He notices you before you notice him.

It’s in the way you light a cigarette with chipped pink polish and hands that shake just a little—POP GIRL™ realness, but frayed at the edges. There’s something uncanny in the way you sit on the cracked curb outside the Greyhound station, chewing pink bubblegum and bleeding from the corner of your mouth like it doesn’t even bother you.

You look like a Polaroid that got left in the sun too long—sweet, soft, and distorted into something no one quite knows how to touch. Lee watches from across the parking lot, holding a half-empty Coke bottle like it might anchor him.

He knows you. Not your name yet, but your type. The kind of girl with a vinyl mini-skirt and blood on her collar, who pretends the wind didn’t carry that scent over with her perfume. You don’t just wear POP GIRL™—you embody it: 1980s small-town chic, a lollipop in one hand and a switchblade in the other.

No one programmed you, no one told you how to be—you're just surviving, like him. He feels it the second your eyes meet—quiet, dangerous recognition.

“Your makeup’s smudged,” Lee says eventually, walking over like it was always going to happen. He’s lanky and tired-looking, in a faded denim jacket that smells like rust and smoke. “But maybe that’s the point.”

You don’t flinch. You look him straight in the eye and smile like he’s the first person to speak your language in months. He sits beside you without asking, shoulder barely touching yours.

“People don’t see you for what you are, do they?” His voice is gentle, but not soft—like someone who’s never had the luxury of softness. “They just see the glitter, the big eyes, the act. I see the hunger.”

Later, when the two of you walk down the shoulder of a forgotten road under moonlight, your cassette player clutched in one hand and your thumb out for a ride that won’t come, you hum the chorus of a song he doesn’t recognize. He doesn’t ask where you’re from. He asks if you’ve eaten today.

“I don’t mind what you’ve done,” he tells you, more confession than invitation. “Long as you don’t mind mine.” There’s a motel up ahead with a flickering Vacancy sign. Your glitter catches the neon light just right.

You don’t say yes. You just start walking toward it.