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Mick—droopy-lipped, dull-eyed, with a light, oily complexion and a buzzed head—pulls out an earbud. “Huh?”
“Please, can you take that group’s order and handle them? I’ll take over dishes.”
He gives one long look through the window, confused. “You want me to huh?”
“Them. That group. Can you be their server? C’mon, Mick.”
He doesn’t close his mouth between sentences. It literally just hangs open, waiting for flies. “I dunno how.”
“Lord help us, you just take them to a table, give them menus, and find out what they want. Please.”
“Huh. Okay.” He pops out his other earbud, stuffs them into his pocket, then pushes through the kitchen door still wearing his sudsy apron. I peer through the crack in the door, watching him fumble with some menus before walking the four of my former friends to a booth in the back.
Satisfied, I breathe a sigh of relief and take over doing dishes just as promised. And in that soapy, lukewarm water, I let the rest of my worries melt and break apart like the grease and gravy off plates, until they’re just swirling messes circling the drain.
But even in the kitchen, with the noise of machines buzzing and refrigerators humming, I hear the quartet’s shouts of laughter as they enjoy themselves. One of them starts chanting some kind of slogan—maybe from the university they were admitted to and are leaving for in a week or so, since college classes start later than high school. Then TJ’s distinctively clear and lofty voice proclaims something that sounds rather happy, and once done, it’s met with applause. I have no idea what it is and I never will. It has the intended effect of making me feel so damned lonely and worthless. I’m ready to just break the rest of the dirty dishes, hurl them through the window, or gag myself with this greasy rag. And even a full forty minutes later when TJ and his gang finally leave—and after only three mistakes and one totally botched order on account of Mick being a foggy-headed ding-dong—I still feel sulky.
Eleven o’clock can’t come sooner.
But then it does, and I finish up my duties, bid farewell to Mr. and Mrs. Tucker counting money in the back, and head out the door. I stand on the curb and begrudgingly wait for my mom to pick me up, as planned. Five minutes turn into ten, then twenty, and I take a seat on the curb, listening to the distant noise from a bar down the street and around the corner where the drunken adults of Spruce are all gathered. I pull out my phone and read a text from Kelsey apologizing for not stopping by Biggie’s tonight. She was apparently grounded for the weekend on account of what happened the first day of school, which is a bit of information she didn’t exactly disclose to me, but with dads as strict as hers, I am not surprised in the least.
I’m not surprised my mom isn’t here yet, either. I figure she is either late getting off from Lucille’s, or has totally forgotten about me. Either one is as much of a possibility.
I push myself off the curb, prepared to take the long twenty-minute walk home in the dark, minutes from midnight. What’s the worst that can happen, right? It’s Spruce, Texas. Spruce is safe, unless you count the mythical pack of stray dogs who police the streets, growling in the dead of night at any lone passerby. (That would be me.) So unless I’m superstitious, I have nothing to fear.
Still, after I leave the comfort of Biggie’s and the brightly-lit Main Street, my heart rate speeds up. With just the occasional dim streetlamp overhead, I carry on down the sidewalk, my eyes now and then darting left or right at the hint of a perceived footstep or rustling of grass. I tuck my greasy apron tighter under my arm as I pick up my pace. I reach the intersection between Spruce High and the street that stretches on to the suburbs where I live. The high school is a creepy beast in the dark, only one single parking lot light spilling its whitish-yellow murk over an empty concrete desert. The noise of crickets fills my ears as I hurry across the wide road, even in the obvious absence of any vehicles at all. As I pass by the school, my thoughts drift back to Vann and the way he looked at me after reading the cast list. Was he picturing how it will look in rehearsal, the day we have to kiss each other as Kingsley and Danny? Did the notion sicken him? Embarrass him? Or did it annoy him, since he pictured one of the other girls who auditioned as Danielle? I’d thought that at the very least Ms. Joy would have read some of us together in a scene, to see if we had natural chemistry, or to see if we played well off each other. Instead, she seemed to make a snap decision, and now here we are.
