I had no intention of allowing any audience to see my creation. No tourists, no tickets. No, my escape would be real and total, fully lived and experienced by me, a lone human, and shared with as few people as I could get away with. Mine would not be a soundstage, or have any reference to cameras or lights, or acknowledge an audience or fandom; nor would it hint that it was a fictional show: I would live inside the show. I would burrow past plotlines or jokes, I would bury myself in it. I would figure out everything I needed to survive, alone, and then I could dismiss every other person on earth, living and dead, with one triumphant wave goodbye.

Before the lottery, before I discovered Three’s Company, I had worked at Scheele’s Market for twelve years, starting when I was twenty. Before that I worked at a shoe store at the mall in town, but when Krystal, my best friend since the second grade, told me that her dad was hiring at the local market that was only three minutes from my house by car, fifteen by foot, I applied and was hired.

The market was small. More like a convenience store, really, than a proper market. It was the nearest place to get any type of groceries or sundries without driving to the supermarket in town, and because of that it offered everything from coffee to hot deli food to lottery tickets and basic groceries, plus state-themed souvenirs and postcards for any passing tourist. It even rented out videos before the internet took over. Geannie and Jim had owned it for twenty years. There were three long aisles, mostly stacked with canned and boxed goods, and the store had been robbed only once before I started working there. That robber had been a local kid who pretended to have a gun by pointing his finger inside his coat pocket. Jim had almost laughed at him, the story went, but handed him a few twenties from the till, anyway. The few customers who had witnessed it always found a way to bring it up. It was probably the most exciting thing they’d ever lived through.

Mostly the market did business on cigarettes and chewing tobacco, plus the deli subs and soups I helped prepare. On Fridays and Saturdays we were open later than usual, until 10 p.m., for the beer sales, and I knew most of the customers by name and brand. In the mornings retired men would come in and buy a coffee and hang around, shooting the breeze for hours, trying to flirt with me or one of the summer helpers—usually a cute kid on summer break from community college who turned red and mute at the attention. When the old men tried out lines on me, though, I would play along and answer with something slightly bitchy, but in a clever way that they delighted in rejoining; I probably reminded them of some long-ago missed conquest they were never smart enough to deal with when they were younger and only now could fully appreciate. I admired them. Well, I admired the idea of being an old man. Now that they were old and nothing was at stake, they were freer, looser. They could get away with anything.