The food court was always busy at lunch time, and always a source of human drama. All over, people were experiencing the many stages of life. Toddlers dashed underfoot, children pulled their mothers toward their favorite food stalls, teenagers sulked or made out (or both), and even the elderly could be seen out and about. Some people were happy, some were worried, and maybe some were dealing illegal drugs under the tables. Anything could happen in a food court.

Madison Mickelson was not concerned about other people, however.

"I'm not playing baby-sitter to Madigan this summer!" she growled into her cell phone. "...I don't care!... No, actually, there are not 'great opportunities' here for her... Okay, a museum doesn't count... Yeah, but... God, FINE." Not for the first time in her life, Madison wished that she could slam a cell phone. Instead she had to satisfy herself by snapping it shut with a violent shake of her wrist. At a nearby table a young boy was staring at her. She glared back and he nearly tripped over himself running away.

The young woman stared down at the plate before her. The previously appetizing plate of sesame chicken from The Blue Wok now made her just feel sick. She heaved a gigantic sigh, removing herself from her slightly sticky food court chair to throw the plate away.

Madigan. Here. All summer. No freakin' way, she thought, dumping the sesame chicken into an already over-full garbage can. The thought of toting her little sister around the city for the next two months was not a pleasant one--she was too young to take to any clubs, too smart to care about any museums, and too weird to take anywhere in public. "Pick her up from the airport next Friday!" her mother had managed before Maddy had hung up. That gave Maddy less than a week of freedom. Might as well enjoy it shopping.

Some people were suprised when they discovered Maddy's passion for purchasing, but most people could take one look at her and know she was fashion-minded. Take now, for instance. She was striding down the mallway in a silver-gray mini-dress, dark jeans, and strappy black sandals with tiny, half-inch kitten heels. A black messenger bag was slung over her right shoulder, the strap crossing in front of her to rest below her left hip. Her blonde hair was down, brushing her shoulders in the front and reaching down to her shoulder blades in the back.

As she walked, people got out of her way. She smiled a little, the corners of her glossed lips twitching up and her gray eyes lighting up just a little. She liked that kind of reaction--it made her feel important.

She was approaching her first favorite shop--a random boutique that sold fantastic jewelry--when she changed her mind and decided to veer off and stop at a cookie kiosk. Maybe throwing away her lunch hadn't been such a good idea. A giant cookie could fix that. Shoot, she'd even managed to push from her mind the annoying fact that her irritating younger sister would be intruding on her life.

She joined the short line at the kiosk, wondering what kind of cookie to get. Chocolate chip was a classic favorite, of course, but there was always macadamia nut... The back of her neck tickled a little, and she blinked in surprise, shuddering a little. Maybe a cookie wasn't a good idea. Maybe she should step back. She stepped back. The person in front of her in the line suddenly turned around and threw up exactly where she'd been standing.

Madison stared blankly at the spreading puddle of vomit on the floor in front of her, then at the ill-looking shopper who was the source of the mess. Turning on her heel, Madison marched to the nearest bench and sat down hard. It had happened again. That weird... thing.

Not even the prospect of shopping could distract her from this new development.

Harassing people he knew to buy CutCo. products didn't pay half as well as Wit had initially expected it to, so when his supervisor mentioned that a cart was being opened up in the mall and that someone would be needed to man it once in a while, he had jumped at the chance. He had been to the mall, and he had seen other carts for dinky little products like his that were usually only seen in Skymall magazines - it wasn't like anyone actually came up to those people and bought anything. So when Wit found himself nearly half asleep across from the cookie kiosk, which was far more popular than his Pointy Knives That Wit Cleaverdale Probably Wouldn't Mind to Stab Himself With Out of Boredom, he wasn't entirely surprised. He did, however, make a mental note to pick up reading again if he intended to keep up with this. He was not very clever or suave enough to smooth-talk people he knew into buying crap they didn't need, much less people he had never seen before and would probably never see again in his life.

He slouched back into the director's chair, his long legs propped up casually against the immobile wheel of the cart. Despite his first suspicions, the plain, light blue collared shirt emblazoned with the CutCo. logo was undeniably and frustratingly hot. Who, in their right mind, made casual work T-shirts out of the most pointlessly warm fabric? He silently condemned the forces that be that decided that the mall wasn't going to be as ruthlessly chilly as per usual, and pouted at his cart. He could really go for a cookie, but knowing his luck the second he got up some kid would try to make off with his stuff (all the kid would have was a handful of cardboard, since the small set that was actually present was just to show what the stupid knives actually looked like and as he didn't actually own those he suspected he'd get fired if they were stolen). So, instead of doing something about his anger at the broken air conditioner and his shirt and how much he really wanted a cookie, the thirty-five-year old stared sullenly at the cookie kiosk.

...and then someone vomited. The crowd dispersed immediately, and Wit realized that there was now absolutely no one to whom he could legitimately pretend to be catering to. While he didn't mind being ignored for long periods of time by any stretch of the imagination, he did discover that he minded smelling the bizarre mixing of cookie dough and someone's lunch having come back to haunt him, so he grudgingly left a "Be Back in Five" sign that meant he probably wouldn't be back for nearly an hour and moved to a bench not too far away but, thankfully, out of reach of that horrible stench. And he thought it was bad when he drank himself into a hangover - at least he did it in the privacy of his own apartment. Maybe the guy had just had a bad cookie, though. Wit didn't know.

He glanced sideways, and frowned. Oh God, this chick wasn't the one who just vomited, was she? She looked a little faint. He massaged his temples for a moment, really not in the mood for getting involved but then remembered he hadn't been laid in forever, so he said, "Uhm, you feeling okay?"

Maddy was sitting in a fashion not normally present in well-dressed young women. She was leaning forward in a slouch so big that her shoulders were practically in her ears, and was cradling her chin with her hands in the old elbows-on-the-knees position. As soon as she'd plunked herself down, she'd fixed her abnormally blank stare at the floor about ten feet in front of her, lost in thought.

Around her, general commotion ensued as the vomiting wonder was lead off by somebody, and the cookie-vendor started freaking out and telling anybody who would listen that she had thrown up before she'd had one of his cookies, that's right, before... There were actually a couple little kids crying, and if Maddy had been paying attention she would have probably made a snide comment or two about how attention-craved the kids must be, crying at a little bit of puke. Although, truly, it was a rather impressive amount of vomit...

Maddy was not focused on any of these things, of course. She was mulling over the latest occurrence of her uncanny intuition. She hated it. Oh, it had its benefits. She'd avoided two drunk drivers in the past year. The previous month she'd been on a walk, and had changed her mind and gone home, only to learn later that the park she'd been in had been the scene of some gang fight that resulted in half a dozen bystander deaths. And she always seemed to know which movies would be worth her money, and which would totally suck.

So, undoubtedly, intuition was good, right? Maddy wasn't so sure. A couple lucky breaks could be considered coincidence or fate, but with Maddy it happened all the time. And it was starting to drive her crazy.

She was busy considering her sanity when the man--who she didn't even notice sit down--suddenly spoke to her. Maddy didn't 'jump a mile'--she wasn't the mile-jumper type. She did sort of jerk, though, raising her head from her hands and turning to identify the source of the question. A little bit of her personality leaked back inside of her, and her gray eyes bored into his with a touch of her usual intensity.

"I just about got my new designer jeans--not to mention my shoes--covered in up-chuck. No, as a matter of fact, I am not okay. However, your concern is duly noted and appreciated." Maddy didn't exactly say it nicely--the last part was laced with heavy sarcasm. She was aware, after she spoke, just how shallow she probably sounded. Then again, she thought, I supposed I am sort of shallow, now, aren't I?

Wit noticed that he seemed to have a particularly striking lack of good luck. Just the other day he had been taking a walk through the park and thought about validating his youth by interrupting some teenaged girl's solitaire game and made a complete fool of himself. Today he had thought the mall would be pretty cool, and now he was nearly sweating beneath his T-shirt and his blue jeans. Hell, he had thought working for CutCo. was a good idea. Clearly this was not the case, and his lack of trust in his ability to predict what was a good idea and what was a bad idea was reinforced when this girl - who he really just been hoping would make out with him or something, she looked like the sort of person to be angry at the world and potentially desperate - decided to release her anger and frustration at him.

The thirty-five-year-old made a noise caught between a grunt and a sigh, not too unlike the noises he tried to repress when people asked him stupid questions about knives ("Will this cut through a lampshade?", "If I touched the blade really, really forcefully would it hurt me?", "Just, you know, out of curiosity - could I cut out a person's heart with this?"). "That's, uhm... okay." He guessed he probably shouldn't be trying to get himself laid on company time anyways.

He stared at her for a moment, clearly perplexed as what to otherwise do, and just said, "Sorry to hear that. I... uh, hope you feel better soon, then," and quietly sat himself up straight so he could resume watching the fiasco happening between his sales cart and the cookie kiosk.

Maddy barely registered any discomfort on the man's part. She constantly dealt out such remarks, and never noticed how others were effected. To put in nicely, Maddy was not exactly sensitive. To put in realistically, Maddy did not give a damn about anybody but herself. Nice person, huh?

She returned her eyes to the floor as he started mumbling his response--or did he respond? She wasn't sure. It wasn't like she was paying attention. Instead, she was suddenly thinking about how completely awful it would be if her mother called her back. She withdrew the slim black device from her messenger bag and was just about to turn it off when the phone roared to life--okay, well, it started ringing--and she dropped it in her lap like it was on fire.

"Mom" was written on front display. Maddy scooped the phone up again and opened it, her ringtone--"Flight of the Valkyries," actually--suddenly ceasing. As soon as she opened it she hit the "end" button, hanging up on her dear mother. Then she turned the phone off. She started at it for a moment, ponderously, before abruptly turning to the guy sitting by her.

"Do I look like a crazy person to you?" she asked, quite bluntly. Her sarcasm and anger was gone, but her voice was still rather sharp, and seemed to almost demand an answer.

Wit wasn't really the type to sigh over and over again, but today seemed to be a good day for sighing. Part of him thought about quitting - he could try out one of those work-at-home schemes so he could work and get drunk at the same time. Of course, then the sparse social interaction he got as a CutCo. salesman would probably go straight down the toilet then he really would never get laid again. He guessed even if his job landed him at a dinky little cart in the middle of the mall next to people's vomit and women who were too catty to let him have a chance with them, it was better than never leaving his apartment ever, ever again. He ran a hand through his hair and wondered if he had enough money in his wallet to go grab a hamburger at the food court.

"...huh?" Wit stared at her for a moment. "Uhm, no?" He usually didn't like talking to crazy people, so he wouldn't have asked if she was all right if she looked crazy. Of course - did look include how she was acting? Because how she was acting wasn't very conductive to his ulterior motives and he would consider that crazy. It wasn't as if he really asked for much in a woman - as long as she had boobs he was pretty good. His standards weren't that high. He couldn't really expect her to be psychic - unless, if she was, and was just doing this purposefully to get rid of him, he had to applaud her efforts.

He blinked a few times and inquired, "Why do you ask?"

"Well," started Maddy, suddenly seeming in a chatty mood rather than a bitchy one, "Well, have you ever had that thing where you know who's going to call you, and then they do? I have that all the time. Like just now. And I had it a five minutes ago, because I knew that one chick was going to blow chunks so I backed away. Does that mean I'm crazy? And why the hell am I asking you?"

I definitely need to work on my inner monologue, she thought, reflecting on the last sentence. She wondered, briefly, if her sudden mood swing might come off as bipolar, but then decided that it might be funny if the guy thought she was. You know, bipolar. Messing with peoples' heads was fun. If the whole "I-know-who-will-call-me" thing wasn't real, she probably would have made it up anyway, just for kicks.

Real nice girl, that Madison Mickelson.

Wit noticed that he was doing a lot of staring today. "Well, no, actually, I don't get a lot of phone calls and when I do it's about my rent or my bills or something, so... okay, so maybe I do know who's going to call me, but I don't think that's what you meant - ?" Befuddled, he continued to gawk at her, hoping to quickly divine a reason as to why God had placed him next to this crazy woman. It figured. He was at the mall, trying to sell people over-priced kitchenware, and now he was getting smited for thinking he was talking to some easy girl. No wonder he never got laid - it was divine intervention!

Silently, Wit wished he could predict his phone calls. That would be so sweet. He'd know when not to answer so he didn't answer his insurance agent or something while wasted. He was pretty sure his car insurance had suddenly gone up a bit just because he answered the wrong phone call at the wrong time in the evening.

"...oh, uhm, I'm not sure. Because I'm a good answerer?" He wasn't, but he didn't know either.

"Ha. You wish. Your answers suck," she informed him almost snottily. But then she added, with a sudden grin, "Then again, I suppose my questions suck." She turned away, smile evaporating, to look at the infamous cookie kiosk, where a couple mall employees were cleaning up Little Miss Vomit's mess.

She wondered why she was still sitting on the bench, talking to some random guy about her weird problem. Normally she'd just get up and walk away, maybe even while he was in mid-sentence. Why does this guy even care about your problems, Maddy? she asked herself. Hell, what is he even doing here?

Her eyes trained then to the closed CutCo stand not far away, and then they turned back to the man sitting next to her. Specifically, they trained to his shirt, reading the logo. Her eyes then returned to his face. "Slacking on the job, are we?" she asked, her eyebrows raised.

"Oh. I... guess they do," he confessed, which he guessed explained why he wasn't smart enough to realize that this was a rather misguided adventure. He looked gloomily back at his cart, hoping that the smell from the girl's vomit wouldn't linger - the last thing he needed to be around for the next two hours and fifteen minutes was the sickening smell of vomit and cookies. Maybe if no one went near the cookie kiosk, though, he could get in line fast enough so that he wouldn't have to call it an actual break (he wasn't calling this a break, either, but more of a short leave deigned by God Himself).

He slouched over, leaning his elbows onto his knees. When she asked about why he wasn't working, he replied, "Cookies and puke mixed smell worse than I thought they would." He shrugged, and then looked over towards her. "Just shopping, I guess?"