed it over the opposite shoulder playfully. “Except that these aren’t made of camel hair. These are made of old pop bottles and every old lady in town owns at least two.”
Paige’s shoulders sagged.
“I guess that’s what happens to high fashion after a few years have passed,” he said quietly. “You won’t find anything that’s the height of fashion here. That’s why I didn’t buy a diva. Just pick out what you can tolerate—even if it is eons out of style. No one will see it back at my place except me anyway. Buy what’s comfortable and will last long.” Then Harrison turned and headed off to a different department.
Paige stepped up to the display and touched one of the yellow coats. Harrison was right. But still, she’d wanted one badly before she’d lost her mind. She picked out her size in the yellow and slung it over her forearm. This was what her life was like now and she wasn’t going to cry about it.
After that, she pecked around the store smelling weird scented body wash, testing the elasticity of hair bands, and trying on clothes so cheap her skin felt strange after she pulled them off. Eventually, she made her way back to Harrison and showed him her purchases. He reviewed them without comment and paid for them on credit. She winced. He didn’t have the money in his normal account. She hoped it didn’t max him out, but she couldn’t do anything about it if she did. She had to have clothes.
Before they went back to the helocarrier, they stopped to pick up an order of food at the grocery store and a parcel from the post office. It was an awful lot to carry. He got a loading cart and pushed it all the way to the helocarrier landing.
“You can stay here while I walk the cart back,” he said charitably with a chipper grin on his face.
Paige smiled at him wearily and tried to look happy, or at least, not miserable. He was trying to be kind to her by not making her walk back to the store, so she made herself comfortable and rested.
The town spread out before her through the windshield, a pitiful cluster of unpainted buildings with pathetic clumps of yellow grass between them. Paige remembered how she hadn’t seen a single flower on her way to this miserable town. How was she going to survive here? Even if she had never been rich in her life before, she was used to beauty.
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
She cast her eyes downward and picked at the peeling manicure she'd received at Sleeping Beauty Inc. before they put her to sleep. What had she felt or envisioned when it had been done? She didn't know. Whatever beauty or glamour it represented, it hadn't kept its promise. She wished she'd had enough money to buy nail polish remover. How long would it be before it chipped off completely?
Time passed and somehow Harrison snuck up and swung the door open.
“Oh! You’re back!” Paige forced a smile on her face.
Harrison hopped up into his seat and suddenly he handed her a cluster of roses. They weren’t real. They were made of ribbon and carefully clustered together with faux silk leaves coming.
Paige was speechless.
“Sorry, they’re not real. We’re in the middle of nowhere and not even greenhouses ship out here without an order, so it was all I could get. Don’t worry. There will be flowers, just not for another couple of months.”
Paige was so choked up she couldn’t say anything, but Harrison seemed to get it and started the chocker.
“We’ll talk at home.”
----------------------------------------
Harrison did have something he wanted to talk to Paige about, but he didn’t know how to broach it. To put it simply, it was bad news—for both of them. Ever since the orange juice, she had seemed down. It wasn’t until he saw her shopping that he realized how messed up she was. She looked completely hopeless. As he looked at her across the cockpit, he understood what the coordinator said at the agency was dead on—she was damaged goods. He realized that he should not have laughed when he caught Paige going through his trash looking for dead bodies. She had her memory wiped. She could have been doing anything in those two years. Anything. Even murdering people and wrapping their bodies in plastic.
Well, the police couldn’t be looking for her, because if they had been, it probably would have taken them thirty whole seconds to find her at Sleeping Beauty Inc. Not exactly good news, as that could mean that they'd just never pieced together what she'd done.
A chill ran up his spine. He’d heard of models who had killed their owners before. There were protections built into the bracelets to stop that nowadays, but argh! He had the willies.
He glanced at Paige again. She did look a little deranged. He’d never seen hair that perfectly long and undamaged on a girl before. The girls he knew usually wore their hair to their shoulders like Keziah. That way it was just long enough to pull into a ponytail. Paige’s skin was practically transparent like she’d been locked up for years. Add that to her vacant expression and he wasn’t sure if she was the ghost or if she was the one being haunted.
Harrison pulled his gaze away from her and looked at the horizon. I am not forcing her to sleep with me. I am not beating her. There is nothing to worry about. He chanted it over and over again in his head. He wasn’t taking advantage of her or raping her or whatever those nasty guys had done to the models who went nuts. Nothing was going to happen. She slept on a completely different floor. He had to calm down.
Now.
It wasn’t working, but eventually, it would. He would establish that trust between them that was so necessary for their future. Everything would slowly work out, he told himself as he checked his instruments and sped ahead.
Back at the house, Harrison and Paige unloaded the chocker and put their food away. It was such normal work that Harrison shook off his macabre suspicions and got on with it.
After that, Harrison got in his truck and took the helocarrier back into the hangar. As he crossed the yard, he saw Paige up in her tower putting her things away. That was as good a place as any to break the bad news, so he went up to see her.
He tapped on the door.
“Come in,” she said and he came in.
She stood by the door, putting a shirt in the closet. The room was an irregular shape because a side of the circle had been shaved off for the stairs, the closet, and the bathroom. That put three identical white doors in a row. He hoped she was never too drowsy to forget which one was the bathroom in the middle of the night. Falling down the stairs would be a nasty surprise.
“Everything fit okay?” Harrison asked cautiously, as he moved over to the other side of the room and perched himself on the window frame.
“Yeah,” Paige nodded, taking another hanger out and putting a tank top that cost a dollar on it.
Harrison sighed. He knew it cost only a dollar. She’d bought six of them.
He couldn’t procrastinate any longer. “I got a transmission from Her Majesty’s Bank. Does that name ring any bells with you?”
He watched Paige gulp down uncomfortably. “Yeah, that was where my debt was. Don’t tell me the money that Sleeping Beauty Inc. transferred to my account wasn’t enough to cover my debt.”
Harrison nodded gravely.
Paige’s face went from white to red and she stormed, “I was repeatedly assured that the payment would be enough unless no one bought me. Wasn’t that true?”
“They said the principle was paid, but interest rates went up while you were in cryostasis and now they want another twenty-thousand dollars.”
Paige stared at him, horrified and unable to speak.
He clenched his teeth together and gave her a half-hearted smile. “They say I’m on the hook for it.”
Paige’s shoulders sagged. “Sorry about that.”
“Just let me ask one thing,” Harrison said patiently. “Do you have any idea what you spent that money on?”
She shook her head weakly. “No. I was broke before my memory wipe, but I wasn’t in debt. Back then, no one would have given me credit.”
Harrison sat, pondering that. “Well, I’ll ask HMB to send me your financial records for the past ten years and we’ll see if we can figure it out. In the meantime, we need to come up with a way for us to earn twenty-thousand dollars by New Year’s Day.”
Paige shook her head sadly. “So you don’t have the money?”
“I spent nearly all my available cash getting you.”
Paige chuckled darkly. “Was I worth it?”
“Putting the topic of money aside, I think it might help us if you told me what you can remember about yourself. I might not be able to help, but I might be able to understand.” He paused. “I can tell something’s bothering you. Maybe you sold yourself so you could start a new life because something about your old life was unbearable. I bought you for the same reason. Living out here alone was intolerable and I wouldn't tolerate it any longer. I want to help you adjust to this new life, so let’s talk.”
Paige thought for a second then stuttered, “Talking about that old stuff won't procure twenty-thousand dollars. We need money. Even if you go through my bank statements, you won’t be able to reclaim any of that money. It's gone. I have no possessions, and I feel sick.”
“I can get a doctor on a video call if you want to talk to someone,” Harrison offered.
Paige flicked her hair out of her face. “No. I don't want to talk to a doctor. It's not that kind of sick. I need to be different, give up on who I was, and I don't think a doctor can help me do that.” She picked up a pair of scissors and went into the bathroom. Standing in front of the mirror she snatched a clump of her hair and put the scissors to the roots.
“No!” Harrison yowled, diving at her. He grabbed the scissors in one hand and in so doing, knocked her completely off balance. Reflexively, he grabbed her waist with his other hand and held her up.
Her eyes were wide as she stared up at him.
He breathed heavily and brought her back up to a standing position without letting the moment become any more awkward. “Whew! Don’t cut your hair for nothing.”
Paige looked confused and Harrison felt her eyes on him as he put the scissors away. “Harrison! I don’t even remember the time that this hair grew. You didn’t buy me to be your lover. Why should it matter to you what I do with my hair as long as I work?”
“You’re right,” he said, touching her hair. “I don’t care if you want to cut it. I just think that if you’re going to do it anyway, then let’s cut it the profitable way.”
“The profitable way?” Paige repeated.
“Yeah. I know someone who can pixie you right up.”