by Rachel Vail
“Yeah, but—”
“People are here to spend more on a cup of coffee than a Guatemalan guy makes picking coffee beans in a week.”
“That’s depressing.”
He shook his head. “Everybody’s day is what it is. May as well enjoy the one you’re having, yeah?”
“Um, okay,” I said.
“So you just give them some kindness with their cuppa. Even the ones who start their order with the dread word ‘Gimmea.’”
“Gimmea?”
“Yeah. ‘Gimmea tall, skinny latte?’”
“Oh,” I said. “I hate that!”
“Right. Those people don’t tip, either. Still.”
“Be kind. Okay.” I put the manual down on the one stool behind the counter. “So where do we start?”
Toby picked up the manual and handed it to me. “Senior person on the shift gets the stool. There’s lots of rules. Most important one, though, is …”
“Chill,” I said.
“And beware the evil frother.”
“I will beware,” I said.
Over the next hour I managed to mess up approximately everything Toby attempted to teach me. When I pulled out the brewer, which I thought I was supposed to do, the grinds and hot water splashed out with tidal force and then stuck like molten tar to my hands, all the way up my wrists. I was talking, at the time, to a supernice and patient woman, who kept telling me not to worry.
Penelope, meanwhile, stood beside me, behind me, ultimately in front of me, fixing the stuff I messed up, which was, well, everything I laid my hands on. After I shredded yet another garbage bag with a long line of customers waiting, Penelope suggested I haul the garbage out back to the Dumpster and take my allotted ten-minute break.
“But Toby’s not back from his,” I started to object.
“It’s okay. I got this. Go.” It was not an offer made from generosity, clearly, but in a desperate effort to take a break from my incompetence. I didn’t blame her, or mind.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Take as long as you want,” she added.
Every part of me was tired. I lugged the heavy bag over my shoulder like Santa’s loser little sister and backed out the door to the alley. Into the Dumpster it went, and I nearly followed, but I didn’t have the energy. I slumped against the wall instead.
“Having fun yet?” Toby asked from up the steps beside the Dumpster.
“Oh yeah,” I said. “Tons.”
“Didn’t figure you for the working type.”
“No?”
“Student council or something.”
I sat down on the bottom step, a few lower than his feet. “Nah. Not a rah-rah girl.”
“So much for first impressions. The money’s not bad here.”
I didn’t respond. I had eight more minutes, and the possibility of dozing off was very real.
“You may be the least naturally gifted barista I’ve ever seen,” he said.
“Call Guinness,” I said.
“Or Ripley’s,” he added. “How’s the burn?”
I closed my eyes. “Which one?”
He held out his hand in front of my face. With supreme effort, I opened my eyes halfway, to see. He had little scars all over the backs of his hands.
“All from here?” I asked.
“Most,” he said. “Most people don’t last past orientation.”
“I’m as disoriented as I’ve ever been.”
He chuckled.
“And that’s saying a lot. But this is the only place in my world that hands out a manual of expectations and rules, so, gotta love that.”
“Indeed. And at the end of the day, you go home with money you have truly earned. Pretty sweet, that.” Toby stood up and held his hand out to me. “You coming back in, or no?”
“In six minutes,” I answered as my eyes closed again.
“Cool,” he said, stepping past me.
sixteen
WHEN I GOT home three hours later, Mom and Joe were cooking together, giving each other tastes with spoons and laughing. “Hi, Charlie!” Mom said as I passed.
“You guys are gross,” I answered. It smelled good in there, but it was too hot and steamy, in every inconceivable way.
“How was work?” she called after me.
“Um,” I said, yanking myself up the stairs with help from the banister.
Kevin’s door was closed, I saw as I reached the top of the stairs.
The next thing I noticed was that all along the hall walls were photographs. Very arty, I admit. Maybe too arty. Self-consciously arty, black and white, lots of partial faces and shadows. And most of them were of Kevin, or Samantha, or Kevin and Samantha.
I was standing in the hall looking at an especially gorgeous shot of Kevin as a little guy, maybe seven, sitting on a rock with one eye closed and the other open, glaring at the camera, when Samantha emerged from her room.
I jumped and dropped my backpack, in my failed attempt to not look guilty and caught.
“Do you want to play with me?” Samantha asked. “Or I could just read or hang with Alpha if you’re busy.”
“Hang with your fish?”
“If you’re busy. Kevin has a lot of work, so you probably do, too, unless you’re much more focused. I think he spends a lot of time on the internet. Also, he had baseball tryouts today.”
“Yeah.”
“He made the first cut. That means he still has a chance. Luckily, or he’d be a grouch and end up in a fight with my dad.”
I smiled at her. A girl who spills too much, in hopes of connecting: my kindred spirit.
“So anyway, Charlie, if you have time and you want to watch a movie or play something together, I’m allowed tonight. I saved up my screen time and finished my homework.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.” She was going to hang out with her fish? “I’m kind of wiped out, but let me try to get my homework done and then maybe we can do that.”
She smiled hugely.
“Is your tooth loose?” I pointed at the bottom tooth that was tilting out of her mouth.
She nodded and wiggled it for me.
“Ew. Wow.”
“I am deciding to still believe in the tooth fairy.”
“Good idea. I’ll …” I pointed to my books and hurried to my room and closed the door. On a sticky note I wrote tooth fairy.
By the time we got called down to dinner, I had finished most of my work, other than math and an essay on Act Two of Hamlet. All the way along my previously peaceful, bare-walled hallway, the sometimes solemn and occasionally delighted faces of Samantha and Kevin stared out from beautiful photographs.
“Did you finish?” Sam asked eagerly as I slipped into my seat.
“Almost. How’s the tooth?”
“Wiggly.”
The kitchen smelled amazing—warm, garlicky, but also like just-mowed grass in spring. Joe ladled a mass of green slime–covered spaghetti onto my plate.
“I was going to surprise Joe and make lasagna, or maybe some other kind of pasta,” Mom said, smiling so huge her gums showed. “That’s why I was texting you, Charlie, to ask if you knew whether … well, anyway. But then I got home and Joe was already working on a pasta dinner!”
“Wow,” I said. “Small world.”
Mom’s smile faded, just a bit. Why am I so reflexively obnoxious to her sometimes? Just because she’s happy? Giddy in love? Why would I be mean about that? Why hadn’t she asked my opinion on putting up pictures in the hall? I looked down at the gooey, green pasta strands tangled in the bowl in front of me. I had my doubts but took a taste.
It was so delicious I had to close my eyes and just taste for a minute.
“So?” Joe asked.
“This is really good,” I had to admit. “Wow. Yum.”
“Pesto,” Joe said. “My special recipe—with cilantro, but no cheese.”
“It’s amazing,” Mom said.
“We’re all lactose intolerant,” Joe said cheerfully. “The three of
us. Too much dairy and we’re all gas machines.”
“Dad!” Kevin yelled.
“TMI,” I said.
“Sorry,” Joe said. “Well, anyway. We always have Lactaid with us, but with this recipe, we don’t even need it!”
“Dad, do everybody a favor,” Kevin said. “Stop talking.”
Joe shrugged bashfully, and when I gave him a pity smile, he winked at me. Seriously. Winked. Exactly the way Kevin winked at me once. My hands, in a sudden attack of boinginess, flayed around and knocked over my water glass.
Water flew up in an arc and then splashed down all over the table and across it onto Kevin’s lap. Trying to grab my napkin, I karate-chopped my knife, which did a little acrobatic routine in the air and landed on my foot, but luckily didn’t slice it off, just clanged against it. I bent down to get it and banged my head on the underside of the table, coming up.
In all it was forty-five seconds of the Charlie Freaks Out Show.
The other four people at the table sat still and watched it. I resumed my seat as the water that had been in my glass drip-drip-dripped off, onto the floor.
“The End,” I said.
Samantha giggled.
“Towel?” my mother suggested.
I went to the oven, where the towel wasn’t, anymore. “I put up a hook,” Joe said, pointing to the corner near the sink, where indeed a fresh new towel was hanging.
After I mopped up the mess, and managed to eat the rest of the dinner without smashing anything else off the table or onto anyone, I said, “That was great, Joe; thanks,” and cleared my plate.
My mother, clearing her plate beside me, whispered, “You okay, Charming?”
I started to say, Yes, sure, of course, but it didn’t come out. I nodded instead, and Mom put her arm around me. I still had my plate in my hand, so I kind of stood there, stiff and awkward. I had a sudden need to cry. No idea why. Just tired, I guess.
Mom took my plate out of my hands and turned me toward her. She hugged me hard and we just stood there. I didn’t say, Why does there have to be a new hook? Because, seriously, why would a sane person cry about a very nice hook holding a towel in a more convenient spot, just because that is not where the towel belongs? What is so sad about that?
Everything.
I think some Lazarus people started coming to the sink with their plates, but Mom must have gestured to them to go away. I kept my eyes closed.
After a few minutes, the feeling passed. I took a deep breath and pulled away, bracing myself for questions and A Talk. But Mom, luckily, hadn’t changed that much. She kissed me on the forehead and let me go.
“Hey, Sam,” I said. “I’m pretty much done with work. Wanna hang?”
I saw Mom smile at me, out of the corner of my eye.
“Yes,” Samantha answered. “Do you like games of luck or of skill?”
“Not really, no,” I said.
“Oh. It was, I meant that as a choice.”
“Having not too much of either puts me at a disadvantage,” I explained.
“I could play down a queen, if you want to play chess,” she offered.
“Okay.”
She smiled, revealing her chaotic teeth. “I used to be scared of losing, too.”
“I’m not scared,” I defended myself, absurdly, to her. “Well, not terrified. Not of losing. Not at chess, anyway.”
“Just remember,” Samantha said solemnly. “At the end, whether you win or lose, we shake hands and both say good game. Winning feels better, of course, but either way, you end up with a handshake and a good game, so really you have to focus on the fun of playing instead of the dread of losing.”
She might have weighed sixty-five pounds. I towered like a giant over her. Maybe she was Yoda.
“Or I could be wrong,” she hedged.
“No, I don’t think you are,” I said.
She grinned.
“We have a chess set we got for Christmas around here somewhere,” I told her.
“I can get my tournament set, if you want.”
“Sure.”
She ran up to her room and got her chess set. “Good luck,” Kevin whispered. “She’s really good.”
“How do you know I’m not?”
“I know you are,” Kevin whispered. “But maybe not at chess.”
“I rock,” I said. He nodded, heading upstairs.
I waited in the living room, while Mom and Joe went downstairs to shoot pool and drink wine. I tried to block out the sounds of their flirtation and pool balls.
Samantha came back down wearing her Ugg slippers, the same as mine because my mother bought them for both of us, and with an oblong canvas case slung over her shoulder. “Black or white?” she asked, already on the floor with her legs in a broken W shape around her.
“I don’t care,” I said. I looked away from those Uggs on her feet. It made no sense at all for me to be jealous of them, or of my mother’s attention to this sweet, odd kid. What did it rob from me if my mother wrapped her up in cuddles and braided her hair sometimes? Nothing. Nothing.
Sam smiled to herself, her face bent over the mat of a chessboard, which she had taken from the case, unrolled, and was populating with big, solid chess pieces.
“I should warn you, I am a champion chess player,” I said, sitting in front of the black pieces opposite her. I consciously loosened my vise-tight jaw.
Paling, Samantha opened her huge eyes wider. “Really? You are?”
“No,” I said, my tight meanness melting in the heat of her earnest tension. “I just thought I should tell you that. To throw you off. Even though it’s a lie.”
“Okay. White moves first,” she said, and plopped a pawn into the middle.
Ten seconds later, before I’d found a comfortable way to sit, she said, “Mate.”
“Mate like you’re affecting an English accent? Or mate like you win?”
“See?” She pointed at my king.
“Rematch,” I said, not seeing.
The fourth game I lost in five moves, a personal best, which emboldened me. Fifth game, I got a sixth move. Sam’s face furrowed as she studied the board.
“I’m trying to figure out your strategy,” she said after a minute.
“Should I tell you?”
“No.” She studied the board some more.
My butt fell asleep. I got busy wondering what kinds of cookies might be hidden in the back of the cabinet, and whether I had anything funny I could post on Tess’s wall.
Samantha said, “I can’t figure it out.”
“Ah. My plan is complex,” I said with as much drama as possible. “Try to stay with me here.”
She nodded, her eyes lasers on the board.
“I was thinking, Hmm. I haven’t moved the horsie in a while. So I moved it.”
“The knight?”
“Okay,” I said.
“Really?”
“Sorry. Your stepsister is kind of an idiot.”
She jolted upright, startled.
“What?” I asked.
“My whole entire life I wished for a sister,” she whispered. “My entire life.”
“Me too,” I said, not knowing if that was true or not, before that moment, when it irrevocably was.
She started to smile a bit, but pulled it down, turning her eyes to the board again. She moved, I moved, she moved and said, “Mate.”
I held out my hand again. “Good game.”
“Good game,” she said, shaking on it. “You shouldn’t say nasty things about people. Even yourself. That’s what my mom says.”
I watched her put the pieces away carefully into their little plastic bags. “She’s right, your mom. She’s smart.”
“Kevin hates her.”
“No, I’m sure he doesn’t.”
“He does,” Samantha said solemnly. “Because she left.”
I nodded.
Samantha zipped up the canvas bag. “I don’t hate her,” Sam said. “I wish Kevin didn’t. Do you hate your dad?”
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br /> “I don’t know. I was really mad at him for a while. I don’t really remember, but supposedly I wouldn’t even look at him. It’s like the one thing he and my mom agree about—how mad I was. And it took me years before I could even say hello to his girlfriend, who’s now his wife. I just flat-out hated her. Maybe I still do. But I guess I don’t hate him. Usually. And probably Kevin doesn’t really hate your mom.”
“He does,” Samantha said. “Your dad got a girlfriend while he was married to your mom?”
“Yeah,” I said, surprised by the catch in my throat. I didn’t care anymore about that. Not really. I didn’t think I cared, anyway. “Is that what happened with your parents, too?”
“No,” Samantha said. I waited, but that was it.
“Mmm,” I said.
She bit her lower lip. “I don’t know. They just stopped loving each other, I guess.”
“Oh.”
“It’s my bedtime.” She stood up and extended her hand to shake again. “Thank you for playing with me, Charlie.”
I stood up, too. “Your dad didn’t notice the time yet,” I said. “I could make us ice-cream sundaes, and we could gossip or something.”
She hesitated. She definitely hesitated before she said, “No, I have to go to bed now.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Charlie?”
“Mmm-hmm?”
“Do you ever see swirly colors at the sides of your eyes?”
“No,” I said. “Why?”
“Just wondering. I might be a mathematician when I grow up, or else a rock star.”
“You’d be great as either,” I told her.
“Thanks.”
I stood alone in my living room and watched her drift upstairs in her clunky Uggs. I listened to her footsteps across the creaky hall.
With nothing left to do, I went up a few minutes later and wrote my Hamlet essay while listening to music with my earbuds in. I must have drifted off to sleep, because a while later, I thought Laertes was knocking at my door, but no, it was Kevin, in the ghostly hallway light, leaning against my door frame.
seventeen
STANDING THERE, SO still and back-lit, he looked like one of the moody photographs hanging in the hall come to life, as if the image had clambered out of the frame and wandered to my room.