Cherry Pop

Chapter 1

[PRESENT DAY]

It is an ordinary kind of Monday evening for a bookstore that sits unassumingly small in-between giant slabs of concrete buildings. The late night rush hour hurries home past its glass-paned windows filled with featured books from no particular year nor theme. The books are illuminated in a kaleidoscope of rainbow lights as if from a medieval church's windowpane. These are the only signs of life in the otherwise pitch-black space, dotting the floors, walls, and bookshelves haphazardly in random bursts of color.

A young man in his early 20s watches the lights paint his white sneakers in splashes of red-blue-green as he walks the short distance from where he was standing at the cashier to the front door of the bookstore. He flips the store's sign from "closed" to "open" and unlocks the door, before walking back the short distance to a bookshelf at the back of the store. It is again an ordinary bookshelf filled with books of no particular genre nor are they arranged in any particular order, but the one thing they do have in common is that all their covers are a bright cherry red. It is a sea of red right in the middle of other normal dark wood shelves, and on the sign that normally tells book-lovers what genre the section is there is instead six words in all-caps print:

JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER.

The young man lays a palm on a spot somewhere in the middle of the shelf and pushes. The shelf slowly swings open, revealing a dark wood room dimly lit in the same kaleidoscope lights as in the bookstore. The smell of whisky, citrus, and a faint hint of smoke linger in the air, accompanied by bubbles of music sounding like the lovechild of jazz and lo-fi. The mix of classic and modern surrounds the room, with its high glass ceilings letting the pure moonlight in contrasting dreamy technicolor lights; dark wood furniture with black leather couches scatter near the walls; classical books and abstract art decorating walls and shelves; an oval black marble countertop right in the middle of the room with alcohol bottles lining its dark wood shelves; dim glass chandeliers of various shapes and sizes dangling from the high ceiling, but the only bright light is a cursive neon right in the middle of the bar that spelled, Cherry Pop.

"We're good to go, Alex," The young man calls out to the figure in all black standing by the bar. The shelf-door closes behind him while he pads over to the center bar, his footsteps muffled by the maroon carpets adorning the dark wood floors.

"Thanks Ash," Alex says back without looking up from his phone. His dark hair falls over his eyes but he's so used to it by now he doesn't bother brushing them away. The blue light from his phone softly illuminates a prominently chiseled jawline with a straight-set pair of lips that neither smiles nor scowls as he reads through his messages again.

On my way, one of his friends Levi said an hour ago. He really shouldn't be surprised that they are all late, and he isn't really — it's the slow churning of anxiety inside him that bothers him with the thought of who's going to show up first. He tries not to feel too guilty about that, because that's the thing about how friendship ages: you get closer to some, and you drift away from others. Sometimes you change with your friends and sometimes they change without you. It is one of the inevitable laws of nature, and that is okay. Or at least, he tries to tell himself that it is okay, like he has learned to accept the many things in his life that have changed as "okay."

It is an oversimplification, perhaps, to classify the things that happen to us as "okay" or "not okay." But Alex finds that the simple neutrality of the word "okay" takes the harsh edges out of the words "good and bad." There is a childishness, an innocence, a wholesomeness to the "okay" that brings him comfort. Cherie, one of his other friends that has changed without him, taught him that.

He wonders if when he sees his friends tonight, they will recount their times together in the gradients of okay / not okay, or in the black and white scales of good / bad.