The story below is a work of fiction.
She babysat the one kid who just watched that one animated movie on repeat. The one with the Taylor Swift song in the beginning. That one song that was an obvious ploy by her A&R management to sell to any kind of media that involves New York City landscapes. What garbage. The girl had already did her time in NYC, as though a prison sentence. Current social expectations condemned her there: a young, modestly attractive, Anglo-Irish girl—fashionable, barely 18, smoked pot a few times, memorized a few seasons of the Sex and the City boxset her trashy aunt lent her, preemptively bored of a decent, affluent life ahead of her. She practically received the bus ticket tucked into her high school diploma. The city was an awful piece of hell. Everything clamored for a piece of her: the rent, the overpriced restaurants, the coffee, the fornication, the queers, the rooftop parties full of self-deifying anons and their forgettable art installations. Brooklyn shanked her with a whittled plastic fork handle. Her mom loved the downstairs deli.
She felt hoodwinked by the 2 years she wasted there, scammed by the facade of trends smashed together inside a 4k screen. Once back home, at the local coffee shop, someone tried to game money from her. An older black man in a Mountain Dew shirt, Rosary around his neck. His dad was friends with Martin Luther King, he said. Of course he was. Knew some basic Episcopalian history. His dad was a priest. Then some sob story. Do you think I’m an idiot. He was going to give her religion or ask for money. It was the latter; she was relieved. The religion thing could go all night. With money it was much quicker. She said no. Why, are you mad at me. He fell asleep a minute later. She bet he likes those terrible CGI movies.