It was a weird, sweaty summer, the summer Brad and Gwyneth split up for good, and I didn’t know what I was doing at the 7-Eleven. The air conditioner was busted, and my polyester smock baked me like an oven, too tight across the front with snap buttons that popped open every time I bent over. I was forty pounds too fat, which only made me sweat harder.
But we got free flavour-of-the-week slushies, on account of the temperature, and that June I decided to go on a diet. I lived off slush for two months, nothing else, every featured flavour. By September I was the thinnest I’d ever been and my 7-Eleven smock hung from my shoulders like a giant tent.
I’d just quit school and it was a shitty job, but minimum wage seemed like a lottery ticket and I scratched and won. The interview was a cinch- I just had to promise to work the night shift and say I knew how to mop.
I was good at making change- they made me take a test. And I began to think that maybe I wasn’t as stupid as everybody had always said. Reg was our store manager and he saw my potential. He believed in me. I mean he hired me, even though there were seven other people interviewed and they had to get my smock special-ordered from head office on account of my size. The smock order was delayed for over a week though, and so on my first few shifts, I just wore my regular clothes. People kept reporting me for shoplifting; “that fat girl in blue jeans” they told the cashier, while I reordered the jugs in the milk fridge or threw away the microwave hotdogs too far past their best-before dates.
I worked the nightshift during the week with Celia, who’d been there for eight months before I started. Celia was skinny with straw hair, an upside-down broom. She had a tongue ring and a baby at home, which her mom watched while she worked. I knew Celia from before. She was older than me but we’d gone to the same school. Boys used to line up along the side of her house so she could suck them off around the corner, one by one, or at least that’s what people said. But I never mentioned that to her. Celia had long purple fingernails with white tips filed into points.
She got them done every week and at least once a shift, she filed them sharp with a leopard-print emery board and it was weird that Celia thought about her nails so much, because she never even bothered to brush her hair. But I also thought a lot about Celia’s nails, thought about them digging into my arm until her white tips were swimming in my blood. Celia seemed armed and dangerous. The first time we worked together, she said Reg was grooming her for management and I only just smiled, even though he’d said the very same thing to me. You’ve got to pick your enemies carefully, I always said, and she seemed like someone you didn’t want to get on the wrong side of.
Free slushies weren’t our only perk- we were allowed to read all the magazines we wanted, so long as we left no dog-ears or coffee rings.
Except the top shelf was off-limits while we were working, and the bottom shelf was all cars, embroidery, gardening, and whatnot. I’ve never been crazy about hobbies, so I stuck to the middle shelf and I’ve never read as much in my life, every single glossy page from cover-to-cover. I knew everything that summer. I received the stock of People magazines that announced Brad and Gwyneth’s breakup the Tuesday it came in at five a.m., so I guess I was one of the first people in the world to know about it. The sun came up as I cried at the cash register, and of course I couldn’t tell the customers what was wrong. They’d have though I was on crack if I told them the truth, so I said it was just allergies. They believed me. In that heat anyone would have been allergic, but really I was brokenhearted.
Like when you hold people up as an example and everything, and then it turns out they were never that at all.When the Princess meets her Prince, and it’s not necessarily happily-ever-after. It’s a rude awakening, because even in my plus-size smock behind the cash at 7-Eleven, I had dreams of my own, you know? And when even Brad and Gwyneth couldn’t get it together, I thought I totally didn’t stand a chance. Because she would have been the prettiest bride.
But life went on as usual, until near the end of August. It was late on a Tuesday night, and Tuesday nights are usually dead until after six, when the sun comes up and commuters start to come in for their early-morning coffees and fill-ups. But it wasn’t even there yet, and Celia was mopping in the bread aisle. I had my feet up on the counter with a copy of The Enquirer and an extra huge Bodacious Berry Blue. Reg was supposed to be there but he’d gone home with a headache after midnight. And then this freak with white running shoes, bare legs and trench coat comes in, and I was concerned at first, but he just went about his business, no trouble at all. A big carton of chocolate milk and a package of powdered donuts. He paid with a five dollar bill, and I handed him his change.
I was just about to tell him to have a good night, when all of a sudden this short weaselly guy burst through the doors. He had a gun. The guy clicked the lock, then turned around and pointed his gun across the store at Celia. He was wearing a three piece suit, no socks and his pants were too short.
“Put the fucking mop down,” he said to Celia.
“Come now, there’s no need for profanity,” said Bare Legs at the till, at nearly the same millisecond that Gun Toter spun around and shot him clear in the head. Brains, blood and chocolate milk splashing everywhere, just like JFK. And I’ve seen that film a million times, so I knew what was going on. But then I was covered in the guy, and I had a weak stomach anyway, since I hadn’t eaten solids in two months. So I threw up all over the counter, buckets of Bodacious Berry Blue, and it felt like I spewed forever.
The Gun Toter was amazed. “How can she do that?” he asked Celia, but she had dropped her mop, speechless. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he asked me, but there I was, being sick again. And now there was puke in the Tootsie Roll box on the counter.
Celia was crying, shaking. She was even whiter than usual. Fat load of good, those pointy nails in a pinch. I could see her sinking slowly into the aisle, out of the Gun Toter’s sight, sitting right down, squish on the hamburg buns.
The gun turned on me then. “All the cash in your till,” he said. “Put it in a bag.”
I’d received training in this procedure, just to follow orders, but nobody had mentioned the dead guy or the puke. I kept my cool though.
He got nearly five hundred bucks, double-bagged in plastic. I handed the money to him, and then he climbed up across the counter- I said he was short. He actually climbed up across the counter and he planted a big wet kiss right there on my lips. I mean, the guy nearly sucked my mouth off.
And then he bounced back down onto the ground, covered now in Bare Legs’ brains and my Bodacious Berry Blue puke.
“You’re a goddess,” Gun Toter said to me. Big eyed and open mouthed, like he really meant it. His tongue was hanging out of his mouth like a sweaty dog. “You’re like a woman from another planet,” he said. Then he checked the cash in his bag, unlocked the doors and took off into the dark night. And they never managed to catch him.
I was going to quit the 7-Eleven after that, but Reg fired me the next week for stealing one lousy pack of cigarettes. Then Celia got promoted to manager after all, and I found out she had been sucking Reg off in the stockroom all summer long. But it didn’t really matter anymore. I had bigger fish to fry and I was looking for a bigger pond to fry them in. And so that was when I moved to Hollywood.
First Place ~ Hart House Literary Contest