For a moment, all Irwin could think was that he would be glad to never go home smelling like popcorn again. Two years ago when he got this job he never considered that he might come to hate that smell. Corny, buttery. What was there to hate? But he knew now that he’d been so naïve. Two years of anything, day in and day out, was going to grate on the nerves.

So it was with some relief that he accepted the news he was being fired from his position at the movie theater. Standing there in his manager’s cramped little office, tucked away in the same room where they kept the janitor’s equipment, Irwin sighed.

His manager mistook the sigh as disappointment. Folding his hands, he leaned over the filing cabinet he used as a desk and peered up at Irwin with genuine sorrow. A man by the name of Leonard Higgins, he was one of those unfortunate souls doomed to forever resemble a pre-pubescent nerd even now, well into his thirties. His face was wide and doughy, riddled with an array of volcanic blemishes all in various states of healing. This plague of acne was only further accented by the fact that he wore his hair in a long, greasy ponytail yanked tightly back from his face.

“I know it’s hard,” Leonard said. He seemed to talk with his tongue more than necessary. Irwin hung back, wanting to avoid the worst of the spittle flying through the air. “And you’ve been a model employee. But the truth is, we can’t keep you on any longer.”

“That’s fine,” Irwin replied. “I understand.”

No more dealing with rude customers who all complained about the prices, no cleaning up after brats, and no burns from scalding hot oil? Yeah, this was fine. It wasn’t like he wanted to make a career out of this.

“Well, it’s not fine,” Leonard said. His tone of voice shifted. A lecture was brewing. Irwin groaned inwardly. His manager was nice enough most of the time, but he had an annoying habit of trying to share his vast wealth of information with others who clearly weren’t interested. These lectures were constant and long, occurring at least five times daily. Neither employees nor customers were spared, as he shared his information with open pride to anyone who stood still long enough for him to get going.

He was warming up to one such fit right now, and there was little Irwin could do to stop him.

“You see, the fact of the matter is we really can’t afford to keep you. Demand for our services have majorly decreased in the past decade as more services become available. People just aren’t going out to see movies like they used to. Do you watch Netflix, Irwin?”

“I do,” he lied. He knew Leonard kept up with all that mainstream crap. It was best just to agree or else he’d get an earful on how much he was missing out on.

“Right. It’s so much easier to just stay home. And we barely make any money off movie tickets. It’s all in the concessions, but this whole health food kick is, well, kicking our ass. If it doesn’t have coconut oil, people just don’t want it.”

Can’t afford to keep me.

There was something in that sentence that called for his attention, nagging at him.

“So, our budget is being cut. It’s corporate. Nothing we can do about it.” Leonard spread his hands, his marijuana-glazed eyes wide with regret. “And since it’s, like, the end of summer, everyone is going back to school. Tons less money to go around. So we have to cut down.”

“Is anyone else being fired?” Irwin asked. He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand and looked around the combination storage room and office. The thought he was trying to have kept dancing around, avoiding capture.

Leonard grimaced. “You’re not really, like, being fired, okay? It’s not because of your performance or anything. Just, no one’s watching movies, but we gotta make sure to keep our profit margin up just as high. Maybe even higher. So, not fired. But laid off.”

That was laughable. You didn’t get laid off from your minimum wage job. That was a word reserved for people with careers, not 22-year-olds who served nachos and rubbery hot dogs to cranky people. It was a matter of semantics more than anything else; Irwin might not have been an expert in that particular subject, but he knew enough to recognize when he was being bullshitted. The sad thing was, Leonard seemed to genuinely believe what he was saying. He’d bought the bullshit fed to him and was now excreting it back out to those beneath him.

“So, when?” Irwin asked. School hadn’t even started yet in Portsmouth—there were about three days left before the unofficial end of summer—but he supposed there was no time like the present.

“Today,” Leonard replied. “Right now, as a matter of fact.”

Irwin stared at the pudgy man before him, feeling a pale shadow of anger stir inside his chest. Rising up his throat, it tasted like copper and heat with a distinctive splash of the chemicals that made theater popcorn so addictive. Here he was, reporting for work like a good employee—and if he wasn’t fantastic, then he was at least competent—because he’d volunteered to work the early shift for Half-Price Saturday. He’d walked up to the door less than five minutes ago and had changed into this stupid fucking vest…and now he was being told it was all for naught.

“What?” he eventually managed to say. The anger in his throat choked his words. Clearing his throat, he tried again. “What?”

“Today,” Leonard repeated. “Right now. If you’ll hand over your vest and badge, please?”

And now, finally, he realized what it was that he’d been trying to recall all this time. He just got paid a few days ago. Being fired now meant this upcoming paycheck would be sparse, hardly enough to buy groceries and definitely not enough to cover his upcoming bills. He had some savings but that was to cover his rent each month. If he took from that to pay for his utilities, he wouldn’t have an apartment to worry about such things as water and electricity.

As much of a relief as being fired would be, it was going to cause him a whole hell of a lot of trouble.

“I volunteered to work today,” Irwin protested. “Can’t I at least finish my last shift?”

But Leonard shook his head. “If you were on the computer schedule, I could let it slide, but since you only volunteered…”

Plus, people who worked on Saturday got paid an extra two dollars an hour because of how chaotic things could get. Whoever made the decision to fire him wanted him gone so bad they wouldn’t even allow him an extra $16 or so.

“Your vest and badge please, Irwin.”

Irwin growled softly in the back of his throat, but the sound was intentionally muted because he knew how it would sound to human ears. Regular people growled and snarled on occasion, but the difference between such weak imitations and a real animalistic threat was more than a little audible. The last thing he needed was to freak Leonard out, because as much as he would have liked to cause a scene, he was too disheartened to actually go through with it.

That was one of the bad things about being a shapeshifter. All the things Irwin could do, he usually wasn’t allowed to do. There were laws to abide by, certain unwritten codes that couldn’t be broken without bringing trouble down upon himself and others in his community. He might not be a saint, but even with all the trouble he caused, he’d never purposefully endanger someone.

“Irwin? Vest and badge.”

Tearing off his badge, Irwin tossed it on top of the filing cabinet. He ripped off his vest and dropped it down as well. “There.”

He felt like some fraud who had just been stripped of all his credentials, leaving him with nothing more than a blank slate. He was far from that. He knew it. He was more than simply his job, but damn it hurt all the same.

Leonard folded the vest with quick neat tugs delivered from pudgy fingers. Soon enough, all the wrinkles were removed and the garment looked as if it had never been worn. Just like that, Irwin was wiped from the face of the planet.

“Thank you,” Leonard said. “Now, for our exit interview. Is there anything you’d like to say about your time here with us? Anything you liked, hated? Anything you would change?”

There were a lot of things Irwin could have said about the Commodore Theater. He could have said they already needed new employees and this downsizing would only hurt the business even more. Or, he could have suggested that the food was terrible, the bathrooms needed cleaning more often, and the parking lot was such a tangled mess of fading lines that it was a wonder there weren’t daily wrecks.

But he didn’t say any of that. There wasn’t any point. The word of one wayward wolf shifter wasn’t going to do a damn bit of good.

So he just forced a smile that felt exactly as fake as it was and shook his head. “Not really.”

Leonard nodded, as if he thought this would be the case. His certainty made Irwin want to go back on his word and start jabbering, just to prove him wrong, but he was just so tired of this now that all he wanted to do was leave.

“All right then. Well, Irwin, it’s been nice having you. I wish you luck in your future endeavors.”

“Yeah,” Irwin said.

Turning, he walked out and went through the theater, past the long concession counters crawling with customers, like ants swarming on a picnic blanket. They shifted around him automatically, clearing out of his way. It didn’t matter that he was just an omega wolf, a submissive weakling. Some deeper instinct spoke to them—warned them to move out of his way—and so they did without even realizing what they were doing.

He made it all the way to the other side of the theater unimpeded, passing by one of the tables laden with different kinds of popcorn flavorings, straws, and napkins. It was with no real desire that he lifted five straws and a handful of napkins. No one saw when he summoned one sharp wolf claw and severed the wire holding the little canister of cheddar cheese powder to the table so no one could steal it. Shoving it into his pocket, he carried on and went out through an Employee Only door to reach the back parking lot where he’d left his car only a few minutes ago.

The thievery hadn’t really given him much of a thrill but he knew better than to push his luck. Luck was…just luck. Sometimes it was good. Sometimes it was bad. A person took what they got and that was about it as far as he was concerned.

Unlocking his car, he slid inside the driver’s seat and just sat there without moving. Now that this was all over, he couldn’t help but start worrying more. He could stretch what little money he had by stealing what he needed, taking advantage of the fact that he was born with sticky fingers, but that was by no means a long-term solution. Another job was called for. And fast.

Shaking his head, Irwin tried to rouse himself from his stupor. Nothing was going to happen overnight, jeez. He’d relax for tonight, take it easy, get wasted, and then tomorrow he’d go on the hunt for a new job.

With a plan in mind, he felt himself cheering up considerably. Things had been kind of down lately ever since he stopped hanging out with his gang. Well, they hadn’t really been a gang so much as they were a group of troublemakers who hung around and smoked together. With the five of them, there was always guaranteed to be someone who was up for a bit of mayhem.

Then Blake went and got mated and started himself a family with some nice guy named Josh. Blake’d been the one who gave Irwin the nickname of Fox—because of his red hair—despite the fact that they were all wolves. It’d been a damn shame to lose him, but Irwin was glad that such a decent guy had found the place where he really belonged.

But Blake had been their leader, the one who bound them all together with his drive. Without him, they were just four people with slightly less in common than before.

Then Nickie had dropped out of the group. From what he understood, she had been so broken up over her boyfriend cheating on her that she went plain crazy. She was supposed to be in a rehabilitation center now, slowly being weaned off all the inhalants she’d come to depend on in place of love.

Then it was only him, Pinocchio, and Pete. Pete also used to work at the theater, but he quit to pursue pushing drugs, and Pinocchio had mostly given up on the troublemaker lifestyle to focus on his college courses. Without Blake and Nickie, they had nothing in common. The tentative bonds of their friendship collapsed into ruin, and they didn’t so much part ways as they just forgot the others existed.

Life was like that sometimes, he’d learned. People moved on, and he wasn’t sure he liked knowing it when he felt like hardly more than a kid, as if it was some truth he’d discovered that wasn’t meant for his eyes. Hell, like he’d seen his parents boning or something.

Shuddering at that mental image, Irwin slid the key into the ignition. “C’mon, Monica,” he muttered. The engine whirred uselessly, turning over and over for such a long time that he felt his heart actually start to sink from the disappointment. The car was ancient by automobile standards even before he bought her four years ago, and it was beginning to seem more and more like she might finally be on her last legs. A 2004 Ford Taurus, her original color had been an unattractive shade of dirty orange, but all that remained of her pumpkin-y past were a few streaks and clumps of paint. The rest of her body was an apocalyptic landscape of rust and bared metal, pocked with dents large and small. The surface of the moon had less craters.

Most of the damage had been done before he bought her, which was why she came so cheaply, but he’d added a few more collisions to the list through sheer neglect. One of her tires had blown causing him to slam into a guardrail. There was also that time he didn’t replace the brakes and just kept going when he tried to stop, bumping into the backs of other, larger vehicles.

Now he feared she might be done in for good. And that would just be the shitty icing on top of the shit cake because he couldn’t afford a new car right now.

Just as he was about to call it quits and start walking, the engine finally caught and coughed into life. “Thank God,” he growled. He didn’t mind walking, most wolves didn’t, but a job hunt would be so much easier if he could drive.

Pulling out of the parking lot, he joined the flow of traffic heading in the direction of his apartment building. His thoughts churned like Monica’s engine had, searching for some bit of thought to hold onto as he wondered exactly what to do now. If he wanted to get wasted he was in for a bit of a wait, since most bars didn’t open until later. If he wanted to have some fun, the last thing he was going to do was sit in an early-open bar with a bunch of other jobless drunks and pitiful men lamenting their relationship problems.

While Irwin might wind up one of those jobless drunks, he didn’t have any problems with his relationship. He had none. Never had. Girls annoyed the fuck out of him, and as a result, he’d decided a long time ago that he was asexual. He was just fine with that. He couldn’t believe all the awful stuff he’d seen in other people’s relationships that they were just blind to. No way was that going to happen to him. He’d be happy on his own. A loner through and through.

In the end, he decided it was probably best just to go home and catch up on all the sleep he’d been missing out on. When it got late, he’d grab some dinner and head out again.

Plan cemented in his mind, Irwin reached his apartment quickly and climbed up the rotting wooden stairs. Each step bent precariously beneath his weight and he knew someday one was just going to fail and he’d plummet all the way down to the basement and snap his spine. Could a shifter survive that? He’d get to find out, lucky him.

Unlocking his door, he slipped inside and collapsed into bed, falling asleep in a matter of seconds. If he had known how much his life was going to change that night, he might not have slept so soundly.