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Carol Anne Sturka remembers her earliest years being relatively happy. For a time, Carol Anne returned from school to a home that loved her and invited her in with open arms.
She lived with her mother in a cozy and kept apartment in Virginia. The neighbors upstairs played loud music and the ones downstairs were always yelling at each other, but Carol Anne liked where she lived all the same. Every day after school, she went to Girl Scouts meetings and brought home pockets full of money and cookies.
Sometimes, Carol can even remember her old bedroom. Barbies were strewn on the floor at all times. She'd always forget to pick them up before nighttime and she would always step on a little plastic shoe.
When Carol Anne played with the Barbies, her favorite game was dress-up. She'd never bothered to dress the Barbies in outfits that matched the themes on their boxes. Gold Medal Barbie wore Ballerina Barbie's tutu and heels. Malibu Barbie wore nothing at all.
Just like her toys, Carol Anne liked to dress silly and mismatched. One day before school, she had picked out an outfit she thought looked great.
Carol Anne hopped up into a pair of green corduroy pants with reindeers embroidered into them. Over the pants, she'd just managed to fit a brown puppy-dog shirt over the bulky pants. As soon as she got the zipper up, Carol Anne was on the move again.
Carol Anne went crashing into one Georgina Sturka. Georgina caught Carol Anne and hugged her tight. She smiled and held her daughter's hand the whole way to school.
Carol Anne was the only good thing that came from an otherwise unstable and abusive marriage. For eleven years, Georgina hugged Carol Anne multiple times every single day.
Georgia admired Carol Anne to a fault. Every time she misbehaved, Georgia couldn't find it in her to seriously get upset with Carol Anne. Two hours after she threw a tantrum, she would find her way back into her mother's arms.
All those years ago, Georgina would whisper to Carol Anne that she was a miracle from the heavens above. Georgia swore to herself that she would love Carol Anne no matter what because she was sent by God to heal her past wounds.
When Carol was eleven years old, she had not only stopped going by her first and middle name (sounded silly), but she had also hugged her mother for the last time.
Carol had trusted Georgina's words too much. She had believed that her mother would be with her no matter what, because her mother told her that she knew what was best for Carol. Carol had told her something which Georgina did not take well.
For the next five years, Georgina and Carol Sturka became distant from each other. Georgina talked to the locals at her church about what Carol had told her. One day, Georgina Sturka had received a piece of paper with an address in Tennessee. Georgina Sturka held the paper to her chest and hugged it.
Carol Sturka has not had love for her mother for decades. But sometimes, when she's all alone her body and mind betray her.
It makes her yearn for unwavering motherly love again. A kind of love that Carol Anne Sturka has never truly had.
One day during a Girl Scouts meeting, Carol meets a girl named Casey who is sitting in a corner. Casey does not like making friendship bracelets and donating soda tops to charity. Instead, Casey dresses in baseball hats and soccer shorts. She draws on mustaches and talks funny as she ties ropes and plays sports.
As Carol sees Casey at more meetings, she becomes increasingly interested in her fashion. Casey has three older brothers who grow six inches every month and constantly need new clothes. Carol and Casey come into possession of more and more clothes to play with. There's dress-up shows with boy's clothes, girl's clothes, and grown-up clothes.
Carol feels happy as she wears clothes that aren't her own. There's some stolen silk dresses from Casey's mom that she drowns in, and there's basketball jerseys that go down to her knees from Casey's oldest brother. Carol stops playing with her Barbies which only have pink dresses and tank tops.
A little while afterwards, Carol's convinced to join the soccer team. It turns out that she can take a speeding soccer ball to the stomach without throwing up, immediately ranking her above the previous goalie.
The school's soccer team sets a new winning record, and after every game, Carol's teammates rush up to her and swarm her with shoulder hugs and cheers.
Casey hugs her like her brothers had taught her to: she grips tight like a bear and she shakes Carol until it feels like she might explode.
As they win game after game, Casey and Carol hug a lot more, and Carol leaves each one feeling warm and happy. Even outside of sports, Casey hugs her and makes her feel cared for. It's a feeling she can't help but share with her mother.
Georgina Sturka does not hug Carol that night.
Carol smokes her first cigarette the next day.
There's a long, stretching period in Carol's life where she feels unlovable. In her formative years, where she knows she should have been hanging out with friends and going to prom, she's been building walls around her emotions and making sure that nobody gets in.
Carol likes to think that her defenses stay strong and impenetrable. The last time Carol had let somebody in, it led to hurt and lasting scars that wouldn't go away like a slap on the cheek. For a good, long while, Carol turns down every invitation to bars and parties and instead tries to drown her sorrow out with needles filled with cloudy brown murk.
That's a habit she's proudly dropped after a year. Carol's funds run extremely low, so she makes the choice to pack up from Virginia and enroll in university. New Mexico takes her and she sets up shop there. It feels acceptable to have something to spend time and effort on that isn't a complete waste of time.
She drinks cups and cups of coffee and devours chocolate-chip pancakes, frankly, like a fucking hog, after every bland shift. With syrup dripping from her lips and whipped butter dotting her cheeks, she scrabbles down some notes on a stack of papers.
Her favorite waitress, Bri, touches her shoulder and offers her another cup of coffee. Carol manages to nod her head through the interaction. She only lets herself exhale once Bri has pushed into the kitchen again.
With food still smeared on her face, she leaves the diner and goes on a grocery store run for another week of meal prep.
Carol walks past the local Sprouts with a scoff (fancy crap, anyways) and enters the local fresh market. She hits the soup aisles and gets chicken noodle, various Progresso cans, and lastly, ramen.
Another woman has just taken the last god-damned package of shrimp ramen. Carol places a package of beef flavor into her cart with an extraordinarily comical frown.
She finds herself behind the ramen-snatching thief in line, too. The woman curses as she comes up short on her card. Carol slides her a nickel and a five-dollar bill. It's a mere drop in the bucket, but it makes the other woman smile.
Helen Umstead brags about how she stole Carol's favorite ramen (that she won't even touch nowadays) and her heart in a single night. It was one of the days Helen had allowed herself to drink.
Helen places a sloppy kiss on Carol's forehead and squeezes her in a tight hug that warms Carol's whole body. It's one of Carol's favorite memories from thirty whole years of knowing Helen.
“Don't tell her what to think!” Laxmi moves her hand a fraction of an inch closer to Kusimayu and by extent, Carol.
Carol's quick to shut her biggest critic down almost immediately.
“Could you just,” Carol pressed her hand down dramatically “please?”
Carol gets close to Kusimayu again and begins to speak again, Kusimayu has no intent to actually listen to Carol restate the same repeated rhetoric that her family has heard for generations.
Her hand reaches out to steady Kusimayu, an attempt to establish a sense of human touch with her, but she moves away and gives her a glare. Carol's frankly offended, face twisting as Kusimayu rejects the same advice she wished she could have heard as a woman in her mid 20s.
Once they're out for lunch, Laxmi gives Carol those same eyes. Koumba's eyes dart between the two women between bites of chicken as they bicker across the table about Laxmi's son. His focus begins to drift away from his Barbie squad and more on what unfolds each time these two women interact.
He crosses his legs haughtily as their meal goes on, and doesn't miss how Laxmi flinches with something that isn't just anger when Carol starts taking swig after swig of a liquor bottle.
Koumba's the first one up when Carol collapses in the grass, but he can make out Laxmi immediately popping up to get a better peek at Carol. He sees himself in Carol's screams, but he doesn't have time to properly de-escalate the situation like before when everyone's seizing again.
Laxmi screams at Carol with hot, burning anger as she holds Ravi in her arms.
The museum trip later that day is incredibly awkward, even with Carol gone.
When Carol visits him not but a week later, he chooses not to share what Laxmi had confided to him. The end of the world had to be coming sooner than he expected. After a Zoom call, Laxmi had privately called him to complain about her pre-hived husband's performance (compared to now) as well as how badly she wanted to see Carol again… to yell at her, only.
Koumba tucks Carol in that night, looking down at the lonely, rejected woman crashing in what he knows is not really his penthouse. He pulls the blankets up to her chin but doesn't give her any unwelcome contact. He knows he's not the person for that, instead starting to think of a plan for breakfast tomorrow.
Carol slept better in ghost Elvis's dust than she had in a fortnight. A hint of comfort remains in her shoulders when she wakes up wrapped in blankets.
As Carol leaves and his girls come back, Koumba thinks about her familiar loneliness again until two sore-loser poker pirate guys drag him into bed for a “sword-fight”.
Carol grabs handfuls of flesh on Zosia's back, indulging in her scent, her taste, her feel. It's been so unbelievably long since Carol has let herself have anything like this.
The individual known as Zosia feels pain in the grenade-inflicted scars on her back but she does not utter a word, only a pleased-sounding moan. Her body is pliant under Carol, easing her into a guiding role.
Carol takes and takes and takes until she's dizzy and feels like crying. It's been so long of holding out and living in a world where nobody, yet everybody, wants her.
The next morning, Carol wakes up with a warm body in her bed. For the next two weeks, Carol gets everything she's wanted, and it feels satisfying. A domestic home life with the added benefit of no arguments or money troubles. But there's still a nagging doubt on her shoulder that fills her with dread.
As good as she feels, she doesn't feel right. It feels like she's running an experiment. She asks Zosia for a hug, then a kiss, then a hand on her breast, then a tongue on her pussy, then a “stop” right before Zosia leans in. Zosia follows each order like an obedient dog.
She has time, she thinks as she pushes away the stubborn wrench in her plans.
The wrench is a man who reminds her too much of that trusting girl who got disappointed and failed over and over again.
Later that same night, she leaves him in the dust.
For the next two weeks, Albuquerque is empty except for Manousos Oviedo and Helen Umstead.
Carol rinses and repeats her nights with Zosia, taking from her and giving like she knows she should, even when Zosia is silent until Carol looks her in the eyes and reminds the Hive that she should be reacting to getting eaten out.
The eggs hurt, but Carol figures she deserves it for being foolish enough to trust again.
Carol comes back, bomb in tow, to address herself and the new next door neighbor who she still can't look in the eye. She'd run from him like she'd run from Carol Anne and Virginia and Helen.
Coward, Carol thinks to herself as she takes the first step of addressing those memories in her past that still haven't died.
“Tell me I'm doing a good job” Carol speaks into her all-mighty phone translator.
Manousos sits beside her. A stack of papers block him from seeing her eyes. He takes the phone from Carol's hand and stubbornly turns off the translator.
“You eat Cheetos and don't sit for two hours. No.”
Manousos has been right about many, many things. Annoying.
He pushes a paper with a scribbled out diagram. There's Cheeto dust all over it. Manousos points towards the piece of paper. “What this mean?”
Carol glances down at her doodles and shrugs her shoulders. “Eh. No sé.”
“You are not good at this.” Manousos chimes in. He'd come to grapple with the fact that Carol Sturka was not the same as the woman from the video he had seen months ago.
The Carol Sturka he had gotten to know for the past few weeks was different from the expectation he'd built in his head.
He'd been so focused on meeting and impressing who he assumed Carol to be that he had forgotten entirely on how to speak to a human. Manousos is learning slowly but surely.
Carol Sturka's lip curls up at his jab.
“You suck. Descansemos.”
Manousos doesn't pride himself as a heavy drinker, but when your only social contact is Carol, you're gonna end up drinking anyways.
He takes out two beers from the fridge and slides one over to Carol.
Carol watches him for a few moments, right at home in her living room. They're making progress, sure, but the past week has been more about learning to tolerate each other more than anything.
Carol crosses her arms. “You're an ass,” she states.
Manousos, now on his second beer, just scoffs instead of freezing up like a timid animal.
“No. You.”
They bicker for a few more moments until Carol threatens to crack him in half with a “FUCKING hug” because "to save the world you need to not be FUCKING strangers and friends HAVE bear hugs sometimes."
It's a request Manousos would have sneered and denied at any other time, but he can feel the walls he's built around his heart start to slip as he makes a very specific "Carol Sturka can be my friend" compartment in there.
Manousos sips the last few drops from his beer and shrugs, like he's accepted his fate.
“Okay.”
Carol bear hugs him like Casey had taught her to all those years ago. It lasts a total of three seconds before Manousos starts howling about his back hurting.
Carol hasn't had a close guy (big comma to empathize platonic-ness) friend in her life and Manousos hasn't really had any friends in general.
They part ways afterwards and Manousos trips over himself as he walks back to Wilson's house. Carol looks down at where Manousos had left her jacket's collars with finger-chip-grease.
That might have been the worst hug she's ever had in her whole life, but it's the first one in a good long while that's felt human.