Candidate

Part 1

The kitchen was hardly a kitchen, only containing one cabinet and a stove, their fridge in the garage. Everyone shared one bathroom, with a shower so small that you could barely turn around in it. The living room consisted of a worn chenille couch and television with rabbit ears.

In college Carrie's room would be tall enough to stand in, windows large enough to view something more than just a tree branch, the communal kitchen with more accommodations than a stove, hopefully with a fridge that was always cool enough. She'd never been on the subway before, but she could already tell that the people around her weren't too fond of it, noticing the grime around the door and how the seats were crucially faded. At home, she didn't even have a car of her own.

Carrie's home life wasn't terrible, though, spare that their home was too small for three people and that they couldn't afford anything else. She was incredibly close to her brother growing up, taking him underneath her wing after their father had walked out. Being the eldest child, and the main earner of the household when her mother was between jobs, Carrie carried the stress of the entire family beneath her. The only outlet that Carrie had to relieve her stress was her boyfriend, Paul.

Carrie had struggled to find her place in their relationship, always wondering if she was too controlling, too lenient, too rough, too soft. Paul didn't do much more than entertain her arguments, their grievances being brought up almost daily. Their relationship was in various states of disrepair, Carrie somedays thinking that it was fine, others wanting to just throw in the towel. But, there was nothing for her to do other than to date him. She was too busy with schoolwork to interact much with her classmates, too busy at work to make extra cash than to chit-chat with coworkers, and too stressed to talk to her brother as much as she wanted to. Paul was driven to communicate with her, whether that being good or bad, thus she stayed, even when she shouldn't have. There was no true love between the two of them, although Carrie sent him love notes and kissed him when they'd meet. Keeping him as her boyfriend was a chore, and she had clearly fallen out of love with him just as quickly as she had fallen into love. There was something with the fight, though, something that would pull them together to fight like mad, to verbally injure the other, that kept her motivated. She wanted to get out of the town she lived in, of course for college, but mainly to never have to see Paul again.

Other than her brother, though, Paul was one of the only people who consoled Carrie after her dad had left, and his family let her and her brother live at his place until her mother could get them back on their feet. They'd known each other since the last year of elementary school, had grown to love each other in a platonic way after seeing each other in school for so long.

College would be different, though. She'd be a thirteen-hour drive away from Paul, could use school as an excuse not to call him, could text him lawyer puns to amuse him when she couldn't spend an hour and a half on Skype. Things were settled between the two, and they had decided on a temporary break until Carrie had finished her first semester. That way she could adjust to college and her new surroundings. Paul, surprisingly, didn't object.

Carrie was set to study political science in hopes of forging a law career. The only way to dig herself out of debt from student loans and to let her family live in peace was to make more money than she knew how to spend, and with that, being a lawyer seemed to be a good decision.

Resting her head onto the cold metal of the pole, Carrie felt her body jerk again, eyeing a map beside the doors. She skimmed the map, squinting her eyes and hoping that the man sitting beneath the map didn't find her intimidating. Nothing on the map was recognizable, looking for a street she knew the name of other than Broadway seemed impossible.

"You're going uptown, on the 1. Local." The man below the map shifted one of his headphones off of his ear and snapped his fingers to make sure that Carrie could hear him. "Where're you getting off?"