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“You know how when we’re good, we’re good? I mean, we’ve each run this place before.”

Her voice had a tone of hope and I latched on. “Yeah?”

“And you know all we have to do to get sent home is to start waving tampons around…”

“Yeah.” Burton apparently had no sisters and perhaps had never had a mom. If someone told me he’d been spawned from the gunk that lives under a refrigerator I would politely nod and say, ‘Do go on.’ I could tell where she was going, however— “He’s not that stupid, Lacey. If we ditch now, he’ll fire us.”

“Only ifbothof us go. Which is whyoneof us should go.” She held up a dramatic hand. “If the other stays and covers for them?—”

“He’ll never know,” I finished. I was smart—but Lacey was a goddamn super-genius. Which was why she was my best friend, now that Sarah wasn’t around. “Same way we choose everything?” I said, making a fist and bouncing it on my other open hand.

“Of course!” She made the gesture back.

“One, two, three—go!” we said in unison. I kept my fist in my hand, and she shot hers flat.

Without a word, she reached over and put her ‘paper’ on top of my ‘rock.’

“Winner winner chicken dinner!”

“Ugh, you sound like Coach.”

She’d already danced up and was reaching for her bag. “Don’t be a sore loser, Jessie.”

“I’m not, I’m not. I’m more jealous that you get to leave here, honestly, even though I’m sure the party will be fantastic. I hear Liam’s brothers installed a unicorn with a beer tap in its horn that trots out at midnight.”

Lacey beamed at me, Snax Shax cap doffed. “If he does, I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.”

“You’d better. I want details. Excessive details. Who gets drunk, who pukes, who makes out with who—everything. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“And if you start dating Liam somehow at the end of this, I’m going to have to hate you forever. I just want you to know.”

She punched the paper with her name in and out of the time-clock. “Just try to keep me from getting fired, will you?”

“I’ll do a good job.”

She gave me a hug, and then ran down the hall for the Shax back exit.

“Don’t forget to look good!” I yelled after her as sarcastically as possible.

She laughed and turned around to shout, “I love you!” at the same time as she flipped me off.

I waited the precise two minutes I had left on my break and then went back out onto the floor. Burton was there, his grin as greasy as the fries he was pushing across the counter.

“There you are—they’re in the weeds on the drive-thru—” He started talking and then blinked. “Where’s Lacey?”

“About that—” I make sure I took on a worried look, the kind of look that said ‘I don’t want to tell you this in front of the customers but we may have just fried a rat accidentally-on-purpose.’ He keyed onto that and stepped behind the side wall with me.

“What’s up?” he said, doing his best to look managerial.

“Lacey—she—it was bad, Burton, it was really bad—like you know how sometimes you just get that awful feeling inside of you like your period’s going to be massive, like your vagina’s holding back a Red Sea? And then all of a sudden it comes out? In a tidal wave of blood and chunky things? We’re talking a three-tamponsituation, Burton, at least, like—I don’t know—I went into the bathroom with her and I took one look and I was all, ‘Lacey, you’ve got to go home. You’ll be anemic at the least, and at the worst, shit, that could’ve been a baby-arm’. I dunno.” I shook my head, horrified. “We flushed it too fast. I just don’t know.”

The look on Burton’s face then—it was better than Sarah’s three-chin photo. His head was pulled so far back I think he had four. “Get back out on the line, Jessica.”

“Yessir,” I said, and trotted to do as I was told.

The rest of the night was the same as every other Friday night at the Shax. Incompetent coworkers, deliberately so or otherwise, idiots queued up out the door for their pre-made-pre-cooked-recooked slabs of beef. People who wanted no salt on their fries, like that was going to be the difference between them and their incipient heart attack, who didn’t understand that that meant waiting at least an extra seven minutes for new ones because somehow we hadn’t hired any pixies or other wee folk capable of individually dusting salt off our current regulation fries. College kids stumbling in drunk and puking into our trashcans, people getting into fights in the parking lot, someone loudly claiming they got shorted change—it was Darius behind the counter, and if he had, I wouldn’t blame him—in short, the glorious regular weekend shitshow.