Kelly Murashige
THE WORST PART of this whole ordeal isn’t that, ten years ago, Mira stole a tube of JuicyBabe lipstick from the local drugstore. Nor is it that she barely used the tube of JuicyBabe lipstick she stole from the local drugstore ten years ago, or even that her then-best friend was the de facto manager of the local drugstore from which she stole a tube of JuicyBabe lipstick she barely used ten years ago.
No, the worst part is that now, almost exactly a decade after her unforgivable sin, she is contractually obligated to return to that local drugstore and pretend she did not, in fact, steal anything at all.
If anyone were to ask, she would say the second-worst part of this whole ordeal is that the store from which she stole the tube of JuicyBabe lipstick was not even a full-fledged StarMart. It was a small-format one. A MiniStarMart. The store didn’t even appear on searches in Google Maps for years.
Since her one and only theft, Mira has repeatedly read radical posts claiming that theft isn’t as bad as people make it out to be. It’s a victimless, ultimately insignificant way of rebelling against the capitalistic system and sticking it to the man.
Unfortunately, she’s not sure MiniStarMart even has a man.
She supposes it had a general manager, who was indeed a man. Yet he was also old as dust, forcing her then-best friend to become the éminence grise at the ripe old age of seventeen.
If asked, Mira’s former best friend, now a mother of two living on the other side of the country, would likely say their friendship dissolved because Mira hated when her best friend had a significant other.
Mira hated not being the center of attention, she would have said.
She wouldn’t have been entirely wrong. Mira did like being the center of attention. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t have started posting videos of herself doing her makeup while getting ready for her early-morning seminars, which, by some stroke of luck, and perhaps a barrage of makeup-obsessed girls and women sick of the constant drama between the biggest beauty gurus of the time, rapidly launched her influencer career.
Mira. An influencer. Who would have ever thought? Not the people at MiniStarMart. That’s for sure.
After one last deep breath, Mira lifts her head, steps out of her baby-blue car, and all but slams the door behind her. Her heels wobble along the gravel as she makes her way along the parking lot. She spent a good ten minutes trying to decide if she should wear stilettos, as she would for most of these kinds of meet-and-greets, or if that would be too much for the bargain store that, ten years ago, had fake security cameras about as useful as the cheap toys lining its aisles.
She chose wrong, of course.
She always chooses wrong.
She stops just short of the entrance, her reflection dark and almost unrecognizable in the glass door. A security camera—a real one, with a glowing red eye—hangs from the ceiling.
What if they installed that camera solely because they knew she was coming?
She drops her gaze, partly out of shame and partly to obscure her face from the camera. She isn’t sure how much it sees, but she’s certain it’s too much. Now that she’s famous, at least in certain circles, she feels as though everyone is watching her every move. Some of her followers even monitored her social media likes, then the profiles of those who had created the posts she had liked, leading her to discontinue liking anything online at all.
Of course, once she did that, those on her snark pages claimed it was because she either wanted to snub her peers or thought she was too good to bother tapping a heart on anyone else’s posts, all while expecting her fans to eat up everything she did.
Neither is true, obviously. She isn’t snubbing anyone. Nor does she presume her fans will love her every decision.
They wouldn’t like the stealing, for example. They wouldn’t hit the heart icon for that.
She jumps at a sudden burst of movement, her eyes skittering up to the now-open door, then the young woman propping it open with one shoulder.
“Oh my God,” the young woman says, one hand rising to the embroidered MiniStarMart on her chest. “It’s you. It’s really you.”
Mira’s smile is strained. Her lips threaten to split. She’s wearing the best matte lipstick on the market, but not even all the wax in the world could keep the cracks from showing.
Maybe, she thinks as she follows the MiniStarMart employee into the store, this is all a trap. As soon as she’s inside, they’re going to jump on her.
We know what you did. We’ve been waiting for you. Ten years later, we’re taking what we’re owed.
In the years since that day, Mira considered returning to the MiniStarMart at least a hundred times. To purchase something small, then slip an extra five or ten dollars into the till. Would that be possible? Wouldn’t the cashier catch her? What if she handed over the money, along with a written explanation and a promise to never shop there again, and promptly moved to another continent?
She never went back. Not until today.
She could have rejected the idea of a meet-and-greet. Could have suggested another venue. No one would have blamed her for wanting something a little nicer than the MiniStarMart with more cockroaches than customers.
She just thought it would be some kind of expiation. A pathetic attempt at penance. Besides, she didn’t want anyone to think she considered herself “too big” for her local drugstore.
She spends the five-minute walk from the front of the MiniStarMart to the backroom waiting for someone to call her out. For a cashier to tackle her and shout, I GOT HER! At the very least, she expects people to ogle her, this girl who clearly doesn’t shop here regularly anymore.
Yet if people stare, it’s less because they recognize or care about her and more because she’s wearing ridiculously high heels in a place where college students often show up in sweats. The MiniStarMart employee seems to be the only one who knows anything about Mira, and a part of her is convinced it’s because some MiniStarMart employees put together a composite sketch of her after discovering she had stolen the lipstick. Lipstick she applied once or twice, then never again, the guilt so overwhelming, it coated her like sap.
The turnout for her meet-and-greet is humbling, to say the least. Aside from the enthusiastic employee, who perches on one of the few chairs she herself had to haul out of the backroom, and the store manager, a woman Mira has never seen before but suspects has heard of her decade-old theft, there are only about half a dozen people, at least one of whom just wanted someplace to sit.
“So tell us,” the store manager says into the handheld microphone she found in storage somewhere. “How did you get to be so successful?”
Mira licks her lips, the tip of her tongue catching on the dry, dead skin. Somehow, in the midst of that ever-present loop of YOU’RE A BAD PERSON YOU’RE MESSING THIS UP EVERYONE HATES YOU THEY KNOW WHAT YOU DID, she manages to form a single coherent thought: God, I could really use some JuicyBabe lipstick.
She leans toward the microphone, as if she’s about to kiss it.
“Well,” she begins, “the main thing to do is to know what you want in life.”
To be the center of attention, she imagines her former best friend saying.
Mira wonders if she knows. If she has any idea that Mira has hundreds of thousands of followers now. If it even matters when that former friend of hers has all the followers that matter, one of whom is her loving partner, and two of whom are her parents, whom Mira used to secretly wish were her own parents.
Mira again licks her lips, begging herself to save her inevitable mental breakdown for later, once she’s returned to her apartment. Her stupid, empty apartment filled with nothing but mirrors and lights and things that make her pretty.
She swallows. Everyone’s watching her, eagerly awaiting her next words.
“Then, once you can envision it,” she hears herself say, “you just fake it till you make it.”
She makes the mistake of glancing at her microscopic audience, somehow both so much bigger and so much smaller than she deserves.
It is while the young MiniStarMart employee is asking her questions—“What lipstick are you wearing right now? Where can I get it? How much is it?”—that Mira admits what she must have known all along: No matter what she does to move forward, no matter how much money she makes off the people desperately trying to make themselves prettier, for as long as she lives, she will keep paying the price of her ugliest mistakes.
Kelly Murashige, born and raised in Hawai’i, is the author of the award-winning YA novels The Lost Souls of Benzaiten, The Yomigaeri Tunnel, and the upcoming adult novel Milkiverse (2027). Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net.
