Now, sitting in the darkness of the theater, I concentrated on facing forward, trying to take deep breaths and calm my racing heart. Even though I hadn’t been following the story in the least, I could tell that things were beginning to wind down. Just when I could feel my disappointment start to take hold, the stomach-plunging sadness that I’d gotten so excited for nothing, Henry reached across the armrest and held my hand, intertwining his fingers with mine.
In that moment, I knew that things had changed. Henry and I were, in fact, on my very first date. And we were no longer just simply friends.
chapter fourteen
“I’LL HAVE…” THE WOMAN IN THE BRIGHT PINK VELOUR HOODIE paused, squinting up at the snack bar menu. She drummed her fingers on the counter, deliberating. Even though it was cloudy and overcast and had been all morning, she had a bright white line of sunblock covering her nose. “A Diet Pepsi, small fries, and a cup of ice,” she finally said.
I turned back to where Elliot was standing by the grill, the spatula hanging slack by his side, all his attention focused on a thick paperback in his hands. “Fries!” I yelled back at him, and he nodded, setting the book aside. As I punched the woman’s order into the register, I explained, “We only have Diet Coke. And there’s a fifteen-cent cup charge for ice.”
She shrugged. “Fine.”
I glanced down at the register for a second, making sure I’d remembered to add the tax, which I hadn’t done for the first three days on the job. When Fred found out, he’d turned even redder than normal, and had to spend a day away from the fish, going over the receipts in the office and muttering. “Five ninety-five.” The woman handed me six, and I placed it in the register and slid a nickel across the counter to her, which she dropped in our nearly empty tip jar. “Thanks,” I said. “Should be ready in five.”
I turned to the soda jets behind me and started filling her cup, waiting until the foam died down before hitting the button again. I’d only been at the job about a week, but I seemed to have gotten the basics down.
I had decided that I would rather suffer Lucy’s wrath than disappoint my father, and was trying to make the best of the job. I got the hang of the scary industrial coffeemaker, essential for the senior-citizen power walkers who stopped by the beach at nine thirty sharp for decaf after their “workout.” Through trial and error, I figured out the fryer—and, as a result, now had a series of small burns on my arm, from where the grease splattered until I learned to avoid it. I learned the basics of the grill, but hadn’t had much chance to test them out yet.
“It’s the beach,” Elliot told me on my third day, when there was a lull in customers and he was showing me how the grill worked. “And the thing about food at the beach is that sand gets everywhere. And who wants sand in their cheeseburger?”
I thought about it, and made a face. “Not me.”
“Not anybody,” he said. “Trust me.” After working with Elliot for a few days I’d found, to my surprise, that I liked him. I’d been worried that he would side with Lucy, shunning me out of loyalty to her. But he wasn’t taking sides, which I was grateful for. He was patient with me when showing me the ropes, and was easy to talk to, even if he could be a little intense, especially about what he called “hard sci-fi.” Already I’d heard far more than I ever wanted to know about some show that seemed to feature an evil Muppet as the villain.
“See that?” he asked, flipping a burger with a large metal spatula, then twirling it in a way that made me think he may have watched Cocktail recently. I tried to give him what I hoped was an impressed smile. “People will get fries, because they’re protected in their little fry container. But we serve the burgers on plates. And if you’re going to set your plate down on your towel, you’re going to get sand in your burger. It’s a given.”
So I learned how to make burgers, even though I probably wouldn’t need to do it that often. I learned how much ice to put in the fountain sodas, and how to work the register, and how to open the snack bar in the morning and close it at night. But the biggest thing I learned was that Lucy could still hold a grudge.