I don't like to go out

I am not bothered by small or enclosed spaces. The same cannot be said of large open ones, so the parking lot is not really the sort of place you'd probably expect to find me waiting on someone. And, logically speaking, I do know I can just wait inside my nice, cozy apartment for Megan to call and let me know she's waiting outside.

The issue there is that waiting inside would mean I was turning my best friend and a cellphone into a kind of horrifying, semi-irregular alarm. And I hate alarms.

It's a good thing I'm not a spy, because if I got caught by enemy agents they could break me by tying me to a chair, winding up an egg timer and telling me that if I didn't give them the launch codes in the next five minutes they were going to let it ring at me.

On the other hand, if we only had fifteen seconds before the nukes went off you can be damn sure I'd stop that timer from hitting zero.

Probably by cutting the wrong wire and killing us all, because what do I know about defusing nuclear bombs? In conclusion, it's a really good thing I'm not a spy, and I'm not about to let my best friend stand in for a nuclear explosion just because I'm too afraid to wait for her in the parking lot.

I live in the last unit of a row of studio apartments, all lined up side-by-side and facing the parking lot. This is nice because it means I'm pretty isolated.

Also, they're small, cheap places not horribly far from campus -- which means that most of the tenants are transient students. Right now no one is living in the studio next to mine, and on breaks it's almost like no one else lives here at all.

On the other hand, once you attach the word "transient" to someone they become about twelve times more terrifying.

My previous neighbor used to jog around our parking lot in the mornings. I was pretty sure it was just a matter of time before he finished scoping out the community and I wound up being forced into the back of a windowless van and auctioned off to Canadian white slave traders some morning.

I'd probably have ended up staked out in the woods as bait for some sort of flesh-eating half moose/half unicorn monster that roams the wilds of Canada. The chupacabracorn: devourer of virgin lumberjacks.

I'd gotten in the habit of reading while I wait on Megan back when that guy was still a daily trial. Distracting myself with fiction is a coping mechanism. I've always used stories to distract myself and others from my unreasonable anxiety issues. I prefer it when I'm using someone else's stories, though, because then it's just me being lost in a book.

But if I'm relying on my own fiction, it usually means I'm interacting with someone else and I've just been put in a spot where I can either explain that there is something seriously wrong with me, or start making shit up.

The worst part about it? The more anxious I get, the more my verbal filters shut down. And it's not like Tourette's, where I'd just start spouting profanity and be asked to leave. No, it's more like...anything I think? It gets said.

And no one tells me to shut up or go away because they're too busy listening to the train wreck that is my mental process.

I mean, I might start a conversation by asking what's on the number three special. But then I realize that I'm dealing with an actual person, with hopes and desires and opinions and unknown motives, and I've just asked them to do some extra work in order to answer my inane question, and then I'm all flustered and I've probably pointed out that anyone who orders something with that much bacon on it is probably a cannibal because if Circe turned Odysseus' men into swine, she'd probably done it to others, and some of them had probably just been left as pigs, because it's not like she constantly had guests and how many pork meals can one goddess eat?

So some of those probably made it into the general pork population, and I figured you probably had a good three percent chance of eating one of their descendants every time you had a pork product...and that really is a lot of bacon on the number three, but if you think I'm crazy then how do you explain the fact that cannibals always say people taste like pork and swine flu is contagious among humans?

And at that point I'd be a little wild-eyed because I know I'm talking crazy, and a little out of breath because that's a lot to blurt out without pausing for periods.

Also, I'll have ordered the number three with extra bacon, and everyone will stare while they try to figure out if I'm really a psycho cannibal, or if I just play one in real life.

Except for my friend Megan, of course. She'll just demurely eat her salad, oblivious to the stares and not making a scene at all. But I'll still have everyone's attention because I tend to chomp noisily when I'm enjoying a meal, and apparently I want everyone in the restaurant to know that I think people taste great.

....

So, yeah. That's why I don't like to go out much. Because people are either judgmental cannibals or vegan, and there's no way to tell without waving your pinky in front of their faces and seeing who bites. I'd much rather distract myself from the possibility of falling off the earth with a good book than have to notice whether or not there are other people around.

Anyway, I was halfway through my book -- and craving bacon for some reason -- when Megan's car pulled up. It was a small, blue, four-door Chevy and that description pretty much exhausted my knowledge of cars. I tucked my manga into my purse and got in on the front seat passenger side.

"Morning, Abby," Megan said in greeting as I buckled myself in. That's one of the things I love about her. Megan is aware that "good" and "morning" are oxymoronic in conjunction -- even if her bright-eyed, chipper smile implied that perhaps they didn't form a contradiction in terms when applied to her own life.

"Morning," I answered back as I settled in.

Cars are one of the things I have issues with -- especially when I'm the one driving.

I have my license because dad insisted it was a necessity of life, but when he was teaching me to drive he impressed on me the ease with which one could lose control of a vehicle and kill everyone around them and everyone riding with them and be forced to live for decades in a hospital, paralyzed from a severed spine and guilt.

I never quite got over that. But it doesn't bother me so much if someone else is driving. If I'm not behind the wheel and not distracting the driver, then any cataclysmic accident won't be my fault. Maybe it's a little weird, but being unable to affect the outcome of a trip is just about the only way I can stand to be in a car for an extended period.

Now, my fear of strangers and being sold to slavers does prevent me from availing myself to public transportation or cab services, but fortunately for me Megan has no problem with driving. I carpool to and from work with her every day, and she usually gives me a ride to anywhere else I need to be but can't walk to.

Megan is an awesome friend. My best friend.

She's also a total Mary Sue. She's smart; I always had to crib her notes in college. She's fun and sociable; she was always inviting me out to parties she'd been invited to, and still does.

She's even independently wealthy, thanks to an inheritance from her dowager aunt or something. She doesn't really talk about her family, so I guess there's some kind of tension there, but that's not a character trait so it totally doesn't count against her Mary Sue status.