In that shared moment, he continued to lock my gaze to his, holding me prisoner with his eyes, and I suddenly realized he was going to kiss me. Oh my God this is it! My heart slammed against my ribcage, probably so violently that Trip could actually see it. The seconds of quiet seemed to stretch out into eternity as I sat frozen, staring into that beautiful face, waiting for him to move first.
Without another word, he bounded off the bed and returned the snowglobe to my dresser, breaking the moment. “Hey, I’m starving. Whaddya got to eat around here?”
Okay, then!
I resisted the urge to nudge the snowglobe a half inch into its rightful place and instead led Trip back to the kitchen.
He sank into one of the chairs and cracked his Coke while I called out an inventory from the pantry. After much deliberation, he finally settled for some regular Doritos, lamenting the fact that they weren’t Cool Ranch. Through a mouthful of chips, he started, “So, I was thinking... this assignment we have to do.”
“Yeah?”
“Well, I figure most everybody is gonna get up there and give some stupid report, you know, just read off a piece of paper or something.”
“That’s normally how one gives a report, yes.”
“Yeah, but we’re supposed to do a visual, too.”
“Uh-huh. I was planning on picking up some posterboard or-”
“Well, I was thinking of doing something a little different, maybe.”
I watched Trip lounge back in his chair with a mischievous little grin on his face and realized I’d be submitting to whatever scheme he was cooking up.
I was in no position to deny him anything when he looked at me like that.
Chapter 11
THE GRIFTERS
As it turned out, Trip’s scheme entailed the brilliant idea to film our own version of Romeo and Juliet, set in Norman, New Jersey, circa 1990.
We spent the rest of that first afternoon deciding on how we were going to answer some of those questions in Mason’s booklet and outlining our filming schedule.
The plan required me to “borrow” a video camera from work, which I did without guilt. It’s not like I was going to keep the thing, but at the cost of renting it for the next couple months, I may as well have bought one of my own. At the pathetic minimum hourly wage Totally Videos was paying me, that thought wasn’t even a possibility. Because they paid me such a lousy salary, I decided to justify my liberation of said camera as an early holiday bonus. It just happened to be three months ahead of the holiday, is all.
The next day, we found out that Trip had gotten the job at Totally Videos and was scheduled to start on Monday!
Our thoughts on that news were that it was best to keep our association under wraps in order to remain employed. But Martin, sleuthing genius that he was, became hip to the fact that we were friends on that very first day. I suppose we weren’t necessarily as stealth about our relationship as we had hoped to be.
Trip had become easily bored with register duty, a detail compounded by the fact that the store was having a slow day. He decided to make better use of his time by hiding behind the display racks of the drama section and flinging Skittles at me.
I tried to ignore him until the candies started coming by the handful, causing me to drop the pile of tapes I’d been returning to their proper spots on the shelves.
I grabbed the empty box of Terms of Endearment off the shelf and chucked it at him, just narrowly grazing his head as he ducked out of the way, knocking over a bin of rolled movie posters.
That prompted him to hurl the entire, theatre-sized bag of Skittles in retaliation, sending a rainbow of tiny projectiles pinging off the shelves and scattering across the floor.
Martin had been in his office during our little war, but he must have been watching us on the security cameras, because he chose that moment to come storming out the door. Upon seeing the two of us laughing our asses off amidst a pile of videos, posters and candy, we guessed the jig was up. He commanded us in a booming voice to, “Clean up this mess before any customers come in and see it!”
At first, I thought that Martin could have refrained from jumping down our throats. I mean, obviously we were planning on cleaning up our mess, and we sure didn’t need some dorky kid just out of high school chastising us like he thought he was actually some sort of authority figure. I thought that maybe if he slathered on some Oxy every once in a while and got himself a decent haircut, he could find himself a girlfriend and lighten up a little.
But then suddenly, I kind of felt bad for him. The poor guy was only trying to do his job while having to deal with us two idiots all day.
Trip must have been thinking the same thing, because neither one of us busted his balls and just went about the chore of picking Skittles off the carpet.
But even scouring about the floor on our hands and knees was actually pretty fun. Trip made working there bearable for the first time, even if from then on, we toned it down a bit for Martin’s sake. Having him there proved to make work less of a trial and more of an adventure.