She half-turned to spot her friend Bryan walking from the rear of the sporting goods store. Happy Bryan, with his cute little snub nose and square jaw, long brown hair tucked behind his ears, and perfectly proportioned arms swinging loosely at his side. Even his referee-shirt uniform looked almost good on him. Usually Kendra was inherently distrustful of people like Bryan, people so active and warmly welcomed by all. But over time she had come around to his normal charms. He was nice, and better, funny, and in the end the shared boredom of their retail jobs had proven more powerful than what ever social barriers might naturally have divided them. The fact was, she found herself flattered by his much-sought-after attention.

She would have been glad to loiter awhile, but today she had to keep moving. She waved and stepped briskly into the mall, hoping to outpace Bryan before he caught up and began his distractions.

“Hey!” Bryan said.

“Gotta go!” she called over her shoulder.

She couldn’t escape so easily though. Bryan overtook her midway across the mall’s aisle, clearly bored out of his mind. “I thought you were off today,” he said, falling into step. His open face bobbed at the corner of her vision but she refused to meet his eye.

“Nope,” she said, pressing onward.

“You heard about Doug?”

“Uh uh.”

“He wrecked his car last night,” Bryan said.

“Huh,” Kendra said, as the drilling drums and buzzing guitars of Express—the soundtrack of endless, listless pleasure—enveloped them. The whiteness of the walls and floor glared from every direction.

“He was at Powers Park,” Bryan said, glancing around. “Pulled out and bam! Hit by a Volvo. His parents gave him the car last week for good grades. Total burn.”

Usually Kendra would have cackled over the irony of the disaster, the material loss that was not her own. But today she had other things on her mind. She didn’t respond, and thankfully Bryan didn’t elaborate, having already lost interest in the story himself. “Cool sweater,” he said, and peeled off to peruse the new inventory, assuming he could always pick up the conversation later.

With Bryan out of her hair, Kendra focused on the task at hand. She sighted Roy sitting at the main counter, flanked by two huge posters of stunned-looking models in tenement hallways. Was he going to be an obstacle or an accomplice, she wondered? Behind his round glasses his face was as emotionless as milk. As if in answer to her question, he looked up from his magazine and wordlessly walked into the back room. Thank God. There was no need to go through the motions of pretend innocence with Roy. He knew the score. He was giving her the space to do what she had to do.

“Don’t you have something to do?” Kendra said to Bryan, who had begun rifling through the shirt racks, loudly attacking the plastic hangers on the metal crossbars.