Reality Boy

She sighs.

“But it’s closer to the cooler and everything,” she says.

I shrug. “I really have to work on number seven.”

She gives me a nod and tells the woman on #7 to move to #5. She switches the money drawers even though we’re not even open and there’s $150 in both of them. Then she sighs again.

“You okay?” I ask.

“Yeah. Tough day.”

She’s never a downer like this. Beth is awesome. Like—always awesome. I would totally be into her if she wasn’t, like, fifty. She’s the perfect opposite of me—she lives in her own sunshine state. Postal abbreviation SS. It is on an entirely different coast from FS. Her coast has beaches and seventy-five-degree waves, and mine has cliffs and the water is too cold to swim in.

“Can I do anything to help?” I ask.

She shakes her head and smiles a little. “You can make sure everyone has enough ice.”

So I make sure everyone has enough ice and I start wrapping hot dogs and I do as much as I can to make Beth stop sighing. It’s not right, her being like this.

“Yo, Crapper!” Nichols says from the walkway. “You gonna be cool tonight or am I going to have to sic Todd on you?” Todd looks mortified. Not just because Nichols is an idiot, but because he knows I could take him with my eyes closed. I keep wrapping hot dogs and hear nothing but the blood in my ears and my heartbeat.

And then she’s here.

She’s here saying, “Can I help you with those, Gerald?” and I’m so scared of what I’ll say or do that I just nod and we wrap hot dogs together silently. She gets the jumbo dogs and wraps them in silver. I wrap the regular ones in blue. The other five cashiers do other stuff. I don’t care. She smells like berries.

“How come you’re always at register number seven?” she asks.

“Dunno,” I say.

“Really?” she asks. “You don’t know?”

“Not as busy. And no credit card machine.”

“Ugh. I hate that thing,” she says. She crinkles her nose up when she says it.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah,” she says.

I think about this for a minute, and then I ask, “So why don’t you switch registers? Two and five don’t do credit.”

She answers, “I can’t do two because”—she lowers her voice to a whisper—“I’m not eighteen.”

“And five?”

“I—uh—I just like number one. It’s, like, my place.” When I don’t say anything, she adds, “You probably think I’m a freak now or something.” I watch her expression turn pained.

“No. I’m—uh. I’m always on seven for the same reason,” I say. “I like it there.” I don’t add that I like it there because she’s on #1 and I’m in love with her, even though I don’t even know her.

I don’t add that.

“Oh,” she says. “I guess we all have our quirks, eh?”

15

I CATCH HER looking at me a few times across the distance. When it’s busy, there’s a lot of space between register #1 and register #7. I counted on my way to fill the ice bucket. It’s nineteen paces.

I don’t think I’m too dangerous to date anymore. I mean, I know Roger thinks girls are infuriating and that I shouldn’t be opening myself up to that shit, but she’s cute. She’s funny. We’re both weird. She’s weird because she writes in that little book. I’m weird because I used to crap on stuff. And because I wear war paint to school. And because I ate part of some kid’s face once when I was thirteen.

I should clear that last part up.

Tom What’s-His-Name was asking for it. I mean that in a strictly pre–anger management way. Now, I know that Tom was just being a douche, and I was to blame for eating his face. Tom did not deserve a hole in his face. I did not deserve justice. But anyway. He called me Crapper all the time. Like—never called me Gerald, ever. Just Crapper. And in middle school, we were stuck in the same class two years in a row, for seventh and eighth grades. As if middle school wasn’t hard enough.

From the time Nanny left to the time I ate Tom What’s-His-Name’s face, I fell behind in school because no one helped me. Sometimes Lisi would, but I felt stupid a lot, so I didn’t always ask her. By middle school, Mom had petitioned to get me into SPED again. This was her mission in life, I guess. The elementary school wouldn’t let her do it, because they said I did fine in regular classes. But middle school was middle school. And the first quarter of eighth grade was just that Tom kid calling me Crapper all the time again and all the teachers letting him. It distracted me. I got mostly Ds and Fs on my report card.

Then one day—it was a normal day—he didn’t do anything over the top. Just called me Crapper the way he would. Casual. “Hey, Crapper, can you pass me that book?” And I just turned into a hungry tiger. I think people tried to pull me off him, but before they could, I’d bitten him on the arm and the shoulder, and finally my teeth sank into his cheek. I took a bite, like he was an apple. I spat it out. He screamed.

I don’t know. Something snapped, I guess. After five years of locking myself in my room with no one remotely concerned about that fact, and then a year and a half of being called the Crapper, I ate a kid’s face. Sometimes these things happen.

Nichols doesn’t show up until the end of the second period of the hockey game, and when I see him approach, I look over at Beth and give her the come here motion with my head. She recognizes him from last time and pretends to be annoyed so Nichols thinks she’s the bitch.

“ID?” she asks.

Todd Kemp is already walking away, but Nichols just stands there staring at her. She could totally take him. She stares back. He gets that sarcastic smirk he has all the time, like he’s better than us.

Nichols walks away and Beth nods, then motions toward the mob of people coming at us for food. “Here comes the rush,” she says.

I look up and see Tasha standing right in front of me.

This sends me to Gersday, where a bowl of ice cream awaits, and two tickets to the circus for me and Lisi.

Tasha’s drumming her fingers on the counter. “Pretzel and a jumbo hot dog and a Pepsi.”

“No,” I say. Beth stays by me when she hears me say this. I am in Gersday, so I don’t give a shit what either of them thinks, because Tasha doesn’t exist, so Tasha obviously can’t have a pretzel, a jumbo dog, or a Pepsi. Things that don’t exist can’t buy, eat, or carry things that do exist. That’s just a simple fact.