I walked to the nearest convenience store, eyes from passing pedestrians followed me. Children giggled and pointed. An old white lady in a red motorized scooter sneered at me in disgust and shook her head. I felt thoroughly wretched. This was worse than the box in the basement. The teenaged convenience store clerk looked up from his computer gamer magazine long enough to glare at me, smirk, tsk, and shake his head, before immediately reaching for his smartphone, presumably to text his buddies about the tattooed freak who’d just walked into his store. Ironic and a bit hypocritical of him considering the sleeve of dragons, zombies, and sexy devil chicks that ran up his left arm. But, of course, there were fathoms between the sort of antisocial behavior that led one to tattoo a devil in a black bikini riding a Chinese dragon on their arm and the type of insanity that led a woman to allow a man to tattoo insults all over her face. “Hi...uh...do you know the best place around here to catch a cab?”“Cool tattoo.”I blushed and looked away, not certain if he was fucking with me or not.“Uh...thanks...um...”“Taxi, right?
