If the flea market hadn't been so close to my house, this never would have happened. I'd have been just another fifteen year old guy, getting ready to finish off my freshman year of high school and not... okay, I'm getting ahead of myself. Here's how it went.
Every day, I rode the bus home from school. Sounds bad, I know, but at fifteen I was one of very few high school students on the bus, so I got to read, or snooze, or watch movies off my iPod - whatever I wanted. The younger kids pretty much left me alone. So the bus wasn't so bad. Which didn't mean I wasn't looking forward to getting a car over the
summer when I turned sixteen. Even if the car turned out to be a beater, which considering what my mom had bought for my sister, it probably would be, driving still beat the heck out of riding a bus with
second graders.
But in the meantime, the bus stop nearest my home happened to be in the front of the Treasure Palace. It sounds like a casino, but it was actually a flea market made inside an old K-mart that had gone out of business. Inside the store were dozens of little booths and tables, every one of them manned by some old dude or lady who had never heard of eBay. Mostly it was the same kind of junk you saw at every flea market - old clothes, busted furniture, computers that were old when dinosaurs roamed. That kind of crap. There was one place that sold bicycle wheels. I kid you not, nothing but the wheels.
Most of the time I just walked past it, but every now and then some cool stuff turned up. Old war medals, arrowheads, ancient comic books, video games. I was already thinking about stopping in that afternoon when a big fat raindrop smashed into my forehead. That got me moving in a hurry. I made it through the door of the Treasure Palace right as the
first rumble of thunder rolled past and the scattered drops turned into a downpour.
Inside I went past the bicycle wheel lady, the hubcap guy, and the creepy dude who sold "Amish" furniture that had little "made in
Thailand" stickers if you knew where to look. I spotted some old comics heaped up along with tattered paperbacks on one table and spent some time looking through them, but there was nothing there worth buying. After making a trip around the back, I was about to leave the store, then I saw a pair of blue jeans that made me stop in my tracks.
I wasn't thinking about buying the jeans, it was what was inside that made me stop. In front of me was a woman with possibly the greatest butt I had ever seen. She was bent over, arranging heaps of junk on a table as I came up. As far as I was concerned, she could have leaned over that table for hours, but I think she sensed me staring at her ass. As I came closer, she turned around.
I was a bit disappointed to realize that she was older than I expected. I had been hoping for hot cheerleader, and what I got was something like hot soccer mom. But there was some reward: she was wearing a oversized blue sweatshirt, and from the action going on as she turned around, no bra.
She caught me looking at her and grinned. "Hey, kid. See something you like?"
Sweater puppies is what I wanted to say, but I instead I wanderedcloser. This woman looked kind of familiar. "Did anybody ever tell you that you look just like that actress from The Matrix?" I asked.
She laughed. "Don't I know it." There was a cardboard table in front of her stacked with a variety of stuff. Most of it looked to be guy's clothing, and from the look of the clothes the guy who had worn them was big enough to need two seats on airplane. "Right actress, but I'm from a different movie."
The statement was weird enough that I had no idea what she meant.
"People are always telling you look like her?" I guessed.
She laughed. "Hell, kid. Nobody had to tell me. I picked her." To my amazement, the woman raised her hands and gave her boobs a squeeze through the sweatshirt. "Funny thing is, I never thought this chick was all that pretty. But once I tried it." She pressed her boobs together and kneaded them through the shirt. The open collar of the sweatshirtwas low enough that I got an amazing view of cleavage in motion. She worked at her boobs for a second longer, then dropped her hands with a
shrug. "You wouldn't believe how good that feels."
"Uhhh..." this whole conversation was starting to feel more than a little crazy. Women didn't usually start giving themselves a boob
massage right in front of me -- not even at the Treasure Palace. I felt a sudden, severe tightness in my pants and stepped closer to the table to hide it. "Yeah, it... Umm... It must be nice."
She grinned at me again. "You want to find out?"
I gulped. I was pretty sure I'd get in big trouble if anyone saw me touching this woman's breastage, or maybe she'd get in trouble for
letting some underage kid paw at her. Somebody would be in trouble. But for once I didn't let something like common sense get in the way.
"Sure," I said. I paused to lick my lips and watched her boobs sway under the loose shirt. "Absolutely."
"Well all right then." The woman slapped her hand down so hard on the folding table that it made me jump. She bent over, and for a moment I wondered if she wanted me to join her under the table, or if she had noticed the growing problem in my pants and was going to help me out with that. But before I could make a move, she straightened up again.
There was a cardboard box in her arms.
"What's that?"
The woman who looked like Trinity pushed the box across the table at me. From the way the folding table sagged, I could tell that whatever was in the box, it was something heavy.
"Here you go, kid. Your ticket to finding out everything you ever wanted to know."
The box had a top that was folded closed. I reached out to open one corner, but the woman slapped my hand away. "Just take it," she said.
There was a change in her voice, and when I looked up she was staring past me down the row of booths and tables. "Take it quick."
With that, the woman spun around. I got one last good look at her jeans as she ducked under the rope that ran along the next aisle, then she stood up and headed for the door just one notch under a sprint. I was still trying to think of what to do, when the guy from the "Amish" furniture place came wandering over.
"Hey, what did you do to scare her away?" he said. "She was the hottest thing in this place for a long time."
The guy slipped around the end of the table and crouched down to look at the boxes the woman had left underneath. I could hear things clanking as he sorted through her stuff. After just a few seconds, he stood up, scanned the heaps of fat
guy clothing, then reached for the box the woman had pushed toward me.
Before he could grab the box, I got my arms around it and heaved it off the table. "That's mine."
The furniture guy scowled at me. "Yeah? So what did you pay for it?"
"She gave it to me."
That got me a grunt in reply. "Sure she did. Hand it over before I call the cops."
In about a hundred visits to the Treasure Palace, I had never seen any kind of security, so that probably wasn't as scary as the guy wanted. Instead of giving him the box I just hugged it up against me and started for the door. If he came after me, I never noticed. I was too busy watching the guys in dark suits and darker glasses who were coming into the big room. If these guys weren't some kind of Feds, they were doing a very good job of copying the look. The suit guys walked past me without a second glance. I didn't know what they were after, but I hoped it was people selling fake Amish furniture.
By the time I was out in the parking lot, I had learned two things: one, it was still raining, and two, the box the woman had given me weighed a ton. There was no place to set the thing down and with every step it got heavier, wetter, and the cardboard got closer to falling apart. By the time I turned onto my street, the box was sagging at every corner. Something was rattling around inside, and a sharp metal corner was poking through in just the right place to spear my forearm.
I was starting to wish I had let fake Amish guy have it.