by Rose, Katia
Seven
Renee
DICTION: A writer’s unique choice of specific words and phrases within a literary work
“Tahseen, my life is a mess.”
My best friend nudges my foot with hers where we’re lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling while Chance the Rapper plays from my phone. It’s our default hanging out spot whenever we’re at my house. We spent a lot of time at my house this summer. Venturing into the outside world is still a newfound skill of mine.
“A mess? Girl, your life is looking up! You did a sunrise yoga class today. You work at a cool bar you love and are really good at your job—and don’t say you’re not because I know you are.”
“How do you know that? You’ve never seen me working, and you don’t drink.”
“Doesn’t matter.” She sagely shakes her head, hair that’s frizzy like mine but not nearly as voluminous falling into her face. She blows out a huff of air to push the strands back into place. “I just know these things. Now stop interrupting. As I was saying, you just finished your first week at a cool job working with people you seem to like a lot—very a lot, in some cases.”
“Tahseen!”
The girl does not hold back or pull punches. It’s part of what makes her such a good poet. We met at one of the spoken word workshops back when were both in grade eleven, and we officially saved each other’s numbers in our phones as ‘bestie’ about a week after that.
She holds up her hands. “I’m just saying, I’m just saying. You’re more you than I’ve seen you in months. I don’t think you can call yourself a mess.”
“Thanks.” I pat her on the arm. “You’re the best.”
“Oh I know.” She does a little self-satisfied wiggle on the mattress. “So tell me more about Dylan.”
I groan. “I shouldn’t have anything to tell you about Dylan.”
“But you do,” she croons, batting her big brown eyes.
I give up on playing coy. Tahseen might have all the subtlety of a fireworks display, but her brazen approach is what makes our friendship work. She yanks me up out of the dark when I feel like all I do is keep falling. She breaks the silence when I need sound.
“Things have been so weird for the past few days. Ever since the potato incident—”
“I think you mean the four potato incident,” she cuts in.
“Right, right.” I can’t hold back a residual snort at the thought. “We haven’t really talked since then. I wouldn’t say he’s avoiding me, but it’s not like he says more than the normal boss greeting their employee bit to me every day.”
“And you want him to say more?”
I hesitate, chewing on my lip. “I shouldn’t. I really, really shouldn’t. This is so messed up. That place means a lot to him, and he could lose his job if...But I mean, it’s not like anything ‘if’ related is going to happen. I’m sure it’s all in my head. I’m like a stupid teenage girl with a crush again, only this time the consequences are so much more serious. I should quit. I should just find a new job.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Tahseen sits up and starts waving her hands around like she’s conjuring some sort of force field. I honestly don’t know what Tahseen is trying to convey with her hand gestures half the time; mostly they just seem like they’re supposed to look dramatic. “That escalated quickly. Let’s slow this down. You feel something for Dylan, right?”
“I shouldn’t.”
She pounces on me. “Renee Amélie Nyobé!”
“Okay, okay, I feel something, but I don’t even know what something is. Mostly I just...I want to talk to him. I want to spend time with him. Something about being around him is...It’s like remembering a dream you forgot. It’s like I’ve been walking around all day smiling and not knowing why, and then I see him and I think, ‘Oh, right.’”
“Reneeeee!” Tahseen throws herself completely on top of me and starts rolling us around the bed. “That is so cuuuuute!”
“Tahseen, we are both going to end up on the floor.” My voice is muffled by her shoulder where it’s mashed against my face.
“Shhhh. Let me have this moment. My parents don’t want me to date until I have my Masters, remember?”
“I’m not going to date him!” I protest.
“Indulge the fantasy, Renee.”
“That’s the point!” I manage to get her partially disentangled from me. “I can’t. I can’t have this fantasy. He’s my boss.”
“He’s also a human being who clearly cares about you and has the hots for you.” I smack her, but she keeps going. “It’s not like he’s the president, Renee. He’s not the CEO of Microsoft or something. It’s not going to be the end of his personal and professional life if you guys have a thing. Did you even sign anything about not dating co-workers?”
“He’s technically a manager not a co-worker, but...no. Nothing I signed was about that.”
“Look, Renee, I think this whole ‘Oh no, he’s my boss’ thing is just an excuse, on both your parts, for the real reasons you think you can’t date each other.”
I sit up against the headboard and cross my arms. “Is that so? And what would those reasons be?”
She taps her chin. “I, um, don’t know yet, but mark my words, I am so totally right about this.”
“What you are is so totally crazy.”
“But you love me.” She jumps up off the bed and grabs her headscarf from where she tossed it on the floor, then moves to stand in front of my mirror and wind the soft pink fabric into place. “Let’s get out of this house. It’s fall, and there are tasty Starbucks drinks to drink.”
Her love of Starbucks knows no bounds. When we’re not hanging out in my room, we’re hanging out at Starbucks. She’s on a first name basis with all the employees at every location within a five block radius of McGill University, where caffeine and whipped cream are fuelling her studies to become a family lawyer.
“You know, some people consider fall an excellent time to walk outside, go hiking, enjoy the leaves...”
She tips her chin up in the air. “Some people do not have a deep enough appreciation for Starbz.”
* * *
I manage to brush off Tahseen’s insights as typical ‘Tahseen Talk’ until halfway through my shift at the Taverne Toulouse the next day. The fading daylight is still streaming through the windows, catching on the glossy lacquer of the bar and the dark polished floors. The boards will be scuffed with footprints and dust tracked in from the sidewalk by the end of the night, but for now only a few tables are occupied, the couples and small groups speaking in quiet tones.
DeeDee’s using the opportunity to teach me how to do the evening cash out. We have to mime half the steps in the process since actually pushing the buttons on the machine will mess things up for the rest of the shift, so we don’t make much progress.
“Are you getting sick of me yet?” DeeDee asks with a laugh, after she finally gives up and says we can just put glasses away. “You’re probably wondering when they’re going to put you on a shift with someone else.”
“I’ve been hoping for it every day, but you keep showing up.”
She does a double take and then chuckles as she throws me a wink. “Sassy. I like it.”
I grin as I start sliding shot glasses into place. I’ve been feeling more and more at home here. The two weeks since my interview have been a rollercoaster, but just like Tahseen said, it’s somehow made me feel more myself than I have in months.
“I think you just earned your stereo rights, ma belle.”
“Stereo rights?”
She points to where the front of house sound system is set up, just beside the hall that leads to the back. “You get to pick the music for the rest of the shift. We’re supposed to stick to the official ‘playlist’”—she makes air quotes with her fingers—“but on dead days no one minds if we play what we want.”
“I can play anything?”
She tilts her head to the side and ponders. “Maybe not death metal. Monroe would not l
ike it if she came in and heard that.”
“Got it. Anything but death metal.”
I head to the sound system where a beat-up old iPhone used solely to stream music is docked. This part of the bar is always strange to stand in; you can hear what’s playing in the front and what the cooks have blasting in the kitchen. It usually sounds like a garbled mishmash of noise, but sometimes you end up with a pretty cool remix.
I find my account on the streaming app and scroll through my public playlists. I don’t obsessively curate them, but I have a few for different moods. I pick the one called ‘Hanging Out’—they also don’t have very original names—and head back over to start helping DeeDee again.
“This is good.” She’s already bobbing her head to the beat of the first song. “Who is this?”
I’m about to answer when a deep voice from the hall does it for me. I snap to attention at the sound, already tuned into him like a radio station.
“Who’s playing Chance the Rapper?”
“The new bartender is!” DeeDee shouts back. “She got stereo rights.”
Dylan emerges, glancing between the two of us. “What did she do to get those? You don’t give those away easy, DeeDee.”
She whips the towel she’s been using to dry the bar off. “She was sassy.”
Dylan cracks a smile as he looks at me again. It’s his smile, not the small talk smile he’s been flashing me whenever we’ve said hi these past few days, but the real, full Dylan smile that hits me like whiskey—meaning I start to splutter and stammer while a not-as-subtle-as-I’d-like blush creeps into my cheeks.
“She’s a sassy one, that Renee.” He says it to DeeDee, but his eyes don’t leave mine.
I feel the air thicken, the piano notes of ‘Same Drugs’ a metronome to count out the seconds of tense silence that stretch between us. My heartbeat pumps to the rhythm, calling out to join in the song, calling out for him to come closer.
“Ben là! Finally!” We rip our gazes away from each other at the sound of DeeDee’s shout. “That’s a big group. Time to watch Mamma DeeDee make some money.”
She swings her towel over her shoulder and sashays over to the far end of the bar, adjusting the hem of her crop top a little before greeting the group of six men who just walked in with a whistle. I watch as one by one they all fall under her spell. She’ll have them doing tequila shots in no time.
When I turn back to Dylan, the tension is gone. He’s standing there with a mildly disturbed expression.
“Mamma DeeDee?” he questions, in a ‘Do I really want to know?’ tone.
“Apparently that’s what she makes all the trainees call her.”
“Do you call her that?”
“Sometimes.” I force a chuckle, wondering if I imagined the moment that just passed between us. “DeeDee likes to be...indulged.”
“She’s about to get those customers to indulge her.”
We both watch her start pulling pints. The guys have foregone a table and are all grabbing seats at the bar.
“So,” Dylan comments, after we’ve both had our fill of watching DeeDee work her magic, “how long have you been listening to Chance?”
“Only about two years now. I wish I got into him sooner. I didn’t even know what I was missing.”
“I love the way he phrases things. You can read his lyrics and just know it’s him.”
“Exactly!” I’m bouncing on the balls of my feet with excitement I can’t be bothered to hide. I know way too few people who listen to Chance. “I feel like the genre—any genre, really—is so oversaturated that it’s hard to actually come across something unique. That’s not to say it’s hard to find things that are good, but there’s that tiny, tiny handful of people who have that...that thing, you know? And he’s one of them.”
“Yeah.” Dylan bobs his head, his goofy, overenthusiastic fan grin matching my own. “I agree. One hundred percent. Have you ever seen him live?”
“I wish!” I shake my fist with regret before I gasp. “Wait, don’t tell me you have. Oh my god, I would be so jealous I’d have to kill you.”
He holds up his hands. “Whoa, whoa, slow down there, righteous rap enthusiast. I haven’t, so there’s no need to murder me today.”
“I mean, I’d also plague you with questions about it before I killed you.”
“Now that I wouldn’t mind.” He scratches his chin, where just a bit of stubble is forming. He’s always shifted between scruff and clean shaven, even back when I was in high school. I was never able to decide which look I liked more. “I get the feeling we could talk about Chance the Rapper for a long, long time.”
It slips between us again: that pull, like magnets just close enough to start jerking with the urge to snap toward each other. This time I know I’m not imagining the force of that draw. He doesn’t say it, not exactly, but I know the real meaning behind his words.
We could talk for a long, long time about anything. It’s like my life story has scribbled itself down in a notebook and is asking—begging for me to thrust those pages at him. I want to tell him everything: my favourite song, my favourite colour, the tattoos I’d get if I were brave enough to get some. I want to tell him what half-remembered dreams swirl around my head when I wake up in the morning. I want to tell him about the way the streaks of light from passing cars keep me up at night as they climb my bedroom walls.
I want to talk with him. I want to talk for a long, long time.
The song ends, and some soft acoustic ballad I don’t even remember putting on the playlist starts drifting out of the stereo. Dylan shifts his weight and clears his throat.
“You guys, um, doing okay out here?” he asks, reaching beside him to drum a finger against the bar.
“Mmhm.” I nod, turning so I can keep working on lining up shot glasses. “It’s been really slow. I’m sure you guys are losing money on me.”
We don’t have a hope of breaking even if I stay on the payroll for my entire shift.
“Hey, you’re important.” I whip my head up way too fast at those words. Dylan clears his throat again. “Training is, uh, important. We take it seriously here. I’d rather you had a few slow shifts to really get comfortable with the job. There’s nothing worse than someone bailing in the middle of a night we’re getting totally slammed because they don’t have the training to handle it. There’s something to be said for getting thrown into the fire, but I like to get my staff as ready for it as they can be.”
“That makes sense,” I agree. “Not a lot of places in this industry are like that.”
“You can say that again.” He stops tapping the bar top and gives it a fond pat instead. “Which reminds me, I have like, eleven million and one things I’m supposed to get done for the reopening.”
I wish him good luck with his eleven million and one tasks before he heads to the office. I turn back to the bar find myself out of shot glasses to stack, so I start on the pint glasses next. That’s when Tahseen’s grand prediction decides to drift back into my thoughts and pester me.
I think this whole ‘Oh no, he’s my boss’ thing is just an excuse, on both your parts, for the real reasons you think you can’t date each other.
If Dylan weren’t my manager, if I’d never worked here in the first place, if we’d bumped into each other at a metro stop and decided to grab a coffee to catch up, would things look different for us?
No.
Things wouldn’t be different. We wouldn’t be going on dates. I wouldn’t be his girlfriend. I’m not in a fit state to be anyone’s girlfriend at the moment, least of all his. He’s Dylan Trottard, for god’s sake: award winning spoken word artist, kitchen manager at one of the coolest bars in the city, ubiquitously admired human being. He has his shit together.
To put it crudely, I don’t even know where my shit is, never mind how to get it all together.
“Do you want to get those two?”
DeeDee’s questions snaps me back to reality, and I turn to find her nodding toward a couple wal
king up to the bar.
“Oh, sure.”
I take a few deep breaths as subtly as I can before approaching the customers. They order in French, asking for two pints of our special beer of the month. The woman asks a few questions about the flavour first, and I can practically feel DeeDee nodding in approval as I answer using the description she taught me.
“C’était parfait!” DeeDee congratulates me once I’ve served the beers. “You were perfect. If they don’t give you a big tip for that, I’ll give you one myself.”
I slap the hand she holds up for a high five. Things start picking up after that. Most of the tables fill with customers, and we spend our time getting drink orders done for the servers while handling the people who sit at the bar. DeeDee and I have something of a rhythm now, weaving around each other in a bartender’s dance as we grab the bottles and glasses we need. I’m starting to adopt her ability to do two or three things at once.
We’ve got the ‘official playlist’ on again, but I still recognize most of the songs.
“Who made this?” I ask DeeDee during a moment we’re both at the taps. I jerk my head toward the sound system so she’ll know what I’m talking about.
“That would be Dylan. That mec takes his music so fucking seriously. If anyone touches the speakers in the kitchen, he chops their fingers off.”
“It’s a good mix,” I can’t help commenting, even as I strain myself to sound casual.
“The best.” She nods in agreement. “He should be a DJ or something.”
I think back to the almost nightly ‘radio shows’ he starts our shifts with. He hams it up as much as he can, but it doesn’t disguise the fact that he has talent. His voice was made to make people listen. It reels you in, coaxes you forward like someone calling your name from the other side of a finish line. Combined with his ability to pick just the right songs for just the right occasion, he’d be the perfect radio host.
DeeDee takes off to deliver the beers she’s poured, and things pick up enough that we don’t get another chance to talk for a solid half hour. She slides up beside me at the cash register once we’ve reached a temporary lull in the influx of customers.