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After struggling through taking an order from a table of five, three of them kids, I put in the order and leaned against one of the kitchen walls as though to hold it up. I had not obviously messed anything up taking the order, but the parents had clearly been happy and ready for good service when I arrived at the table and by the time I had left, they were reserved and a little confused.
The job was harsh enough on my self-esteem and my never-ending physical exhaustion, but to add to it the social awkwardness always dredged up memories of how I had acquired it. Ostracism was one of those words that most kids do not pick up until late high school or after, but I had known it well many years before that. Everyone at school had known what happened to my family. Their sudden and completely unexplainable death had made national headlines thanks to its air of the strange and tragic. Paired with my unforgettable last name, I was forever branded by my family’s death, not just in my own scarred mind, but socially now as well. Among adults, the reaction when they realized my identity was usually pity and unhelpful advice to ‘help me cope’. Among my peers it was fear, discomfort, and fuel for teasing. With vague memories of my family plaguing my mind, I never had a childhood and was always the sort of person who was much more mature, much more depressed, and much less naïve than my peers. I did not have the patience to listen to them complain about their parents taking their GameBoys away or, later on, refusing to buy them new cellphones. I rarely talked to them even when they gave me a chance to. Being quiet and indifferent would’ve been more than enough to label me as the scapegoat, but beyond that, I loved reading and learned a lot from the books I picked up. American students are generally not kind to “teachers’ pets”.
Naturally, I was tortured mercilessly from the age of four until I graduated and escaped to college, where I was finally granted a clean slate. By then the damage had been done, though. I had been deprived of any social skills.
Catcalls and teasing rhymes were not what haunted me long after my school years, though. There were far crueler specters that chased and clawed after me endlessly through my waitressing shifts at the casual restaurant two blocks from my apartment. Throughout the night, I would constantly face the horror and awkwardness of trying to take orders and failing to fake enthusiasm or amiability in the process.
I rubbed my temples to try and force Nina Faucett’s malignant voice from my head. The loud music blasting through the noisy, greasy kitchen usually managed to drown out her chants of “Orphan” echoing through my mind, but not always. She’d had one of those unforgettable voices that could not ever be ignored. It was loud, always seeming to bounce through a room like an all-around speaker system, and had a slightly high, grating pitch, combined with an eerie, faintly vicious tone. It was the sort of voice you expected from a charismatic person who tortured squirrels in their backyard as a child.
Gigi, my coworker at Starbucks, seemed to have gotten all the good genes in the Faucett family. Nina, who was my age, was like a scantily-clad beast from Hell. If one person I knew besides myself was suffering from some kind of mental disorder, without a second of hesitation, I would guess it was Nina. She was tall, with flaming red hair and green eyes that reminded me of the way I pictured the cat fromPet Sematary, a combination that made her even look mentally deranged. She had graciously bestowed the name “Orphan” upon me and I kept it throughout elementary and middle school. By high school, my name had evolved into “Freak”. A few years back, I had read in the paper that she’d been charged with harassment and battery and hoped she was spending an interlude in Maryland State Penitentiary.
“Poe? You okay, honey?”
I sighed and looked up, smiling grimly at the head waitress, Janie. “Yeah. Headache again. I’m starting to think it’s a clinical problem.”
She looked down her thin nose at me, dark eyes piercing. Everyone I spent time around seemed to be at least six inches taller than me, Janie in particular. She grimaced and shook her head disapprovingly. “God, Poe, have you seen those poor eyes of yours? It’s sleep deprivation that’s giving you headaches.”
Sighing once more, I looked down at my shoes. “Maybe. I’ll try to get to sleep earlier tonight. Maybe that’ll help.”
“You’d better,” she said, only half-teasing. With nothing further, she balanced four plates of burgers on her arms and flew like a hawk out to the dining room, shouting orders enthusiastically as she went. I rolled my eyes at my foolishness at standing still when Janie was working and rubbed my temples once more, then hurried back to work before anyone else lectured me. It was bad enough that I was never tipped well, but now it looked like my disposition might cost me the entire job.
The problem was that going to bed earlier doesn’t cure insomnia. Maybe someone like me wasn’t meant to be a waitress anyway.
----
When I got home that night, I wearily changed into pajamas and sought out a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup, dumping its contents and the required can of water into a small pot on the stove. My legs and stomach muscles ached from the effort of running amok in the dining room for six hours and I had been tipped horribly, as per usual. The restaurant was in the part of Baltimore where you could not really expect good tips, especially if you were a bad waitress.
The bleak thoughts of my lousy jobs, neither of which I liked, brought my mood down even further and I elected to mentally review the day, searching for anything worth dwelling on. As I stirred the soup, my mind wandered once more back to Frost. I bit my lip in distaste at the memories and tried desperately not to think too badly of myself, but it wasn’t easy.
Aside from being an Edgar Allan Poe fanatic, Frost was the sort of kindred spirit I had never thought I’d find. He seemed to have an element of depth and dark memories that he descended into once or twice in the course of our conversations. He might have even understood what I had been through…
And the steel door slammed shut again.
I had turned him down flat. Walked away without so much as a parting glance, a chance for him to respond to my abruptness. Baltimore was not a small city. It was an absolute miracle I had seen him more than once that day and not one that would ever be repeated. I would never see him again. For all I knew, his name wasn’t even Frost.
The soup began to seize and convulse in its pot and I removed it from the burner.
----
The next morning followed the same routine as every day. I awoke to vicious nightmares three times in the course of the night, earning myself an estimated three hours or less of genuine sleep, and was up before my alarm went off at five. This time, I walked to Starbucks, too tired, dejected, and on-time to bother with running. The November wind whipped around me like a maelstrom and as I walked down the occasionally icy sidewalk in the glow of the lampposts, I worked the calculations in my head on what I owed this month in rent and tuition payments. I needed a new coat; as Carol had alluded, this winter was going to be a real killer and if I wanted to survive I would need a little more than a jean jacket and extra sweaters.
Gavin wasn’t keen on talking that morning any more than the one prior. He just gave me a weird Star Trek sort of salute as I relieved him, then evacuated the coffee shop at a near-run, his techno music blasting through his eardrums as he went. There were only two customers in that morning when I arrived, so I fished out my battered paperback copy ofJane Eyrefrom under the counter and leaned against the register to read. The novel easily transported me to a better place, the English countryside, and to a world I could relate to, could empathize with, and, above all, could inhabit safely. No memories or nightmares could chase me as far as Thornfield Hall.
When Gigi relieved me of my post at noon, there had been no accidents resulting in scalded hands. There also had been no sign of Frost, which didn’t surprise me in the least, but left me with a strange and foreign twisting feeling in my stomach. He had a job, I assumed. Clearly yesterday had been a fluke, or maybe his day off.
I escaped Starbucks before Gigi could comment on my half of a peanut butter sandwich and took off for the library at a relaxed run. The buildings around me, the people on the sidewalks, the cars zooming along the street, everything melted away as it always seemed to when I ran. There was nothing but the pounding of my battered sneakers on the pavement, the beating of my heart in my head, the whisper of my lungs working in my chest. Even the frosty lampposts and pavement seemed to fall away.
The warm, seductive scent of fresh-baked bread stopped both my thoughts and my feet in their tracks and I paused at the door of a small family bakery, hesitating and thinking of the miserable half sandwich in my jacket pocket. After a long minute of internal debate, I walked on, staring at the salt scattered across the sidewalk as I tried to fight off the crest-fallen feeling the less logical side of me was displaying. I had just been thinking to myself that morning that I needed a new jacket and I did, desperately. Even now, without the wind whirling around me and threatening to blow me over, my arms were numb with the cold. Fresh bakery bread was not a luxury I could afford.
I climbed the steps of the library and hurried through the doors, breathing a sigh of comfort and relief as the warmth of the building and the smell of books greeted me. Carol wasn’t at the front desk and that was fine with me. I wasn’t really in the mood for small talk anyway. I needed to write.
Throughout my life, I had always had the ability and the gift to escape into books, whether I was reading them or writing them. Writing was best, though, because it was like a diary. Pieces of what I was feeling, the emotions that I spent each day drowning in, found their way into my writing and would often stay there, locked away in my flashdrive for a long time. It was a safe haven, an oasis in which I could find respite from daily trials and wicked recollections.
I reached the computer terminals and logged in, then made to retrieve my flashdrive from my jeans pocket.
My fingers found only my apartment keys and lint.
Panic surged through me instantly, overtaking me like a drug. My eyes went wide and my heart raced in terror. I didn’t have a single file on that flashdrive backed up. All of my writing, all of it, was on that flashdrive save for a few hard-copy print-outs and spiral-notebook drafts. Thousands of hours of work and pain were on that flashdrive. It was my life, my ticket to my dreams of being a novelist, my diary, my soul. My soul was on that damn flashdrive.
