Katie first saw the display in the skyway food court, put together hastily overnight in the open space between two restaurants and manned by a single woman who looked as though she could do with a vacation herself. The sign over the bleach-blonde, blank-eyed employee's face said, 'Win the ULTIMATE VACATION!!' in bright rainbow letters that promised fun and excitement with an almost threatening intensity to them, but nonetheless, Katie wandered over to see what they were offering. She hadn't had a vacation in so long that she was almost starting to forget what sunshine felt like.
(The sun shines warmly on her skin now, but she doesn't notice. Behind her dark sunglasses, she stares dreamily into the distance, not even registering her surroundings as her naked body tans in the summer heat.)
The sign next to the woman ('Lizzie', according to her name tag) was filled with more exclamation points, along with handfuls of words emphasized in bold text and oversized fonts until the whole thing made Katie feel a bit like someone was shouting it at her at the top of their lungs. 'YOU can WIN an ALL-EXPENSES PAID VACATION to the destination of YOUR DREAMS!' It was a marked contrast to Lizzie's dull, slack expression and vacant, staring eyes, but Katie supposed that standing around all day handing out little slips of paper to people wasn't exactly the most fulfilling job in the world. If Katie had to do this for eight hours a day, she probably wouldn't look very excited either.
(She doesn't know it, but she looks exactly like Lizzie right now. Her muscles are too relaxed even to smile, her gaze turned so deeply inward to her own pleasure that the world around her is a mere blur.)
Katie skimmed through the paragraphs of over-enthusiastic text, picking up only that a travel agency with a bland and forgettable name ('Siesta Travel', but she forgot it before she even walked away from the display) was offering a free package tour to a mystery destination to one hundred lucky travelers. They promised 'SUN! SURF! And ADVENTURE!', but Katie already suspected that this was the company's way of getting rid of a bunch of tickets to Podunk, Idaho that they'd been suckered into taking on by an overeager Chamber of Commerce. Nonetheless, she took a slip of paper from Lizzie's outstretched fingers and promised to bring it back the next day on her lunch hour. She stuffed it into her purse and promptly forgot about it.
(Katie's purse is back in her hotel room, forgotten more thoroughly than the piece of paper ever was. In a few days it'll be gone, sold first to a consignment shop and from there to a tourist who won't believe her great deal. Katie won't notice. Katie won't care.)
She saw the display again the next day with a tiny wince of recollection, suddenly very much aware of the entry slip still sitting in the bottom of her purse unfilled. Lizzie wasn't there to apologize to, though; she'd been replaced by another woman named 'Jennie' with identical bottle-blonde hair and an identical hollow-eyed stare. Jennie handed her another piece of paper, and rather than try to explain to the obviously uncaring woman what had happened to the previous contest entry, she simply took it and tossed it into her purse to join the first. The next day, she decided to get lunch from a food truck instead.
(Katie eats only when instructed now, her empty mind no longer really processing hunger or thirst. The only thing she knows is pleasure, pure and unending, shining so brightly in her head that the needs of her body are blissfully irrelevant.)
It wasn't until a few days later, when she went to the mall on a Saturday evening and saw another one of the Siesta Travel kiosks staffed by another blank-eyed blonde-'Daisy', according to this one's name tag-that she finally decided to fill out her entry slip. She was already starting to get some friendly warnings from her boss that any PTO she hadn't used by April would expire, and apparently HR got on his ass any time an employee didn't take all their time off. Katie guessed she could go ahead and take an all-expenses paid vacation to a fabulous land of sun, surf and adventure if it helped save Terry's ass from getting reamed.