Two Percent

As Erin pulls off in her car from buying her Win For Life lottery ticket at her local convenience store that she’d gone to for years, she recalled all the recent news about how the power and mega jackpots are the biggest in history. As she drives home, she has that same old familiar feeling of 2% hope and 98% this is never gonna happen. She sighs hopelessly, “I don’t know why I bother, but hey….you never know”, she whispers to herself, mocking the all too familiar lottery commercials. She pulls up to her apartment building and tries to find an open available space, something that proves often difficult on weekday nights. It’s almost 10pm, its eerily dark outside, and almost none of the streetlights around her building worked. After two minutes of circling the block, she finds an open spot in front of a giant heap of garbage. “Perfect”, she whispers in frustration. Erin pulls into the empty space, turns off her engine, grabs her purse and her mask, and steps out of the car weary of any rats that may be near the garbage heap on the side of her car. Erin growls as she dreads the block and a half walk around to the front entrance of her building. As she reaches the one block mark, she suddenly realizes that she left her lottery ticket on her passenger seat. “Crap”, she yelled out in frustration. She turns around to look down the long, dark and empty block that her car was parked. She saw the familiar garbage heap and said to herself, “Nope, I’ll get it in the morning”.

After walking up 6 flights of a smelly staircase because the elevator had been broken for 3 months then walking past neighbors who insists upon leaving their garbage in the hallway, Erin opens the door to her studio apartment on the top floor of a 6 floor very shabby building. “Home stinky home”, she utters to herself within a long and slow exhale. She flips on the light switch, kicks off her shoes at the door, hangs up her coat on the DIY hooks she put on the wall when she moved in 3 years ago, walks over to her black futon and plops down exhaustingly. It seemed as though this is the only time of day that Erin gets to reflect, after all, her solitude combined with the dim quiet of her apartment and the background noise and echoes of arguing neighbors, screaming children, barking dogs and loud music never fail to set the stage for a loathsome recap of one’s life. First, Erin played a quick daydream like snippet of how a billion dollars would change her life. That was that 2% of hope. As she laid her head back on the cushion of her futon, the 98% took over and her mind replayed the last 10 years of her life like a long poorly written story line of a movie. She thought about being 10 years old in the dark of her bedroom closet as she tries to hide from the sound of her dad abusing her mom. She thinks about the 5 years after, when her mom finally ran away from her dad. She remembered the front door of the first shelter they’d ever stayed in because there was a large picture on the front door of a little girl running in a field of flowers into the arms of her parents, and she could never forget the feeling of hope when she thought that would one day be her, free, happy and loved. For some reason, the other what seemed like 10-20 shelters were a blur for her, and for that she was thankful. Her mind drifted to when she turned 18 and got a job in a CVS right when they were building up the new store. She remembered the back breaking work of filling the shelves with all the products, and “facing”, what retail stores consider placing the products neatly on the shelves as presentable as possible for the customers, and the thought alone made her cringe. She thought about the high hopes she had for college around that time then the death of her mom just stealing that hope right from under her leaving her in a stagnant state of being lost forever with CVS being the last ship she’d ever sail again with no land in sight, just a vast ocean of cashier service, shelf stocking and facing.

When Erin opened her eyes, she was jolted with panic as she realized she’d fallen asleep right there on her futon in her work clothes, but a rush of relief calmed her racing heart as she looked at the time on her phone and realized her alarm was set to go off in 5 mins. With a stiff neck and a sore lower back, she stretched and made her way to the bathroom to shower and get ready for work.

As Erin stepped out of her building, she hesitated to remember where she’d parked her car the night before. When she finally remembered, she began walking and remembered the garbage heap and the lottery ticket she left on her passenger seat. That 2% of hope combined with the mood-altering effects of daylight gave her a wave of a slight euphoria as she made her way to her car. As Erin reached her car and clicked it to unlock, a slight feeling of panic came over her as she realized she heard the beep but not the familiar sound of her door unlocking, indicating that she forgot to lock the doors last night. She paused and looked in the backseats of her car and then the front for anything suspicious or unfamiliar. She noticed she didn’t see her lottery ticket in the passenger seat but instead, a small black rectangular item that almost camouflaged with her black seats. She looked around puzzled. She looked up the block, then down and walked around to the garbage heap to look at the side of her car. After a whole minute of her mind racing through as many possibilities as it could, she opened her driver side door, slowly sat down in her seat, closed the door and stared at what appeared to be a little black book.

Erin always left for work early so she always had time to spare, which was a good thing in this case because she was completely frozen and leery about picking up this foreign object that what she imagined was left in her car by someone while they were stealing her lottery ticket. Erin had heard of too many stories about women being abducted and followed and tricked into touching things on their cars with poisons on them that knock you out, so she decided to drive to her job and park so at least she’d be in a familiar place with people around. So, she left the book where it was and drove off.

On her way to work, Erin used what she’d learned in too many movies about being tailed by cars and kept a close eye on the cars behind her through her rear-view mirror to see if she were being followed or if anything seemed suspicious. Every car that was behind for a significant amount of time always ended up turning off the road she was on and by the time she reached her jobs parking lot, it didn’t seem as if anyone was following her. With about 30 minutes to punch in, Erin took her time in deciding to pick up the book. Remembering that her lottery ticket had been taken, she picked up her phone to check if there had been any winners of the huge historic jackpot. As she read the words on the first news headline of her google page, “Twenty thousand Win For Life ticket sold in Michigan”, she felt an ironic sense of relief knowing that at least her stolen ticket couldn’t have been the winner, being that she lived in Maryland. She briefly skimmed over the winning numbers (4-26-42-50-60-24). Realizing that it was almost time to start her shift, Erin decided to pick up the little black book and open it. On the first notebook-like lined page was written the words “For Life” and 6 numbers (4-26-42-50-60-24). Erin turned the page and saw another 6 numbers and then another 6 numbers on the third page. As Erin flipped through the book, she realized that every page of the book was written upon and they all had 6 numbers on them, from the first page to the last. Erin’s first thought about what the numbers stood for was lottery numbers. She flipped back to the first page then picked up her phone to go back to the google link on the winning numbers she just saw. As she looked back and forth from the book to the numbers on her phone her heart began to pound violently hard in her chest and a rush of heat filled her body as she realized the numbers on the first page of the book and the winning numbers of the last nights lottery win were the same. Confused with emotion she went from thinking “wait did I win”, to realizing the ticket had been sold somewhere else and all she had was the actual winning numbers written in an unfamiliar book. After a few minutes of not knowing what to do or think, Erin calmed down, and reality of the time brought her back to focus. She gathered her things, stuffed the book in her purse and went inside for work.

All day long Erin couldn’t help but to be disconnected with thoughts about the book, the lottery, the numbers, why someone would steal her lottery ticket, why someone would leave her a book with lottery numbers in it, how convenient it would’ve been if she’d gotten the book before she’d bought her lottery ticket the night before, and most importantly, what all the other numbers meant.

That evening, during the last hour of her shift, the store was quiet with only a few people in the back by the pharmacy. Erin was alone at the front of the store cashiering, and a very well-dressed man walked up to the counter. In Erin’s mind he looked like someone who was too important to get something from a CVS himself and would have an assistant to run errands like this. His eyes looked as if he was grinning but his mask hid his face and for some reason it made Erin uncomfortable. He reached for a stick of gum and set it on the counter for her to ring up. The man used his credit card to pay, took his receipt from her and walked away. Then Erin, looking down after thinking the man had gone, heard him say from about 6 feet away, “the next jackpot is on Friday, 2nd chance 2nd page” and he walked out. Erin froze as she placed the man’s words within the missing pieces of her recent events and her heart once again pounded in her chest while a rush of heat vibrated through her whole body.

The next days, fear and insecurity kept Erin from sleeping and she imagined she was either in the twilight zone or dreaming, but she knew that when Friday came, she’d play the numbers on the second page of that book. After work on Friday, she went and bought the ticket. When Erin woke up Saturday morning, her usual feeling of 2% hope and 98% this is never gonna happen, was seemingly reversed. She picked up her phone to check the winning numbers, and the google news headline read, “Lucky $20,000 Win For Life ticket sold in Maryland”. She’d won. Erin, elated and numb from disbelief reached in her purse for the little black book…… but it was no where to be found.