Hot Girl Shit
I met my girlfriend at the Department of Social Services a few months back. It was rather congested, as was typical for Mondays. Parents were with their small children waiting in the chairs for their tickets to be called, and an assortment of scrappy-looking people were in line, including myself: equally as scrappy-looking.
The reason I was there is ultimately not important to this story; what mattered were the people around me — specifically, the woman in the line to my right (each line being partitioned in order to accommodate specific types of requests). Her hair was blonde; her brow-bone chiseled; and she was of a gangling construction. I noticed a bit of stubble behind her mask. She was wearing a beige-colored blouse, and pants of two alternating colors: pink and blue. In other words, I had clocked her as being one of me, and she was all the more beautiful for it.
I tapped her on the shoulder. “Your pants… they’re very pretty,” I noted.
“Oh, thank you,” she replied.
I kept glancing at her as I was reading my book in line, until I had reached the counter. At that point, the woman had progressed to having reached the adjacent counter — to my left — herself. I overheard her discussing something about changing identity documents of some kind as I was discussing my own business with the social worker.
Suddenly, a hand came in from my left side with a scrap of paper. It read: “faith” — the tittle of the I represented by a heart; a telephone number listed beneath the name.
I gave her a smirk, chuckled, uttered a “thanks,” and put the scrap inside of my jacket pocket. “I’ll reach out,” I added.
Once I was riding the bus home, I was eager to contact her immediately, and so I sent her a text: “hiya faith, it’s that girl from the dss. you gave me this?” I attached to the message a picture I had taken of the piece of paper.
She didn’t reply until the morning of the following day, resulting in the following chain of messages:
Faith: yes! hello
Faith: sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner… yesterday was a busy day 😵💫
Me: all good
Faith: was working on a new song with my band yknow
Me: oh you’re in a band? neato!
Faith: yeah, we’re a punk band. we’ve got a show coming up in a week so we wanted to work out a new song
Me: nice!
Faith: then i went over to my gf’s place afterwards and watched some tv
Fortunately I’m polyamorous as well. The correspondence went on:
Faith: anyways
Faith: tell me a little bit about yourself
Me: i do computer programming and stuff. i’m a college drop out. i play video games on occasion. uh yeah that’s it i think 👍
Faith: nice
Me: ty
Faith: oh! btw what’s your name
I gave her my name.
Faith: pretty name!
Me: like your pants
Me: thanks
Faith: hehe
Me: heeheehee
A month had passed, and I’d seen her show. It was really good. We were officially “a thing” by this point.
I hit her up without ado one day:
Me: im bored
Me: wanna go shoplifting
Faith: yeah
Faith: where
I named a local grocery store.
Faith: sounds good
SNAP wasn’t allotting even a hundred dollars to either of us, even though both of us were only working part-time jobs. I was hungry, and so was she. And of course, the pantry had limited options.
Me: you ever done this before
Faith: lol
Faith: yeah
Faith: with that specific store in fact lmao
Me: by yourself or with others
Faith: by myself
Faith: you?
Me: same here
Faith: nice
Me: the reason i asked your help is because i just modified my jacket for lifting stuff, cut open the inside of my pocket, then sewed a sack into it
Faith: never done that before
Faith: only gone for small stuff
Me: me either
Me: my point is that this is going to be a bigger lift than i’m used to doing, so if something goes wrong, a driver would help
Faith: i can help
Me: cool thanks
Me: love you babe
Faith: love you too 💜
Thereafter we worked out a date and time for the lift.
While wearing the aforementioned jacket, I was seated in her beat-up car as she drove us down to the supermarket at about two in the afternoon. The intact pocket of my jacket held my wallet, which contained a ten-dollar bill, since I was going to make a purchase in order to distract loss prevention from my stolen items, and using a debit card for shop-lifting purposes would have been self-evidently stupid. For the purchase, I had brought along a pristine shopping bag.
Aside from the jacket, my clothing was not especially remarkable — which was perfect for a shop-lifting trip. Faith’s clothing wasn’t either.
“You nervous?” she asked me.
“Not at all,” I replied with a smirk. “Not even a little.”
“What are you going to get?”
“I think cans would be too noisy — and besides: they’re cheap anyhow. I know the way they package salmon; it would be easy to smuggle in the sack. We could make ourselves a nice dinner with that, since I’ve got some asparagus left over.”
“Sounds bitchin’!”
We reached the supermarket. “You got this,” Faith assured me.
“Thanks, babe,” I responded as I stepped out of the car with the bag, the window rolled down. I zipped up the jacket. “Thanks,” I repeated.
I watched as Faith rolled up the window with a toothy smile, followed by a thumbs-up, before I went off to enter the store. By the entrance, I didn’t bother grabbing a basket, since I was only going to fetch bread and raisins as my legitimate purchases — although grabbing those would come after grabbing the salmon.
I leisurely walked over to the fish section, where I picked up the two salmon fillets and put them in the basket; they didn’t need to be concealed yet.
Then over at the bread aisle, I picked up a loaf of bread, and placed it in my bag atop the salmon.
Finally, over by the raisins, I ensured that there was no one around before pulling off my crucial maneuver: I kneeled by my bag to pick up the raisins and put them in the bag while quickly placing the salmon into the jacket sack, that side facing the raisin shelves. And just as quickly as I had done that, I stood up, bag in hand, as though nothing of especial note had occurred.
Thereafter I headed over to the registers, looking to see who was operating them, and if there were any other customers in line. After a brief search, I found one being operated by a young woman — looking to have just entered adulthood — with no customers in line. Perfect.
I placed the groceries I was going to purchase on the conveyor belt as the cashier greeted me. I greeted her back with amiability as she rang me up. I paid with the ten, and she returned the change. “Have a nice day,” I told her as I headed out.
I bumped into someone whom I used to know who was entering the building as I exited the store though. She was a leader of the trans club when I went to college: before I dropped out. I can’t stand her; she’s yet another middle-class pick-me “respectability politics” trans woman who cares more for maintaining the veneer of a composed atmosphere over taking care of actual harmful actors.
I stopped to look at her. She stopped to look at me, cocking her head as though she had recognized me, but couldn’t quite place who I was.
“I fucking hate you and everything you represent,” I told her. She did not respond, remaining still as I briskly walked past her with a bitter expression on my face.
Once I reached the car, Faith unlocked the doors for me, and so I unloaded my belongings in the back-seat prior to hopping in the front.
I revealed to Faith the salmon. “We’ve got dinner.”
Faith and I were seated on the floor of her studio apartment later that night listening to songs from her band, about half-way done with eating salmon and asparagus off paper plates. I was a creditable cook; and fortunately she had quite the spice rack in order to give the meal some flavor.
“I fucking adore you,” I said.
“Me too,” she responded.
We began making out right there on the floor with an unbridled passion I had never before tasted, where no one could dream of stopping us.
Andrea Fogel (she/her/hers) is a transsexual author who writes to capture the obscure emotions of the gutter in which she lives in order to elevate the low-brow into the high-brow. She is to be published in short fiction in Exist Otherwise and in poetry in the zine Gender Anarchists.
