The title brings to minds some awful precious moments thing when it actually refers to the poor girl I saw in the Wal Mart.
She could not have been any older than 12, I think. She was standing in front of the boom boxes in the electronics aisle by herself. Kelly Clarkson was singing about Ms. Independent and there she was-jeans and a tight pink tee, and odd high flat heels on. Dancing, in time.
She was blonde-lank dull yellow hair, and I glanced as I passed, because there was something-odd there-her teeth were huge, buckteeth.
Something odd.
There's a movie, Fear.com, that I look at the case for a lot, but never see-the case has a horrifying face on it. I picked up the for-sale videotape and perused it again, sat it down. Ms. Independent seemed to charge over then from her dancing and grab it right after me. In a louder voice than needed since she was by herself, she said, "Oh, Fear. com! Cool."
I glanced back. She had no idea what she was looking at, really.
Why did she give me a chill? She was just a young girl, surely not even in her teens, and at the very worst she was in a particularly egregious stage of gawkiness.
There was just something...odd. I realized as I advanced into the electronics department that I had this fear that she might...follow me. A 12 year old, terribly gawky girl.
That's when the vision hit, and had I been the kind who tosses easily I would have puked. I was turning another aisle, watching for her out of the corner of my eye, when I saw in my mind the girl alone in some small and bedraggled living room in a small house, gray light all around, dancing to the radio, to Ms. Independent, just like she was doing when I came up. My stomach turning, I was thinking about the old old man in the next room, whom she would undress for, and dance for, later.
I left, castigating myself for indulging in the cliches of my upbringing-how certain folk tend to just "look" inbred-a funny hierarchy among whites where if you have the misfortune of having certain features like flapping ears, buck teeth, red hair, whispers about your lineage can be heard when you pass. I had only the red hair, so I guess I was spared.
I was berating myself for thinking that because she was dancing frenetically alone by the boomboxes in the Wal Mart, because she'd seen me and I felt maybe even started to follow me for some odd, unfathomable reason, because of these things that did not square with my need for the Wal Mart trip to be bland as tapioca surprise the girl must not only be perhaps slow but mad-and perhaps, doomed.
The sky was gray as I went to my car.
I did not ever want to hear "Ms. Independent" again.
