2Author Note: Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think about posting a Fullmetal Alchemist story. It was one of those rare shows where the story was so perfectly crafted that literally changing anything about it would have altered the plot too much or too unnecessarily (at least for me). However, I managed to find some wiggle room and decided to re-post this story, a story I had started ages ago on a long-dead account lost over the years due to missing password; I had created the account due to my young writer cowardice at my friends finding the story on my real account and judging me for it.
Only now can I fully admit that while some of the narration and diction of the original story was good... the story was hot garbage and needed a rewrite in a bad way. But you know what they say: one man's trash is another man's treasure. While the story was indeed bad, it still had promise and deserves a revival. So, without further adieu, my revamped story of "Wishful Thinking." Thanks for reading and be sure to follow, favorite, and review!
Chapter 1: What You Want
Marching into the Good-2-Go gas station somewhere off of Route 24 at 11:46 pm that night, Lexi Clark was a woman on a mission. The bell chimes assaulted the glass-pane door like a frying pan being dropped on the kitchen floor, breaking the silence of an empty convenience story. Her wisps of russet red hair curled around her round face, sticking to her frost bitten cheeks and pinned back hair, refusing to yield to her decorative, leopard print earmuffs any longer. Comfy as they were, they did little to muffle the stylings of Britney Spears' "Toxic" playing over the intercom.
"There's no escape,
I can't wait,
I need a hit,
Baby, give me it..."
She had tried to quit, promising herself that she wouldn't give in, adamant that she wouldn't fall off the wagon so easily, but damn it, tonight she needed her fix in a bad way, and God help anyone who got in her way. Luckily for the rest of humanity, her objective faced few obstacles. The counter was guarded by a lone attendant, his nose buried somewhere in a three page spread of Playboy's February 2012 edition, but other than that, there was no one else around to witness her sacrilegious act.
A pair of thick, brown frames lined her fierce tea green eyes as they scanned the layout of the store, slightly fogged over from the sudden abrupt change in temperature. She pulled them off of her face, pulling some wisps of hair forwards as she tugged the edge of her blouse and started cleaning the lens. She hated her glasses. They always drew attention to her eyebrows, which were already bushy and masculine just like her father's. In the long run, she knew she should have bought more contacts prior to her previous engagement, but honestly she was in no position to order more. Satisfied with her handiwork, she placed her glasses back on her face and pressed her right middle and index finger against the plastic bridge until they were pushed back into place on her nose and resumed her search. Scanning the frozen food section, her gaze locked onto a familiar row of blue and black containers hidden by a light layer of condensed freezer fog.
"I'm addicted to you,
Don't you know that you're toxic?"
Under normal circumstances, she didn't usually seek out comfort food so actively. It was a bad habit to fall back into. However despite the guilt nestling in the back of her mind like an itch she couldn't scratch, she was confident that indulging in a little comfort food wasn't going to return her to the days where her mother would catch her with pixie sticks shoved into her pants pockets and Trefoils hidden away in her underwear drawer. All she wanted was to innocently purchase a pint of Ben & Jerry's Red Velvet Cake ice cream as a treat while she filled up her 2002 Grand Cherokee Jeep with gas; it was her birthday, and damn it she deserved to celebrate the way she wanted. After all, it didn't come along all that often, only once every four years. That was her one goal for tonight. However, as per usual, things didn't quite seem to be going her way.
After studying the limited shelves six or more times like memorizing answers for a test, her gaze dropped towards her feet. She should have been used to it by now. Life seemed to enjoy throwing her curve-balls just when the dust had started to settle, just to shake things up. Frustrated with having to alter her plans a bit, she let out a disappointed sigh, settling for the generic choice of cookie dough and slunk towards the register. It was manned by a pudgy, acne-covered man who looked like what you would imagine what would happen to a high school dropout who worked at truck-stops for a living well into his thirties and lived off of a diet exclusively made up of Cheetos, beer, and Mountain Dew. He certainly smelled like it.
His rancid cigarette breathe assaulted her nostrils like rotten onions and unbrushed teeth as he pulled his attention away from some Ukrainian girl's nip-slip, not even having the decency to hide the trash he had been ogling for ten minutes from her as he muttered, "that'll be $5.49." The dead look in his dull grey eyes told her that he was probably as thrilled at being here this late at night as she was. Lexi shifted her brown leather overcoat and reached into her Central Perk purse before successfully plucking out a blue debit card.
"It's getting late,
To give you up,
I took a sip,
From my devil's cup,
Slowly, it's taking over me..."
"Hey, didn't you read the sign?" snarled the greasy cashier, placing his hand over a tiny plastic sign in the window display that said 'Cash Only' in gaudy serif font. Reluctantly tucking her VISA card back into her purse, she delved further into her cross-body bag and found she only had two dollar bills and a handful of coins, most of which were dimes, nickles and pennies. Just her luck.
"Is there an ATM nearby?"
"Nope," was his short reply, not even bothering to look her in the eye as the cashier focused his attention back on Lindsay Lohan at the end of her career, and she doubted it was because he was a fan of her work on Mean Girls or Freaky Friday. Rather than take it out on the cashier, who was just doing his job, Lexi kept her expression neutral and grudgingly plucked the five dollar cookie dough ice cream off the counter and returned it back on the shelf where it belonged. Didn't want that flavor anyways.
"...addicted to you,
Don't you know that you're toxic?"
Alternative plans were made as Lexi snatched a Nerds rope and a jumbo Slim Jim on display next to a rotating wheel of postcards of Northern Indiana landmarks like Fort Wayne and South Bend towards the checkout and slapped them on the counter. With a lazy sigh, the cashier punched in a few numbers into his cash register and rang up the total. "That'll be $3.14."
Not giving him the luxury of going back to the blatant porno magazine he was reading on the job, she went through her purse and began the painstaking process of dumping out her coin purse shaped like a red, Japanese koi fish she had purchased from the Smithsonian's gift shop and counted out her spoils to a grand total of $3.19 before absentmindedly muttering, "keep the change." She then gave the man a plastered on smile and a polite "have a good night," to which both he responded with a disinterested grunt, before marching out of the 'in-convenient store' with her goodies in tow and crawled into her vehicle.
The cold, black steering wheel rattled and shook like it was having an epileptic seizure as she turned over the ignition, coaxing it slightly with soft pleas before she successfully put her SUV into drive. Run though she did, Joan refused to stop being a jittering mess until Lexi managed to kick her vehicle up to the magic forty miles per hour. Then Joan nestled into a comfortable hum as Lexi eased off of the gas and let her bipolar baby cruise on the uneven pavement, turning on the brights after she realized she wasn't going to have any company for awhile this far outside any major cities.
Her breathe fogged in front of her, the AC taking its sweet ass time in warming up the SUV as Lexi pulled out a pair of white, cotton gloves stashed away in her overcoat pockets and tugged them over her frozen fingertips before pressing the power button to her entertainment system. Driving around in the Indiana countryside with a messed up outlet, she didn't have a ton of options for music, save for local radio stations if she was lucky enough to be in range before they fuzzed over with static, and that mix tape CD that had been jammed in her car's CD player since 2007. Choosing the latter, Lexi subjugated herself to the opening track of "Mr. Boombastic" for the umpteenth time in a row. She was about a minute or so in before she hit skip, jumping around her CD like an iPod shuffle.
Hunger gnawed at her, craving a sweet she couldn't have while Lexi fumbled clumsily with the Slim Jim wrapper before pulling off her right glove. Forced to endure the icy cold of her steering wheel, she peeled off layers of plastic and took a generous chomp out of the jerky stick, during which she also flipped on her turn signal and began to retrace her steps towards her road home. Her hunger appeased temporarily for now, her sweet tooth now ached in dissatisfaction, causing her to reach for the Nerds rope as well. The sugary crunch filled her with nostalgia of soccer practice fruit snacks and freshly mowed grass, but did little to satisfy the craving she ultimately desired. The whole stop had been a needless detour.
His fault.
By the time she settled down and tuned in to the white noise music on her speakers, Steven Curtis Chapman's "Cinderella" played softly in the background while she quietly pondered over the old Grimm fairy-tale. Like, did Cinderella ever come to resent her father for remarrying and leaving her with a step-family who didn't love her? Was her father aware of the people he chose to associate with, or did they become horrible people because the father was no longer there to fulfill the vows and empty promises he had planned to give the family? Thoughts like this swam in her head as she pulled to a yellow stoplight. As the colors switched from cautious yellow to stop red, she noticed at the empty crossroads that the clock on her entertainment system had changed to 12:09 am at some point during her internal discussion, and then it suddenly occurred to her: today officially marked February 29th, her 'fifth' birthday. And she had missed it.
The blinking red traffic light flickered softly in the black emptiness. Each blink seemed to mock her, being slower than the last. The beef jerky she had aggressively bitten into earlier felt like shards of glass wedged in her throat as hot tears welled in the corner of her eyes before wide streams of salt water burst down her heavily freckled cheeks. A strangled cry of anguish was caught in the back of her throat in between breathes. Frustrated, all she could do was clutch onto the steering wheel and sob while crushing the break pedal with her boot. All she wanted was for one thing to go right today, just one thing. She had even lowered her standards and broken her cardinal rule of stopping at gas stations late at night for food runs, and even that had all been for naught.
One pint of ice cream was all that it took for her whole world to come crashing down. She was gracious that it was so late at night, because then she wouldn't have to feel pressured about moving or anyone seeing the world ending inside of her Jeep. Perhaps she could just stay here until morning. She really felt like parking on the side of the road and curling up in her emergency wool blanket in the backseat slash trunk with all her birthday presents; one of them had been a neck pillow. However, a lone headlight flashing in the distance of her rear-view mirror told her that her pity show was going to have to be cut short unless she wanted to deal with the fallout of an angry driver. Edging her foot off of the break, she hastily wiped her cheek, eased forward and continued numbly down the long stretch of road. Barren, unused fields now marked the sides of instead of small town buildings, stores, and monuments, save for a few leek or strawberry fields.
Due to her still riding an emotional roller-coaster, she failed to realize that she had long since missed the turn-off towards the main road home until it was too late. Not recognizing the flat terrain covered with frost and leftover snow, Lexi make a hasty u-turn at a dirt crossroads that was slightly S-curved on one side and spun her car expertly around on the gravel-dirt road, hitting reverse as soon as she could when the turn became too wide before she heard a sickening thud against her bumper.
Pale, she firmly pressed her foot against the brake and halted the maneuver before cautiously turning on the emergency flashers and putting her car into park. Panic quickly began to replace her sorrow as she unbuckled her seat-belt, fumbling around awkwardly with the strap before she stepped out of the car to look on in horror what she had hit.
All she wanted was a pint of ice cream.
