He smiled. Small. “Maybe I do.”
“Do you?” I asked, perking up a little.
He nodded.
“Not many people like me at the moment,” I said. “In fact, about two hundred thousand people don’t like me anymore. They don’t like me so much that they unliked me. Some even blocked me.”
“That’s a lot of people.”
“Mmmm,” I mumbled. “It is.”
We continued to stand there, looking at each other in the desert.
“And do you care if they don’t like you?” he asked.
I scoffed. “Of course I care. That’s why I came here. To get away from all their hateful comments and shitty words all over my feed.”
“Why do you care so much about a whole bunch of people you don’t know not liking you?”
“Because caring about what a whole bunch of people think about me is how I make my living . . . living. Wait,my living.” I opened and closed my eyes a few times. Why had this not dawned on me before? How had I not thought about this? “Oh my God! I just realized something.”
“What?”
“I have no way of earning money anymore. I am literally going to go broke!” I put my hands on my hips. “Huh! What do you think of that?”
“Is that a rhetorical question?” he asked.
“Um . . . no. Not really.” I stood there and thought about it for a while. I knew the idea should have frightened me much more than it did right now. It was probably the gin smoothing over those rough edges of reality. Making them just a little less rough.
I shrugged. “What can I do, right?” And then I did another ballet spin again, almost falling on my ass. I flapped my arms to stop myself from falling and Mark rushed towards me. I stopped him with my hand though.
“I’m okay,” I said to him.
“Good. I’m glad,” he said and smiled at me.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“Sure.”
“When I first came into the video store, you didn’t seem to like me that much. I mean, I know I basically broke your shop, but . . .”
Mark glanced away. “That.” He started walking again and I followed behind him. “Sorry,” he said over his shoulder.
“Why didn’t you like me?” I asked.
Mark paused for a moment, as if trying to figure out how to say it. “You know that song ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“My dad ran his music and video store for over forty years. In that same spot in the mall. It was such a huge part of our lives growing up, it’s how he met my mom, it’s where we would spend our holidays helping out and listening to music. And then one day, people started coming to it less and less until they stopped coming altogether and it closed.” He sounded sad now. “Spotify, streaming movies, Netflix . . . It killed his business. It was really sad.”
“Sorry,” I said softly, understanding now why he might have been so offended when I’d told him what my favorite movies were. “I see why you came here. So you could open a video and music store in the one place on earth you can!”
“That’s not why I came here,” Mark said, his tone totally changing now. It was colder and harsher than I’d ever heard it before. It gave me a shiver and I stood up a little.
“Why did you come here?” I asked nervously.
He looked at me for the longest time. As if weighing something up. And then he shook his head and started walking. “Some things are best left alone,” he said, striding back towards the house. I watched him and something inside my stomach twisted into a knot. The entire mood of the evening had changed and this saddened me. I had liked the mood, but now it was clear it was over. I rushed after him so I wouldn’t be left behind as he walked off towards the house at speed.
