The Best Laid Plans(25)
The kitchen looks cleaner when we come back. The guys have wiped up the spilled taco fillings that were strewn about the counter and have thrown away their old napkins. They’re all sitting a little bit straighter.
“Hi, everyone!” Cecilia says.
“You want a taco?” Chase asks, getting up from his stool.
“I can make you one.” Andrew peels away from her and opens one of the kitchen cabinets to grab a plate.
“It’s okay,” she says. “I’m not hungry.” He puts the plate back.
“Here,” Edwin says, getting up from his stool. “You can take my seat. I was getting tired of sitting anyway.”
“Oh, thanks, Edwin,” she says, touching his shoulder lightly as she sits down.
There’s silence as we all look at one another, unsure of what to say. She’s like a disturbance in the airwaves, a ripple in the water. The room smells different—fresh and flowery. She must be wearing perfume strong enough to overpower the smell of beans.
“You look nice,” Andrew says. “I like your sweater.”
She looks down at it and then back up at all of us, a bright smile on her perfectly symmetrical face. “Thanks. It was on sale.”
“Nice,” Andrew says. “You look good in pink.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Chase bringing his hand up to cover a yawn, which makes me yawn in response. And there’s a small part of me—a part I’m not particularly proud of—that’s suddenly relieved I get to see what’s behind the curtain. Not just because I see the truth that Cecilia doesn’t, but because I get them without all the bullshit. I get the real Andrew—the one who is funny and lively and sometimes makes me snort milk out of my nose, but who at other times makes me so frustrated I want to shake him. The truth is a little scary. How can I ever trust a guy around his friends when I know so well how guys act around their friends?
But as I watch Andrew tap his fingers quietly on the surface of the counter, the ticking of the clock loud in the now silent room, I realize maybe a tiny bit of me is glad I don’t count.
NINE
IT SNOWS THROUGH the rest of March, and then finally it’s April, and everything melts under a warming sun. The store gets slightly busier as people come out of hibernation, and I settle easily into the work. Mr. Roth is hardly ever there, and so I spend most of my days with either Dean or this older guy Tim, who can spend an entire shift analyzing a single episode of Star Trek. Obviously I’ve tried to tell him Star Wars is better, but he won’t listen.
It’s Thursday evening and the store has been empty for nearly an hour. I’m up front organizing the rows of sticky pastries into a precarious pyramid formation I’ve been mentally referring to as “Sugar Mountain,” when Dean pops his head out from behind a row of DVD cases at the back of the store.
“So you said you like Hitchcock, right?”
“Yeah, why?” I call back to him, placing a croissant neatly on top of Sugar Mountain, a pile of flaky crumbs raining down onto the counter.
He emerges from behind the stacks and comes to join me at the front of the store, a DVD case clutched in his hands. “So what’s your take on horror, then? Are you just into old-school, suspenseful stuff? Or have you explored the genre a bit?” His eyes are sparkling in excitement, little crinkles at the corners. “How about monsters and zombies?” He raises his brows. “Gore?”
Dean places the movie down in front of me. It’s called Mayhem in the Monastery and features a terrified nun in the grasp of a giant bloody hand. The scream on her face is almost funny.
“This is horror?” I ask skeptically. “Not comedy?”
He grins for a second, then goes stone-faced. “This is terrifying. C’mon.” He snatches the case off the counter and, without waiting for me to follow, turns and heads to the back of the store.
“C’mon where?” I glance at the front door. Through the clear glass I can see that the parking lot is empty, Dean’s motorcycle the only vehicle in sight. Yes, Dean drives a motorcycle, because of course he does. The chalkboard out front reads:
DAD, WHAT’S A VIDEO?
I sigh and put down the pastry I’m holding, abandoning Sugar Mountain to follow him into the break room. There’s an old couch against one wall that probably has things growing in it, and across from that, a small TV. The walls are covered in more old movie posters, which I kind of love, and in the corner there’s a life-sized cutout of Legolas from The Lord of the Rings, which has probably been there for years. I guess somebody put a Santa hat on his head around Christmas and it’s still there.
Dean is inserting Mayhem in the Monastery into the DVD player.
“We can’t watch now.” I pause halfway through the door. “What if we have customers?”
“We never have customers,” he says dryly. The menu pops up and scary, dramatic violin music fills the room.
“We do have customers,” I protest weakly. “That woman came in earlier for a coffee. And what about that vampire guy?”
The truth is, I don’t want to sit next to Dean on the small couch almost as badly as I do want to sit next to him. Sitting next to him means not knowing where to put my hands and having to keep my body rigid, because if I relax, what if I lean toward him and our shoulders touch? He probably wouldn’t want our shoulders to touch because he’s used to his shoulder touching prettier, older girls—sophisticated college girls who study film and smoke clove cigarettes and talk about how art makes them feel.