Deja Who (Insighter #1)(54)

At the station she had been booked, which was a series of paperwork, followed by her mug shot, and then her fingerprints were taken (no ink required in the twenty-first century and she was a bit let down, having been looking forward to the drama of ink-stained fingertips), scanned, and put into the System, which, as an Insighter, was redundant, as upon licensing all Insighters were routinely printed and photographed, new photos required every five years.

Then she had been escorted to a spotless, well-lit holding cell

(does television get everything wrong?)

populated by half a dozen other women of various ages, conventional attractiveness, skin color, and clothing choices. Per television, they should all be prostitutes and/or meth addicts.

Only one of them looked like a prostitute (Leah did not approve of tube tops on anyone, never mind an overweight, sallow-skinned woman in her late thirties) and she was the shoplifter. The others were:


1) Karen the Boyfriend Beater. Karen was a gorgeous young lady (“Young lady? Jeez. I’m twenty-nine, okay, and when I was fourteen, I helped my uncle set the Piggly Wiggly on fire, so ‘lady’ is off, too.”) with skin so dark it had mahogany undertones. She tolerated her boyfriend’s gambling habit, his inability to keep a steady job (which was hilarious, as he was a temp worker, so his steady job was to not keep a steady job), and his unfortunate propensity for anal sex. (“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Renee the Shoplifter said. “Only anal sex.” “Oh.”)

Karen worked both her jobs with an often-throbbing backside, but when she objected to his $1,000 wager on the outcome of an upcoming Cubs game, he backhanded her. Karen’s response to this was to hoist a knee into his testicles and, while he writhed and sniveled on the kitchen tile, beat him repeatedly in the face with a container of Clorox wipes. In true douchebag fashion, he called the police.

“That makes so much sense,” Leah decided after hearing the lurid and hilarious tale.

“Thanks!” Karen smiled, pleased. “My mom, she said the same thing, and all my sisters did, too.”

“Yes, well. You, and they, used to be comfort girls in Japan. Chinese comfort girls in Japan,” she emphasized, assuming they would catch the reference. “Sometimes comfort girls volunteered. You didn’t. So in this life, you’re not interested in tolerating male bullshit.”

“That’s creepy,” Karen announced, “but you’re pretty good. Normally I’d be super pissy about being called a hooker. No offense,” she told Celia the Hooker.

“No, no.” Celia waved it away. “S’fine.”


2) Terry the Sociopathic Cat Cooker. Terry did not like being on the wrong end of unrequited love. Not that what she felt for her boyfriend was love, unrequited or otherwise. “He’s the only one that can make me come,” she explained.

“Who can make you come.”

“He can. Like I said.”

“No, you said ‘he’s the only one that can make me come’ and it’s ‘who can make me come.’” At Terry’s long, unsettling stare (unsettling to someone unused to staring down socios once or twice a month), she added, “Never mind. Continue.”

“Right. Anyways—”

Good God. Anyway! Singular! If she says “towards” or “amongst” they’ll have to arrest me for homicide. Again.

“—he can’t make me feel that good all the time and then just take it away. He’s too big for me to hurt directly, so Muffin had to go.”

“He can, though,” Celia said. Leah concurred, but did not waste time or breath agreeing. “Just like you’ve got the right to dump anybody you want.”

“Yeah, that’s a totally different thing.”

“It’s not,” Celia tried again, to the same effect.

“And then that crybaby hostess calls the cops! Like Muffin muffins would be so much worse than the usual crap coming out of that kitchen.” Terry had indulged her anti-cat politics at her (former, Leah assumed) place of employment, Dan’s Diner. “Cat’s totally fine. Okay, a little singed. But otherwise fine. It’s not like I would have really done it.”

“Why lie to us, Terry?” Celia wondered. Oh, she was adorable. Leah assumed it was either a) the sociopath’s instinctive, perpetual habit of lying even when it was easier to tell the truth, or b) television’s portrayal of what happened to those in jail who became, as John Cusack put it, “garrulous in the company of thieves.” Hmm. Is that why she was so taken with Archer? He did remind her of Cusack in Better Off Dead, a bit, but not, thank heavens, Cusack in The Raven.

“So, what is it? Who’d I used to be?”

Leah shrugged. “You were a sociopath then, and you’re a sociopath now.” Déjà vu. She’d said that earlier to Chart #6116.

“Yeah, I figured.” Terry preened a bit, ignoring everyone’s tandem eye rolls.

How I loathe that sociopathy now has cultural cache.


3) Brienne the Shoplifter. Brienne alternately claimed entrapment, absentmindedness, and drunken intent. “It can happen to anybody!” she protested. “I was thinking about the rest of my errands and took it without thinking.”

“Brienne.”

“You can’t tell me people don’t do that every damn week in this country.”