Story code: ST-000140
Part 2: The Runaway
The syllables of his full, legally documented last name-the name he had begged to leave off his badge-spilled from her glossy lips.
“Yes, Brother Thomas,” the woman said, her eyes never leaving Leo’s pale, sweating face. “I’m at the Shop-Rite on Route 9. Lane four. It is him. The runaway.”
Leo’s chest seized violently. The artificial air in the grocery store suddenly felt thick and unbreathable. Brother Thomas. The name dropped into Leo’s stomach like a lead weight. Thomas was the congregation’s discipline coordinator, the man who had spent the last three weeks leaving cryptic, menacing voicemails on Leo’s prepaid phone about ‘correcting his wayward path.’
The woman’s voice cut through the electronic hum of the store, loud enough for the impatient customers behind her to hear. “No, he is working a cash register. Without his father’s permission, I am certain.”
Leo lunged slightly forward, his ribs pressing painfully against the metal edge of the checkout counter. “Please,” he whispered, the single word scraping like coarse sandpaper against his dry throat. “Please don’t do that. I just need to work. Don’t tell them where I am.”
She ignored his plea entirely, holding the cracked screen closer to her mouth. “Do you want me to keep him stationed here until someone from the compound arrives?”
Leo’s vision swam. The fluorescent lights overhead strobe-flashed in his extreme periphery. He frantically pressed the void button on the touch screen, his trembling hands moving with blind, desperate urgency. If he could just finish the transaction, maybe she would leave before confirming the exact cross-streets. He grabbed the expired laundry detergent coupon, shoved it back across the scanner toward her, and snatched up her heavy plastic bottle of fabric softener.
*Errnt.* The machine rejected the barcode. He hadn’t cleared the initial coupon error. He swiped it again. *Errnt.*
“Hey, kid!” the man in the canvas work jacket barked, stepping entirely out of line to peer aggressively around the woman’s beige trench coat. “Are you going to check out her groceries or what? Some of us have places to be today.”
“I’m-I’m trying,” Leo stammered, his sweaty fingers slipping uselessly across the smooth plastic keys of the register.
The woman lowered her phone slightly, her expression hardening into a mask of righteous indignation. “This boy is a runaway,” she announced over her shoulder to the angry man, her voice dripping with sanctimonious authority. “He is actively rebelling against his household and his congregation. I am ensuring he receives the spiritual intervention he so desperately needs.”
The man in the canvas jacket blinked, thrown off by the intense religious jargon. “Lady, I don’t care if he’s the antichrist, I just want to buy my frozen peas.”
A rhythmic, synthetic beep began to echo above Leo’s head. The red light atop lane four flashed rapidly. The point-of-sale system had automatically flagged the register for extended inactivity and summoned assistance.
Heavy footsteps approached rapidly from the customer service desk. “Is there a problem over here?”
Leo’s blood ran entirely cold. It was Marcus, the store’s shift supervisor. Marcus was a stern, highly stressed college student who had made it abundantly clear during orientation that the allowable margin for error on the registers was precisely zero.
“Marcus,” Leo choked out, his voice cracking violently. “I’m sorry, the-the coupon-”
“This trainee refuses to process my items,” the woman interrupted smoothly, slipping her cell phone back into the depths of her oversized leather handbag. “And he is acting extremely erratic. I feel entirely unsafe.”
Marcus frowned deeply, looking from the woman’s calm, unbothered stance to Leo. Leo knew exactly what he looked like: dripping with sweat, deathly pale, trembling uncontrollably, and gripping the scanner scale like a shipwreck survivor holding driftwood. He was a walking liability.
“Leo,” Marcus said, his tone flat, professional, and unyielding. “Why is this transaction stalled? Are you refusing service to this customer?”
“It expired,” Leo managed to say, pointing a shaky, pale finger at the scrap of glossy paper on the counter. “Three weeks ago. The system locked out the date.”
Marcus sighed heavily, pulling a magnetic override card from the retractable lanyard clipped to his belt. He swiped it quickly through the keyboard reader and jabbed a four-digit override code into the touch screen. “You press ‘manager clear’ and call me over immediately, Leo. We went over this specific protocol yesterday. You don’t just stand here and stare blankly at the customer.”
“I…” Leo’s throat closed up completely. He couldn’t explain that the woman had just summoned the very fundamentalists he was secretly packing his bags to escape. If he told Marcus the truth-that his fanatical family was likely mobilizing to drag him back to a house with deadbolted windows and mandatory fasting periods-Marcus would see him as a massive disruption to store operations. He would be fired on the spot to avoid the drama.
The woman smiled, a tight, thin-lipped expression of victory. “Thank you, supervisor. I appreciate your competence. Perhaps this young man simply isn’t suited for the basic responsibilities of the real world.”
“We’ll handle it internally,” Marcus replied tightly, attempting to placate her. He turned his severe gaze back to Leo. “Finish scanning her order. Now. And Leo? I need to see you in the back office the second you clear this line. Turn your lane light off.”
The supervisor walked briskly away, leaving Leo trapped in the suffocatingly bright aisle. The threat of the back office hung over him like a descending axe. A formal write-up. A termination. The immediate loss of the direct deposit, the bus ticket, the security deposit-his entire escape plan dissolving in real-time.
He mechanically grabbed the woman’s remaining items. His wrists felt brittle. His lungs burned intensely with a desperate need for oxygen, but he forced himself to breathe in shallow, silent gasps.
As he placed the heavy detergent bottle into a plastic sack, the woman leaned in uncomfortably close, bracing both her hands firmly against the clear plastic germ barrier. The sickly sweet, suffocating smell of her floral perfume invaded his nose again, turning his stomach.
“Brother Thomas is sending the van,” she whispered, her voice pitched low enough that the impatient man behind her couldn’t hear a single word. “They are going to wait in the parking lot for your shift to end. If you try to leave through the back loading dock, I will know. I am parking my car around the rear.”
Leo’s hands froze inside the plastic grocery bag. The roaring in his ears returned with terrifying vengeance. He stared blankly at the barcode on a box of peppermint tea, his vision blurring with hot, unshed tears of absolute panic.
“Your father is deeply disappointed in your deception, Leo,” she continued smoothly, her tone eerily conversational, as if remarking on the grocery prices. “The elders have prepared the isolation room for you. You won’t be allowed to leave the compound grounds again once they bring you back.”
“Total is fourteen dollars and twelve cents,” Leo said numbly. The robotic words felt like they belonged to someone else entirely. He didn’t look up at her. He couldn’t physically bring himself to look up.
She slid a crisp twenty-dollar bill across the scratched laminate counter. Leo took it, his trembling fingers accidentally brushing against her pearlescent acrylic nails. The brief physical contact sent a sickening jolt of pure terror up his arm. He keyed in the cash amount, the heavy drawer popping open against his stomach with a sharp, metallic *ding*.
He counted the exact change with agonizing slowness. Five dollars. Eighty-eight cents. He handed the bills and coins back to her waiting palm.
She dropped the money carelessly into her handbag and grabbed her two plastic sacks. “Repentance is a painful process,” she murmured, giving him one last, pitying look. “But it is strictly necessary.”
She turned and walked away, her heels clicking a rhythmic, terrifying beat against the white linoleum floor.
Leo watched her belted beige trench coat disappear past the sliding glass automatic exit doors. The crushing reality of his situation crashed down on his shoulders, infinitely heavier than the panic attack. He had to go to the back office right now to face Marcus, where he was almost certainly going to be stripped of his green polo shirt and fired. And if he lost the job today, he had absolutely no money to run.
Even worse, if he walked out of this building, he was caught.
“Hey,” the man in the canvas jacket snapped, slamming a frozen pizza violently down onto the motorized conveyor belt. “Are you awake? Ring it up.”
Leo stared blindly at the frozen pizza box. Through the large, smudged front windows of the grocery store, he watched a familiar, unmarked white fifteen-passenger van pull slowly into the fire lane, its dark tinted windows reflecting the bleak, gray afternoon sky.