The Transfixed

chapter nine

Bridget started jogging down the sidewalk, scoping out the busy mid-afternoon traffic jams. She spotted a mini van wedged into a horrible parallel parking attempt, and skidded over to the open passenger doors. A frazzled, thirty-something mother was rounding up her four little kids and trying to get them buckled into the van. Bridget watched for a few moments, and decided to help out a little by grabbing the smaller kid from a few steps away and planting him closer to his mother. When she turned around and saw him there, a look of surprise swept through her, but relief soon won out, and she finished securing her children into the van.

That was Bridget's cue to slide through the open window into the back seats, just before the doors swung closed. She plopped down next to a pigtail-sporting girl of about six or seven years. While continuing to check the time constantly throughout the long, snail-pace drive, Bridget picked pieces of half-eaten lollipops off of her jeans. She didn't know where this mother and her children were headed, but all she needed was to leave the general vicinity, and out of the traffic to get a better insight on where she was. Her eyes widened when the top of the Washington Monument became visible over the dashboard. She surveyed the addresses on all the street signs, calculating about how far they were until the White House would be within sprinting distance.

"Can we get Poppy-cycles, Mommy?" The fair-faced boy sitting in front of me asked with an angelic voice.

His mother's stressed-out eyes appeared in the review mirror, the cogs in her mind turning. She was most likely considering if it was worth spoiled children, in return for quiet children. Almost as if the answer came obvious to her, she nodded solemnly. "Okay, sweetheart. Do you all want to get pop-cycles?"

The kids cheered, and the little girl, had Bridget not been invisible, smacked her in the face with her elbow. Bridget rolled her eyes, but a smile was left in the creases of her face. These were the kinds of moments that made her love her powers. She was able to relive a normal childhood vicariously through other people's lives. Some would call that type of behavior insanity, but Bridget called it life.

The doors of the mini van were suddenly rolling open, and Bridget squinted through the tinted glass at a bustling parking lot and a shopping center. Realizing it was too late to roll down a window to make a clean escape, she waited with unsettled patience while the mother scooped her children back out of the van and finally shut the doors. Bridget searched around the floor for something heavy. Her hand landed on a baseball bat, and she questioned momentarily whether it was intended for the son's tee-ball practice, or for unwelcome car thieves. Blinking away the unnecessary speculation, Bridget acknowledged that the mother and her children were far enough away to notice an immediate commotion. With one swift jerk to the wide, she slammed the bat through the passenger window, and swung herself out of the van and onto the oily asphalt.

Tossing the bat back through the broken window, she shook her head, realizing that breaking windows was an activity that she'd prefer to do less often. Her feet started moving toward the shops before her mind did. She could hear a few random strangers begin to huddle around the mysteriously broken window, and then nearly ran straight through the mother coming back out of the ice cream parlor. Bridget felt a brief wave of discontent at having to break her mini van window, but she knew that it had to be done in order for her to survive.

The sign above the camping store glowed "Welcome", but Bridget knew that if she stepped through the door, her life would be in more perilous danger than previously noted. With a long, almost comical sigh, she muttered, "Of course this is what it comes to." Feeling somewhat out of options, she gazed around her at a few crowds of shoppers here and there. She glanced down at her phone and consumed the minutes ticking by with a determined glare. She would not give up, she told herself.