Out of the Groove

Katie fought the jeans all the way up her legs and as the battle roared ever closer to her thighs it seemed as if she might lose the war that day. It wasn’t a weight thing. She wasn’t fat. Hell, she wasn’t even mildly out of shape. Forty-five minutes on her Bowflex, three days a week, plus a half-hour run through the streets of South Berwick the other four days made sure of that. No, the shiny black jeans were meant to be squeezed into. That was part of the look. Like a corset her grandmother would have worn, Katie’s jeans were a necessity for a proper night out. The attention they brought was well worth the pain.

The jeans were actually an anomaly in Katie’s closet. They stuck out amongst the overalls and the faded Levis, each with their own distinctive holes in the knees. The jeans stood out as if perhaps part of some Halloween costume. Maybe it was the outfit she’d worn to play the part of the club slut at the town’s masquerade ball. Or maybe it was reserved for nights when her beau had been extra good and deserved a night of her being extra bad.

Except she didn’t have a beau. She hadn’t had herself a man in a very long time. A very long time.

She’d flipped through all the tops in her closet with no luck. Katie peered into the treacherous ocean of faded T-shirts and had no idea where the other half of this ensemble was. The town’s lack of a cultural hot spot was why this outfit hadn’t seen the light of day in so long. Since her car’s brutal murder at the hands of a March Nor’easter that shut down most of Maine for a week, her travel had been limited to the places her broken down Schwinn 10-speed could take her. Life in sleepy South Berwick didn’t require shiny black jeans.