Cynthia Rylant's Checkouts

“You can close your eyes to the things you don’t want to see, but you can’t close your heart to the things you don't want to feel” ~ Johnny Depp. This quote would have been great advice to our main character in the short story Checkouts by Cynthia Rylant. In the beginning of the story, the red headed girl with the orange bow hates how perfect her new house is. When at the checkout line at a grocery store she is intrigued by a boy that is imperfect and disheveled and immediately falls in love with him. She tries to shut the boy out of her heart, unsure of her feelings. The girls indecisiveness, obliviousness, and discontentment, force her to move on from the boy.

How many times has someone truly wanted something but they didn’t know how

. . She interested him because her hair was red and thick, and in it she had placed a huge orange bow, nearly the size of a small hat.”(Rylant) Both the boy and the girl where too oblivious to realize that there were in fact sparks flying around, as if it were the fourth of july. Even after this grocery store encounter, the girl with the orange bow couldn’t bother to check the time so she could visit him when he was working, instead of not seeing him there for a month. “Incredibly, it was another four weeks before they saw each other again. As fate would have it, her visits to the supermarket never coincided with his schedule to bag. Each time she went to the store, her eyes scanned the checkouts at once, her heart in her mouth. And each hour he worked, the bag boy kept one eye on the door, watching for the red-haired girl with the big orange bow.”(Rylant) This girl could have saved herself a lot of heartbreak if she just remembered to look and see what time it