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YESENIA HATED THAT SHE HAD to do this almost as much as she hated the feeling that came as soon as she realized the needed misdeed. The guilt swirled violently in her abdomen as her fingers flexed involuntarily towards the item she required just a few inches away on the shelf in the corner store closest to her home in the South Bronx.
The store was tiny, too tiny for the overpopulated neighborhood it serviced, and fluorescent lights felt like a spotlight, pointing out her past and future sins.
Yesenia had been coming to this specific bodega since she was a little girl, and she knew the tiny hole in the wall, like the back of her hand, from the graffiti that trailed inside from the alleyway adjacent to the aisles that were too close together to squeeze in as much product as possible. The corners of the walls held no cameras, and even with the few other customers milling around her doing their shopping, Yesenia was discreet enough not to be caught.
Yesenia glanced over to the high window where her friends since childhood, Isabel, Zoey, Nazareth, Gabriel, and Elliot, were bottomless in an animated conversation outside the store, thankful that none of them had yet to realize how far she had strayed.
Yesenia forced her gaze to the mid-level shelf in front of her, locking her brown eyes on a blue and yellow cardboard box of tampons, and her guilt ramped up, crawling toward her throat and threatening to make a physical appearance on the dusty tiled floor beneath her shoes.
Yesenia began to stretch her dominant hand towards the box, paused, and then withdrew her hand back towards her jacket-covered side.
It's just once, Yesenia thought to herself.
Just once to stretch my money out for groceries and the water bill and then never again.
With a gulp, Yesenia swiftly took the box in her hands and then stuffed the box into an unzipped section of her rundown black Nike backpack. In the level of speed, she forced the rusty zipper up and further up until her bag was wholly closed again.
"Vic! Yurrr!" Elliot, or Deuce as he liked to be referred to, had stuck his head inside and cupped both hands around his mouth to call out to her. Yesenia's hands flinched at the attention, but she hoisted one backpack strap over her shoulder and turned around to face him, "You are so obnoxious. I'm right here."
Elliot screwed his face up at her words, "Man, whatever. You done in here?"
"Yeah," Yesenia strode towards the boy and out of the entrance, only able to relax when a gust of cooling autumn wind floated around her face and her tied-up curls. The rest of her friend group was outside, congregating adjacent to a graffiti-covered wall in a tight circle behind Zoey; their eyes, except for Elliot's and Yesenia's, were glued to her cell phone.
