Page 10 of Electricity

I woke to my mom coming into my room and zinging up the blinds. She hadn’t properly calculated the extent of her hangover—she wounding stepping back like a vampire in the daylight, hissing. “Get up.”

“What?”

“Time for your shift.”

I blinked awake and looked at my clock—one of those black cats with the swinging eyes and tail. It was four-thirty. The last thing I remembered was crawling into bed and willing myself to sleep because sleeping was better than thinking anymore.

“Mom, can I please call in sick?” I put a hand to my head.

“I’m not rewarding your bad decisions, Jessica.”

“Please, Mom.” It was like there was a drum-session happening inside my skull.

“I can drop you off. Lacey can bring you home.”

“But Lacey’s still in the hospital, Mom.”

“All the more reason for you to go into work. They’ll be short, without her.”

I writhed in bed pathetically. “Can I have my phone back? Maybe she’s better? I could call her?—”

She gave me a look that made it clear what the chances of that happening were. “I’ll be in the car. Don’t keep me waiting,” she said. Then she left the room, and I started hunting for my uniform on my floor.

I hadn’t washed my uniform since the last time I’d worn it on Friday—it still smelled like sweat and fry-grease.

But what smelled worse than it did was my mother’s Buick—if the ‘before’ segment of a no-smoking ad was scratch-and-sniff, it’d probably smell like me.

I coughed loudly as I settled in and got my seat-belt on.

I waited until my mom pulled into the parking lot to ask the obvious question. “How am I getting home?”

“You can catch a ride with someone.”

“And what if there’s not anyone who can bring me back?”

“Then you can call me. I can get off early on a Sunday.”

“Call you—with what phone?”

“There’s one in the Snax Shax office, I’m sure of it.” I inhaled to plead my case, but she cut me off with a glare. “I made it just fine through my childhood without a phone—and you’re still grounded.”

“Fine,” I said, and shut the door.

I trudged into the back of the Shax, slammed the door behind me the way I couldn’t slam the Buick’s without getting grounded more, and walked to my locker.

I had a ferocious headache. I hadn’t eaten all day, or had anything to drink now that I thought about it—and something about being here, the smell, the trapped feeling, general desperation—I pulled away from my locker and looked around, sure I was seeing things.

Everything was blurry, a little shiny, like there was too much sun, even though we were indoors.

Darius came into the break room and took me in. “Female problems?” he asked.

The look I gave him then could have broiled hamburgers.

Darius, Raj, Joey, and I presented ourselves to Burton prior to our shift start. He looked pointedly at me.

“Where’s Lacey?”

I flushed. “Her mom didn’t call?”

“No. Why?”

The weight of what I knew—what I absolutely was not allowed to tell anyone else—pressed against the roof of my mouth. I used the first plausible lie I could think of. “She has appendicitis.”

Burton stared at me, and I felt my face going red. “Really?”

“Scouts honor,” I said and made a vague sign of a cross over my chest.

Burton then did his best to impersonate some sort of rallying figure, the kind of man who brought his team together for the final play in the championship game.

“Listen up,” he said, pacing up and down our line. “We’re down a person, but we’ve worked through worse before. We can do this. I know we can.”

Apparently Lacey secretly piloted nuclear submarines instead of the fry station. Who knew.

“You’ve got this,” he said emphatically. We all looked at each other awkwardly. Only Raj dared break the silence.

“Yeah. We’ll be fine.”

Burton smiled at this, as though his leadership had pulled us up from the brink. “Gooooooo Bisons!”

“Gooooooo Bisons,” the rest of us said, as sarcastically as possible.

Burton either did not notice this, or did a really good job of pretending not to, and we quickly dispersed to our stations.

I stood in front of the fries, scooping them from their paper bags, carefully pouring them into the fry basket, which then got dropped in hot grease.

I felt Burton’s presence looming nearby.

I hoped by ignoring him I could avoid whatever interaction this was going to be, and went on shaking the fry-basket like he wasn’t there.

“Jessica,” he said, interrupting me with a hand on my arm.

“Yeah?”

“Tell Lacey not to bother coming back.”

“But—” I sputtered, just like the grease I shook. “She has a—” and my voice drifted off, looking for the right word.

“I don’t care. Two unauthorized absences in one week? She’s a liability, and you can tell her that I said so.”

I shrugged his hand away. “Like she wanted to work here anyways.”

He inhaled to say something to me—but if the Shax went two men down, there was no amount of speechifying that would save it. I watched him bite his tongue, and walk away.

Sunday evenings weren’t so bad. It was still storming, the rain cut down on the crowds of kids after soccer practices and made the evening church rush of people who’d gone to late services mostly chose the drive-thru.

We could’ve done it without Burton’s help—would’ve rather, if Burton were giving us an option—but he insisted on working the register in the vague hope that his future wife would come in, with an endless hunger for free fries that only he could fill.

What we got instead was half of the baseball team.

“Well hello guys!” Burton wasn’t that far out of school himself, so he ought to know that pandering to the cool kids could never, would never, make you cool, and yet apparently he couldn’t help himself. “What do Redson’s finest want tonight?”

“Oh God,” Darius muttered under his breath behind me. I turned around and gave him the look I would’ve given Lacey if she were there.

Danny, Mason, Chase, Nathan, Bruce, and Liam were approximately half the popular kids at our school, and the other half would be once they made varsity.

They had nicknames like Lefty, and Benz, and Bowser, based on assorted physical attributes, cars owned, and family dogs.

Seeing them together reminded me of a calendar I’d seen the last time the Buick was in the shop—Danny’d been the action pose for January, one of his hands pointing a bat toward the horizon, the other hand held up to channel God.

And they’d all been at Liam’s party—I’d seen them there myself on ZoomBoom. My heart started thumping a mile a minute, and I grabbed hold of the counter and swayed. My headache, which’d been plain old bad before, now scaled the heights of Mount Everest. Little pre-migraine lights began to twinkle.

“Mason,” Danny said, and Mason followed his team captain’s unspoken command, pushing his way forward to order half the menu.

Burton’s hands were dancing happily over the register until he looked at me. “What’re you waiting for? Get some fries going.”

Danny put both hands on the counter and leaned in, looking into the back as I started a fresh basket. “Nice place you have here.”

Burton’s chest swelled with pride. “Thanks—I saw the last game. That was something else.”

“It was,” Danny agreed, pushing himself back. His white-blonde hair glinted under the fluorescent light.

“Don’t wait here,” Burton fluttered, lest they be inconvenienced in the slightest. “Go get your sodas—we’ll bring it out when everything’s ready.”

Within the next ten minutes, Raj and I loaded up three trays full of fries and assorted half-pound burgers, and then after that all the guys in the kitchen looked at me expectantly.

I growled quietly, deep inside my throat. “What, because I’m a girl I get to be the waitress?”

“Jessica, just do something for once without complaining,” Burton demanded.

I frowned at all of them, “Fine,” I snarled, and went through the door that let us kitchen gnomes out into the dining room’s real world.