Chapter 2 - Someone Should Be
The aisle went quiet.
Not silent.
Supermarkets are never silent.
There was still the hum of refrigerators, the distant beep of checkout scanners, someone’s cart wheel squeaking two aisles over.
But the crowd around them stopped breathing in the way crowds do when the version they were filming begins to rot.
The security officer, Andre Brooks, followed Marcus’s gaze.
“Kid,” Andre said, voice lower now. “Take your hand out of your pocket.”
The teenager swallowed.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You already said that.”
“He hit me.”
“I saw the mark. Now move your hand.”
The boy’s eyes flicked toward the phones.
That was his mistake.
A truly frightened kid would have looked for exits, parents, help.
This kid looked for cameras.
Marcus saw Andre notice.
The old woman on the floor winced as she tried to sit up.
“Mrs. Whitaker,” Marcus said, without taking his eyes off the boy, “don’t move.”
Several shoppers looked at him.
He knew her name.
That changed the story again.
The elderly woman’s name was Evelyn Whitaker.
Seventy-eight years old.
Retired elementary school librarian.
Widow of a railroad mechanic.
A woman who carried peppermint candies in the same small red wallet she had used for twenty-three years.
Marcus had known her since he was twelve.
Not because she was family.
Because she had once been the only adult in town who did not treat him like a lost cause.
Back then, Marcus was a skinny kid with bruised knuckles, a bad attitude, and a father who drank through rent money. He spent afternoons in the public library because it was warm in winter and cool in summer, and because Mrs. Whitaker let him sit in the back with motorcycle magazines even when he never checked out books.
One day, he tore a page out of a magazine.
She caught him.
He expected yelling.
Instead, she sat across from him and said, “If you destroy the only copy, the next boy like you won’t get to dream over it.”
Marcus stared at her.
“The next boy like me?”
“Yes,” she said. “Angry. Hungry. Pretending not to be either.”
No one had ever described him that accurately.
He brought the page back the next day, wrinkled and taped badly.
She accepted it like it mattered.
After that, she started saving old automotive magazines for him. Then repair manuals. Then novels with hard men in them who still made choices.
When Marcus got arrested at seventeen for stealing parts from a garage, Mrs. Whitaker came to court.
His own father did not.
The judge asked why she was there.
She said, “Because someone should be.”
Marcus never forgot that.
He did not become a perfect man because one librarian believed in him.
Life is not that simple.
He got in more trouble.
Joined a motorcycle club too young.
Fought too much.
Worked bad jobs.
Lost friends to prison, addiction, and pride.
May you like
But Mrs. Whitaker’s voice stayed somewhere in him.
Someone should be.
