“You're sorta stuck where you are, but in your dreams you can buy expensive cars. Or live on Mars, and have it yooooooooooour way! You hate your boss at your job, but in your dreams you can blow his head off. In your dreams, show no meeeeeeeeeercy!”
The prophetic song played over the intercom of Sandy's, a local retail store in the Twin Pines Mall as Rebecca Armitage and Jake Anselm manned the two front registers. Not a lot of people were in the store today, as it as a Wednesday morning. A middle aged woman and a girl of about nine, probably mother and daughter, were checking out shoes while a nondescript man wearing a brown jacket browsed Blu-Rays. Outside the store, an elderly looking man in a fedora was reading the newspaper on a wooden bench as he usually did every day.
Rebecca yawned loudly as she made inventory of her life. She was 21, going to graduate from college next semester. Her father, for there was no Mrs. Armitage in the picture, had insisted that she take something STEM related, particularly since he was a mechanical engineer himself. Rebecca eventually acquiesced to Mr. Armitage's terms, and was aiming to get a degree in Statistics, though she honestly had very little interest in the subject. The course was intense and work load heavy, which left very little time for her to make any new friends. She half-heartedly tried to pledge for a sorority in her first year, but she dropped out when she realized that she just didn't have the room in her schedule(She didn't want to admit that it was the bitch who made fun of her for gaining the freshman fifteen). Rebecca thought wistfully back to high school. She had plenty of friends there. She was popular. She didn't even have time to go swimming anymore.
“Wasn't that song in Batman Forever?” heard Rebecca all of a sudden, breaking her out of her daydream.
“What?” she asked tiredly.
“That song that's playing. Wasn't that in Batman Forever, you know, the one with Jim Carrey?” asked Jake.
“I don't know” answered Rebecca, resting her face on her elbow, her elbow itself resting on the counter like a freestanding column. “I never saw that movie.”
“Before your time, maybe” said Jake.
“Maybe. I'm not big on the superheroes.”
Jake Anselm was Rebecca's co-worker. He had just turned thirty years old and was going through what psychologists called a quarter-life crisis. Jake was beginning to realize that he wasn't a kid anymore, having wasted his twenties in a state of arrested adolescence and immaturity, working minimum wage jobs just to scrap by, and his relationship with Rebecca was friendly but strained as a result of his insecurities. He wanted to start fresh and go back to college himself, but his low self confidence told him that he was perhaps just a bit too old for it.
“Do you ever wish that you could just start over, Jake?” asked Rebecca in a pensive voice as she was watching one of the customers walk up to her register to purchase something. She suddenly composed herself, forming a perfectly happy smile that hid her soul crushing ennui.
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