Work Text:
The keys thudded in the lock as Lily locked up the store for what felt like the hundredth time. It hadn’t been that many times— Lily was only entrusted with the keys to the store a little over a year ago, and Molly, the owner, closed the store most days anyway. But the task of working her eight-hour shift and then closing the store had long since gained a monotony.
When Molly first let Lily close the store, Lily had been exhilarated, glad she was finally trusted enough to be given a set of the store’s keys. She’d been working at the store for a year at that time, and loved every second of it. (Or almost every second— she wasn’t partial to cleaning the bathrooms.) She loved the faintly musty scent of the clothes people donated, and the rhythmic motion of hanging up clothing. She loved seeing the outfits of the patrons, and checking them out at the cash register, imagining how they’d style the clothes they’d picked out. There was a warmth to the store, a sense of home in the old music posters fading on the walls.
Now, though, the figures on the posters leered down at her in judgement. They’d watched her for years, and now asked her why she was still here. That was a question Lily had no idea how to answer. It was a question she had been asking herself the past few months, as the walls of the store had gone from quaint to claustrophobic, and the air from aged to stifling.
The real answer to the question of why she was still here, working a minimum wage job in Chester, the college town she’d spent secondary education in, over a year after graduation, was because she didn’t know where else to go. Everything that had given dimension to her life in that town— her family, her friends, her relationship, her coursework— had drifted away, leaving only her job.
Everyone she knew had moved away from Chester, settling into somewhere new for the next stage in their life, be it another degree, or their career. Over the course of the summer and first few months of fall, everyone had gotten hired or accepted. If she wanted to drive to visit any of them, it was hours, if not days, away. They weren’t all centralized in one location, so there was no location she could go to and search for a job in.
The one person she would have followed in a heartbeat was Mary, who now lived in Boston as she went to law school. But Mary had made it very clear when the two had broken up that part of the reason was she didn’t want Lily moving or making drastic life choices for her.
And here Lily was, paralyzed. In not making any significant life choices for Mary’s sake, she hadn’t made any significant life choices at all. She hadn’t chosen any direction to go in. She was still in the same town, working the same minimum wage job she’d worked in college, just with more hours. She still lived in the same shitty bug-infested apartment. Everything remained the same, except the things that mattered.
Even her parents had moved farther away from Lily. After their house had been flooded, because both of their daughters had graduated, they’d moved into a smaller house in a suburb closer to Petunia. They were a six hour drive away from Lily on a good day, hours more on a bad one. She wasn’t irritated with them moving farther away from her— Lily’s relationship had always been far more fraught with them than their relationship with Petunia.
Collectively, though, the dispersal of everyone away from Chester had taken its toll. She was now alone, with no friends or family nearby. She only had a few acquaintances and coworkers she didn’t know enough to schedule things with. Her loneliness, like the humidity in the summer air, dampened and mildewed the remaining parts of the town that had given her joy, and her future seemed as cloudy and grey as the afternoon skies, foretelling the inevitable evening rainstorm.
The humidity frizzed Lily’s hair as she walked to her car. Blasting the air conditioning at its maximum setting, she pulled out of the parking lot. She drove home, listening to the mediocre playlist Spotify had made for her.
As Lily pulled onto the rocky asphalt of her apartment complex, she drove past the bench where Mary had broken up with her. It had been fourteen months since the breakup, exactly— not that Lily was counting. (She definitely was.) Fourteen months since Mary had revealed that she was going to law school in Boston, far away from Lily, and neither wanted Lily to move up with her nor wanted to be in a long distance relationship.
On that bench, Lily had sat, a faint smile frozen on her face. She’d been still, save for jerkily nodding in understanding. She’d stayed there after Mary had gotten up to walk to the bus stop at the front of the complex, stayed there as the trees rustled, fortelling an oncoming storm, and stayed there as the rain started pouring down. It was only when a crack of thunder startled her that she got up and walked the few footsteps to her apartment.
She hadn’t really been able to process it until she was done with dinner, alone in her apartment. She’d called off work the next day, unable to last an hour without crying as something new reminded her of Mary. It was cruel of Mary to inform her midway through the summer, after all their friends had gone. Lily had nothing to fall back on, no one in town remaining to have fun with, so she could distract herself. She only had her job, and the store was far too empty over the summer to allow her to escape her flood of thoughts. In fact, folding and hanging up clothes gave her ample time to let herself drown in her thoughts, letting her regrets and what-ifs seep through the foundation of her mind, rotting at the wood.
After a year, though, Lily had come to terms with the fact that she and Mary wouldn’t have worked out anyway. Even setting aside the difficulties long distance entailed, the two had never quite aligned in the ways that mattered. Mary had always wanted to take over the world, while Lily just wanted to carve a piece of it out for herself. She just didn’t know how to find that piece. Mary wanted a loud love, shouted from the rooftops and splashed across every billboard. Lily was content with a private love, in small touches and smiles at secret jokes. She wanted to be the type of lesbian to love loudly, but it had always felt overly performative to her, like she had something to prove. It never felt natural to her, and Mary hadn’t ever understood why Lily felt so uncomfortable publicly displaying her affection. Honestly, she wasn’t sure Mary ever would. So Lily knew that Mary and her wouldn’t have worked in the long term.
Lily would be a liar, though, if she didn’t say she’d get with Mary again in a heartbeat. As much as she knew they wouldn’t work out, she would abandon everything to try again. She knew that made her a fool. She knew it wasn't healthy. But no matter what she did to ignore it, she knew she just wanted to be with Mary again.
Still lost in her own thoughts, Lily parked the car and trudged up to her apartment. It was completely dark until she flipped the lights on. She’d enjoyed having a single apartment in college, as she could invite people over at any time. With a text dropped into a group chat, life would race into the apartment.
Now, her solitary apartment only served to isolate her. There was no one to go home to and no one to invite over. There was no life inside of it, nothing but the bugs she’d occasionally see darting through the kitchen if she turned the lights on at night.
It was a Friday night. Furniture thudded and scraped across the floor above her as she heard her neighbors above preparing for some party. Microwaving leftovers from the previous night, she scrolled on her phone. The fried rice was tasteless in her mouth. Her mind numbed as she flicked through video after video.
After she was done with dishes, the evening spread out before her, a blank canvas she had to fill with something . But she had no clue what. Staring into her vacant apartment, and hearing the muffled beginnings of house music from the apartment above, the loneliness became unbearable. She poured herself a glass of wine and nestled herself between her bedsheets. She swiped through dating app after dating app, the wine emboldening her as she looked through them.
As usual, she didn’t feel confident in anybody. Every person was missing some element she couldn’t put her finger on. (The back of her brain informed her that it was probably the element of being Mary Macdonald, but she ignored that sentiment.) Despite that, she liked profiles quite often, desperate enough for any connection to chance an attempt at something.
In the midst of her swiping, a text message from James popped up on the screen. After the two stopped dating, they’d ironically gotten closer to each other. James was now one of her closest friends, and the two tried to keep in touch fairly regularly, mostly him checking up on her.
James: How r u?
Pretty bad , she thought to herself. She didn’t really have a single event or circumstance she could attribute her deteriorating mental state to, though, so she didn’t feel comfortable texting that back to him. She had no doubt he was enjoying his life out in Denver with Sirius and Remus. She didn’t want her loneliness to give him guilt for his happiness.
Lily: Alright
James: U available to call?
Instead of responding, Lily just called him. He picked up on the first ring.
“Hey Lily. How’s it going?”
The two talked about meaningless topics for a few hours, James explaining the ridiculous drama of his workplace, and Lily mostly listening. Her mood had lightened significantly, laughing on the phone with James. It was only close to midnight, after the call had gone silent for a few seconds, that Lily finally asked, “James, do you ever feel like you’re frozen, with nowhere to go as the world rushes on around you?”
On the other end of the phone, James paused. “I, uh. Not usually, really. But you can tell me about it if you do.”
“I guess it’s just that I’m in Chester, alone. And I don’t really know where to go from here. All y’all moved to different places and have directions you’re going, while I’m just… here. It feels like I’m biding my time for something, but I don’t know what I’m biding my time for.”
“Do you still work at the shop?”
“Yeah.” Lily stared out her window, the dark trees blowing against one another.
“What else do you do?” James asked.
“I don’t know. I watch television, go to the library, read sometimes…” Lily trailed off.
“Seeing anyone?”
Lily sighed. “No, I’ve been on dates, but after Mary, everything just feels… wrong.”
“Still not over her?”
“No, I am, I don’t think we should be together, I just…”
“Can’t imagine seriously being in a long term relationship with anyone but her?” James finished. How James had managed to pin down the thoughts that had been swirling around in her head so quickly was beyond her. But then, James had always been surprisingly good at understanding Lily. It was one of the things that had made it so hard for her to realize she was gay when she was dating him.
“Yeah,” Lily admitted.
“I was like that for a couple months after we dated. You’d been all I imagined for so long I didn’t really know how to be over it,” James explained.
“How’d you stop?” Lily asked.
“Honestly, just time. And fucking around with Sirius and Peter and Remus. Stopped trying to find someone new, and just had fun with the people around me.”
“Oh.” This wasn’t at all helpful to her, given that her friends had all moved away. “I don’t really have anyone here I could do that with, James.” Her voice grew so quiet, her next words were barely audible. “I’m so alone.”
“You could always meet people,” James said kindly.
Easy for him to say. He’d always been the person who’d talk to half the people at a party, and be beloved by every one of them. He charmed every person he met, hell, he’d charmed Lily so much she’d almost thought she was attracted to men. (Not wanting to kiss or even hold hands with him had set her right.) James Potter had no issue making friends with people. Lily Evans, meanwhile, was the girl in the corner at the party, sipping her drink and watching her friends have far more fun. At least until Mary would pull her to the middle of the swarm of people and start dancing with her. But now, there were no parties she went to, and Mary wasn’t here to pull her out of the corner even if she did have parties. “I’m not like you, James. I can’t talk to people like you can.”
“Oh come now, Evans,” James clucked over the phone. “You can talk to people plenty fine. Talked to me great when we first met”
“You were biased.”
He hummed in agreement. “That I was. Even so, you aren’t as bad as you think. And you’re not a bad person. Try talking to people, and worse comes to worst you have an awkward conversation.”
Lily hated how much of a point James had. Hated that she’d have to talk to people despite her lack of confidence. “Where am I even supposed to go?”
James hummed in deliberation. “You could do what Peter did and join a community garden or something. He made a lot of friends there, from what he’s told me.”
She and James talked for another hour, and Lily agreed to start going to the library’s book club. She’d have to ask for her work schedule to be switched around, but Molly was usually amenable to changes. James made a few jabs at a book club being her idea of a good time, but affectionately. She hadn’t realized it, but apparently James had been worried about her for the past few months. On their calls, she’d been reserved, not telling him much about her life. She hadn’t intended to, of course, she just hadn’t had anything in her life that she cared about enough to discuss.
When she hung up the phone, she felt better than she had in at least a month. The grey fog separating her from the world, muting and dampening everything around her, had not disappeared. But it had thinned, letting her see a few yards farther in front of her.
Molly was thankfully working the next day. Saturdays were their busiest days, so Molly almost always worked then, as they needed more experienced workers than usual. The two were opening together, as many of their college-aged coworkers had asked for that Saturday off, it being the first Saturday of the semester.
Lily dusted off the shelves, carefully moving the shoes to Swiffer under them. “Molly, would it be possible for me to close Wednesdays instead of Tuesdays? Or at least get off early on Tuesdays?” she called across the store.
“Sure,” Molly replied, filling the cash register with small bills and change. “Just put it on a sticky note in the office so I remember when I make the schedule.”
Her plan now fully possible, Lily was a bit more bubbly to the customers, smiling and complimenting them more than she usually did. As the day went on, some of her good mood dimmed, bits of it eclipsed by entitled customers and being on her feet all day.
She checked out the final customer of the day, a familiar girl Lily had seen at the store before, always dressed entirely in pastels. Woven friendship bracelets wrapped around her arms, and miniscule origami cranes dangled off her ears. There was a crafty vibe to her that Lily wanted to have, but hadn’t ever been able to achieve.
“I love your earrings,” Lily commented, folding the skirts and flowy shirts the girl had bought into a bag.
“Thanks, I actually made them myself.” The girl looked off into the distance at some point to the far right above Lily’s head.
“Wow,” Lily replied. She handed the bag to the customer. “Your total is $35.76.”
The girl pulled the necessary cash out of a wallet that appeared to be made of duct tape. It had been years, if not over a decade since Lily had last seen that sort of wallet. Lily counted out the change, and bid the girl farewell.
After the two finished cleaning up the store, Molly let Lily leave early, as there was nothing left to do but count the remaining money in the till. The rain had already started to drizzle down, making Lily dash to her car. She was just about to pull out of the parking lot when she noticed a short figure on the sidewalk, without an umbrella. The figure was swinging the bag in a circle, the force of the motion the only thing preventing the clothes from tumbling out. Her clothes were already pockmarked with dark spots from the rain.
At second glance, she realized it was the same girl who had last checked out at the store. Lily debated with herself for a second, and remembered James’s advice, that meeting people was mostly just putting herself out there. She reminded herself that she was a young woman, and not at all a particularly threatening presence. She pulled the umbrella out from the side of her seat, unfurling it before dashing toward the girl.
“Hey! Not to be weird or creepy, but do you want a ride home?” Lily asked, her face flushed both from the dash, and the fact that she was offering to drive a relative stranger home. “Obviously you don’t have to, or anything, I know I’m literally just the cashier at a thrift store. I just saw you walking home in the rain, and you seemed like a cool person who I wanted to get to know anyway, and it would be a shame for you and your clothes to get all wet. So I can drive you home if you want. Or just give you my umbrella or something.” The words tumbled out in a rush.
The girl looked down at her patchwork skirt, paused for a second, then looked back up at Lily. “Yes, a ride home would be lovely.”
The two walked back into Lily’s car, Lily holding the umbrella over the girl’s head. As she unlocked the car, she turned to the girl beside her. “So, my name’s Lily. What’s yours?”
She smiled. “Pandora.”