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Bryce had to lean over the desk to find the source of the voice, a little boy missing his two front teeth, probably because the rest of his face was stained with the bright blue dye of sour candy.
“Hello.” Bryce flapped her wings, wondering if perhaps she should take up a career in acting. “Are you having a squawking good time?”
“Yes.” The boy laughed and held out a stack of tickets. “How many for cotton candy?”
Technically, the tickets were supposed to be read in a machine, with the total printed off to exchange for prizes, but Bryce didn’t feel like explaining that to a sugar-drunk six-year-old, so she counted them out by hand. He was a few dozen short, but she plucked him a bag of candy floss from the display behind her anyway, the pink fluff shrunken slightly after a day of sweating in humid, early summer heat. Just how Bryce felt. Shrunken and shrivelled. “Here you go. Don’t eat it all at once.”
“Thank you, Albert!” The boy grinned and then ran back to his parents on the other side of the arcade. Bryce sighed, if only to circulate some air in her costume, glad when Peter wandered over with a fresh bag of quarters and tokens.
“I won’t tell Gus you got off early if you don’t,” he smirked, joining her behind the desk. The coins spilled into the cash register, only worsening the throbbing in Bryce’s temples.
“Really?”
“I owe you one,” Peter said. “Besides, I just saw your friend come in. Thea, right?”
“Right.” If she hadn’t been running the risk of exposing the fact that Albert the Albatross was actually a twenty-six-year-old woman in a costume to a bunch of kids, she would’ve ripped herself out of the mascot then and there.
“Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” Peter continued, casting Bryce a sidelong glance.
“Make it quick.”
Bryce caught sight of Thea weaving in and out of families to find her. She waved a gloved hand to make it known that she wasn’t in her usual get-up tonight.
“Well… Okay. I…” Bryce had found out an hour into her first ever shift that Peter Keane talked an awful lot about nothing at all. She was used to his half-formed rambling by now, but it seemed to drag on even longer tonight.
“You…?” she urged.
He scratched at the peach fuzz on his chin. Though older than her, his fair whiskers had never thickened to a beard, but he seemed to wear the sparse facial hair with pride all the same. “It’s just… I was wondering… There’s this Thai place on Hoover Street I like.”
Bryce frowned. “Okay… That’s not a question.”
“I’m asking,” Peter sucked in a deep breath that expanded all the way from his chest to his stomach, “if you would like to maybe go eat Thai food with me on Hoover Street. Or any street. Any place. Anywhere.”
“Bryce doesn’t like Thai food, buddy,” Thea piped up as she finally reached them — and thank God. She’d saved Bryce from perhaps the most uncomfortable date proposal she’d ever heard.
“Oh…” Peter’s face crumpled in disappointment. “Well, what about pizza?”
“Sure, pizza,” said Thea. “We’d love to.”
“Actually, I was asking Bryce —”
“Why don’t we talk about this tomorrow, Peter?” Bryce interjected quickly. And then, it seemed her family and friends were all on her side tonight, because a familiar, dark set of space buns popped up from behind the air hockey table.
Olivia rarely came to Bryce’s place of work, even with her friends, so worry gnawed at Bryce as soon as she saw her. She left both Thea and Peter forgotten at the desk, tail feathers colliding with almost every machine on her way through the arcade. “Hey. What’s up?”
“Shh,” Liv shushed, pulling Bryce aside by the wing and ducking beneath a pinball machine. “My friends are over there.”
“Oh, I see. You’re embarrassed that your sister is Albert the Albatross,” Bryce nodded, and then, for good measure, began to squawk and flap her wings. “Hello, Olivia!Squawk! How was —squawk!— school?”
Liv glared through eyes not too dissimilar from Bryce’s own. They were the same shade of molten brown, framed by the same thick lashes inherited from their absentee father, whom they’d both decided long ago that they despised, and wanted nothing more to do with. “I hate you so much.”
“I know,” Bryce sang. “What’s up?”
“I only came to ask you if I could go to a party tonight. It’s Tasha’s birthday, and everyone from school’s going —”
Bryce lifted a hand to interrupt. “Who the hell has parties on a Tuesday?”
“Oh, come on. This isn’t the Eighties anymore.” With a pointed look, Liv crossed her arms over her chest. She wore one of Bryce’s old Nirvana T-shirts, which were apparently more fashionable now than when Bryce had bought it as a wannabe edgy teenager and, as a consequence, had been mocked to no end. “People throw parties on any day they want to now.”
