When Corinne was young, she saw the universe in spite of the world. She pulled back the curtains and gazed out the window of her second-floor room, past the gabled roofs of her neighborhood, beyond the scruffy treeline and battered mountain range, out at a milk-colored sky and all that lay behind it. She was a nanoscale atom in a limitless cosmos, and that was proof she was free. Being tiny was her greatest advantage.
She had always looked at everything differently. Take the telephone, for example. It wasn't a device with which to call a friend, or her Grandma out in Memphis, or order a delivery pizza. To fifteen-year-old Corinne, the family's pushbutton telephone was an instrument of possibility. Ten digits meant 10 billion unique combinations -- an entire world of people to meet, talk to and understand. Sometimes, she would press random numbers until somebody picked up on the other end, and then she'd engage her new friends in lengthy conversations that could last for hours. It was seen to that this phase didn't last for very long.
Late in high school, Corinne battled a guidance counselor named Mr. Redwood. Over and over, he pushed her for a commitment toward a college, a future major, a career path. As she sat in her room among tall dusty heaps of university brochures, she knew that it was nothing personal, that he was just doing a job. She knew she couldn't be good at everything, or grasp every opportunity. But still, each path she chose to venture down allowed the world to build yet another boundary wall that further obscured her horizons.
In electron chemistry as in human society, free radicals can't and don't last. It was inevitable that Mr. Redwood and the rest of the world would win. Over the course of five quick years, Corinne was finally brought into line: she attended the University of Tennessee, majored in political science, and was a sorority member by her junior year. A hollow parade of identical, clean-cut men passed through her life, and each got what they wanted out of her.
And now, here she was at 5:27 pm Central Standard Time, alone in a tiny claustrophobic Japanese hybrid automobile, idling in a numbered space in an exurban commuter parking lot. Corinne's first car was an orange 1978 Ford Mustang II that she purchased off a neighbor's lawn -- it matched her hair, she always told people, and it was the best 150 dollars she ever spent. Back then, she would drive and drive until she was somewhere she'd never been before. Now, her life had degenerated into a tiny, insubstantial figure-eight loop: she worked to pay for the car that she drove to work.
There in parking space 1670, the plastic interior closing in around her, Corinne's shoulders squared and tightened against the seat, her breathing becoming thick and determined. She gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles were white and bloodless.
This was the moment that she decided that it was time to fight back.
