“Reggie! I didn’t know if you were going to show up.” My wonderfully neurotic boss greeted me as I came through the back door. Her brown hair was soaked in grease, and she had a wrench in hand, which worried me because she’d broken her index finger using the register last month.
“I’m one minute late, Peyton. Literally. It’s five-oh-one.”
“Ice cream machine’s down. Something is wrong with the crank,” she said in that panicky, the-sky-is-falling way that she had mastered over years of being a total nutjob. “The new guy hasn’t gotten here yet, and there’s no one at the window.”
“New guy?”
“Mr. Banks is making Carla go on maternity leave.”
Mr. Banks, the owner, was this absurdly rich dude who owned a bunch of small businesses and lived by the pond, which was a huge deal in Flashburn, because there was this unwritten law that only elitists were allowed to live by the enchanted swamp of fish piss. His daughter, Carla, had worked at Oinky’s since we were in seventh grade. She was this stuck-up pageant queen/Pilates junkie that I’d had the honor of schooling with from kindergarten to junior year at Hawkesbury. Thankfully, we never talked much. But in the rare yet unavoidable conversations we did have, the only logical takeaway was that her favorite objects were ones she could see her reflection in and ohmigodtotally was her life’s motto. I’d credited it to sweet poetic justice when she got knocked up by some mysterious loser from across town and blew up like a float at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Listening to her blast Taylor Swift from glittery iPod speakers while I did all the work was taking a hefty toll on my patience.
“I’m going to go look for a bolt in the back room,” Peyton said, turning the wrench in what was clearly the wrong direction. “When the new guy gets here, show him how to use the register.”
Show him how to touch a button and open a drawer. Got it.
“Okay. Let me know if you need any help.”
I sat down in the folding chair beside the window and stared out at the empty parking lot. I was just beginning to admire the weeds growing beside the telephone pole when there was a knock on the back door. The guy actually knocked. Knocked as if he would be interrupting something important. At Oinky’s. In Flashburn.
Newbies.
“Come in!” I yelled.
The door stuck a little like it always did. He shoved it with his shoulder and stumbled inside, practically tripping over Peyton’s toolbox, which was sprawled out beside the ice cream machine.
It was a virtual impossibility that his unwashed hair and puckered lips could go unrecognized. Not far behind a greater virtual impossibility that, evidenced by his subtle smirk, I was pretty recognizable myself. Once I got a better look at him, I couldn’t decide if he looked more or less idiotic in the Oinky’s uniform compared to his THE RENEGADE DYSTOPIA T-shirt. It was probably a tie.
“We meet again, reptile,” I greeted him, no doubt committing some sort of crime of flirtation by acknowledging him first.
“Chick with the butch name,” he replied, leaning against the machine to try to look cool or something that really wasn’t working for him. “Shall I call this fate or destiny?”
“You should call this an underpopulated town.”
“Fate it is.”
I pointed to the chair beside me. “Sit. We’re going to be exercising your fingers.”
“And here I was thinking this is a family business.”
“You obviously haven’t met Oinky.”
He sat down, crossing his knees one over the other in the daintiest fashion.
I couldn’t help myself. “What are you, a woman? Sit like you have something between your legs.”
He grinned that same unconcerned grin from the pharmacy. “Don’t make me report you for sexual harassment.”
“That wouldn’t be the worst thing to happen to me today.”
“And the worst would be?”
“Waking up.”
He looked mildly surprised for a moment, like he didn’t know what kind of response I was expecting from him. And then, as if on cue, he erupted with laughter. “I’m starting to think you waking up was the worst thing that happened to me today.”
“Did you just wish me dead? It usually takes people at least a week to get to that point.”
“You must hang around some very patient people.”
“Oh, like you’re some gem.”
“Well, I don’t joke about suicide.”
“I wasn’t joking about suicide, I was joking about death.” I grunted. “Whatever. Congratulations on your unshakable moral compass, Mother Teresa.”
“My moral compass is far from unshakable,” he muttered to himself.
For the next few minutes, we engaged in the kind of stimulating conversation Peyton would have been proud to witness, taking orders and making change. Riveting stuff. After he got the hang of four quarters equals a dollar, he serviced one of our few-and-far-between customers, who had ordered a large dreamsicle cone; Snake had to sell her on a blueberry snow cone after she pitched a fit about an ice cream parlor not selling ice cream. She left cursing about how she was going to warn the masses of this crime against the dessert industry, and then hopped on a hot pink motor scooter and embarked on her mission.
“That’s something you don’t see every day.” Snake laughed. “An ice cream vigilante.”
“Reggie!” Peyton shouted from the back. She ran into the room with black gunk smeared on her face and a screwdriver clasped in her palm. “Oh, hi there,” she said to Snake. “I would shake your hand, but—”
“You’re gross,” Snake finished. She looked embarrassed. “I would give you a hand, but mine are burned-out from all this strenuous button pushing.”
“Has it been busy?”
“Snake almost got stabbed with a plastic spoon handle.”
“What?” she gasped. Peyton lived in a very nonactual actuality where exaggeration and sarcasm were as foreign as the execution of DIY.
“I saw my entire life flash before my eyes,” he added. “Which was basically a series of mistakes with an occasional what-the-hell moment.”
Peyton eyed him but didn’t put much stock in his behavior, considering he was fresh off of spending time with me. She always said that my attitude was a contagious and terminal disease that infected anyone who talked with me for more than five minutes. It had to have at least been ten, so poor Snake was already experiencing symptoms of my dark cloud mentality.
She stuck the chunk of metal inside the machine and pulled a lever, which released a cloud of smoke. She uttered an obscene word. “I’m going to have to call Mr. Banks. I’ll be outside if you guys need me.”
Snake sat down by the register and drew a Twizzler from his pocket. “Twizzler?”
“Are you serious? What’s the deal with the Twizzlers?”
“You don’t like Twizzlers?”
“I don’t tote them around like loose change, no.”
“They help me.” He wrapped one around his finger while he balanced another between his lips. “I used to chew.”
“Tobacco? So you replace nicotine with strawberry artificial flavoring. Natural substitute.”
“My moms told me the chemicals would satisfy the craving.”