Alicia and the shopping feud

Shopping is Alicia’s bête noire. What interest could one have in hunting pieces of cloth if they were anyway going to find their way to that Clothes-To-Throw box? Whatever lust it held for some women, Alicia has no idea. For her, shopping was all about shadowing her mother and sister- Sandra and Ruth, bobbing her head whenever a decent T-shirt shows up and leave them to decide whether or not they should let Alicia buy it. Going to shopping with them has become like a family ritual. Today’s haul is not different.

‘Ooh! Look at this gorgeous little dress! Alice, I suggest you try it,’ says Ruth looking lovingly at a white dress that ignites no approval in Alicia and she simply shakes her head; one of the little things she does at an ill-fated day like this. ‘Oh, come on! Look at it, my darling. It is so absolutely pretty,’ agrees her mother.

Ruth and Sandra’s green eyes glint and then somehow, Alicia ends up inside the Trial Room, the white dress in one hand. Blowing her ginger hair out of her eyes, Alicia gratefully sits on the small futon in the corner of the torture machine people called the Trial Room. Without bothering to wear the dress, she throws it in the corner of the room. Her mother and Ruth were so regal and have so many reasons to like the world while Alicia could only appreciate the words from the books she reads. If Meg from the last book she read was here, she would probably waltz in this room recklessly. Jace-from another book she read, would certainly try to examine every grain of the concrete floor of the room.

Soon, Alicia falls into an aware slumber of the possibilities of the activities her favorite fictional characters would do in a place such as this one. ‘Alice! Was the dress so pretty that you are unable to take it off? Need a hand?’ asks Ruth’s love-sick voice breaking Alicia’s reverie. Declining the offer, Alicia stands up. Ruth is just like her mother; impatient and hot-blooded. Alicia often feels like an adopted child at times when she can’t see eye to eye on anything with her family. Her mother and sister is her only family; her father having died four years ago. Alicia grieved her father the most, he was the one who familiarized her to the fantasy of fictitious legends. Ruth and her mother are hardly ones to spare time to pick up a book just for the sake of pleasure, so they weren’t that affected by the death of her father. She felt like she didn’t belong with Ruth and Sandra. Sometimes she wondered if they even loved her or not.

Unlocking the battered door of the Trial Room, Alicia prepares to help Ruth and Sandra face the bitter truth that the dress did not fit her. On the other side of the door, Alicia strides straight into the flow of a human river. Her painful relatives are nowhere to be seen and Alicia grunts, shouldering her way into the crowd. Her hair comes undone from its pleat by the time she reaches the other side but that isn’t what tingles the panic inside Alicia. Ruth and Sandra are not even in the Clothes Section. They couldn’t go that far, could they? Alicia never really paid much attention to her surroundings in the South Mall. Ruth and Sandra were like the anchor of her boat pulling her from one section to another, and without them Alicia feels like a puppy in the crowd of a bunch of grown-up dogs.

After searching all the sections, Alicia gives up and defiantly sits on the corner of the Clothes Section. In al her experience of shopping with her mother and sister she has known this much; they spend most of their time looking for clothes in the Clothes Section, so why weren’t they here? Her head explodes with dangerous questions and Alicia is about to cry when a voice sounds above her. ‘Honestly, Alicia! Don’t you know better than to sit and sulk on the floor like that?’

Alicia’s head shoots up and when she sees Ruth and Sandra towering her, she realizes that even though her father isn’t alive anymore, she still has people who care for and love her. With that thought in mind she shakes her head at them and says, ‘No, I don’t.’