mars

Rachel dropped out of school when she was sixteen. She didn’t really like going plus she couldn’t stand living with her parents for another second. They were well off and pretty much gave her anything she asked for, but Rachel really hated them. Her mother owned two white BMWs but she only drove one around town. The other one just sat in the driveway and winked at jealous passersby. On a Wednesday, Rachel broke up with her boyfriend, walked out of school, packed a go bag of her favorite tops and panties, and took off in the spare BMW. 

She drove around for a couple of months, living off of cash she’d stolen from her parents in the weeks before her escape. When the money ran out, Rachel got a job as a waitress in a shitty old diner just outside of Las Vegas. It was called “The Pancake Nook”, which Rachel always thought was stupid because there was only one type of pancake on the menu (chocolate chip) and they were mediocre at best. She lived in the BMW for a while and then she bought a trailer. The trailer was right at the edge of town, practically on its own in the desert. When Rachel got up for her morning shift at the diner, she could look out the window and see the sun rising from behind the red rocks in the distance. 

As she drove through the desert to the Pancake Nook, Rachel would pretend that she was living on Mars and that the diner was actually a covert space station. She would take orders and carry plates because it was a matter of national security, rather than because she had to pay her bills. Sometimes she would get so lost in her own fantasy that she would tell customers to order the “rover soup” or the “galaxy fries”. Rachel’s manager always threatened to fire her when she got too caught up in her head but she knew he would never do it. The Pancake Nook was in the center of a ghost town and the only people who came in and out were truckers and sometimes foreign tourists who got lost on their way to Vegas. Nobody moved there; Rachel was convinced that she was the first to do so in the last century. So she couldn’t be fired, her boss would never be able to replace her. 

Rachel had a few boyfriends over the years, but never anyone she really wanted to spend the rest of her life with. In her early forties she dated an older man named Earl who was probably the closest she ever came to love. Earl was a retired trucker who had also served four years in jail for armed robbery in his twenties. He had a weird neck tattoo of something that looked like a bird but was actually a dog and he got real angry whenever someone drew attention to it. Rachel liked Earl mainly because he did whatever she wanted but also because, despite his offputting exterior, he was truly kind. They ended up breaking things off because Earl’s brother had a heart attack and he had to move to Seattle to take care of him. 

Earl had asked Rachel to move to Seattle with him. She thought about it obsessively for two weeks, to the point where she couldn’t sleep or eat or even pretend she was on Mars. She really didn’t like it, that taste of reality. Plus, what would she do in Seattle? She wasn’t any good at waiting tables, not in a big city like that. She hadn’t finished high school or even gotten her GED. In the end, Rachel decided she wouldn’t be going anywhere.