Reality Boy

Anyway, for the matinee, she’s at #4 because the stand is half-closed, and I have to squeeze past her twice to get stuff. She smells nice and her hair looks soft. I know… this is the shit I will think about when I’m locked up one day.

She’s only been working here for a few weeks. Regular hours like me, but not always in my stand. She disappears a lot and I see her at break time in the smokers’ alley, writing in a little book that she keeps in her pocket. She looks at me sometimes. She’s caught me looking at her twice, but I’ve looked at her a lot more than that, because there’s something about her. The way she wears her hair. The way she wears boys’ combat pants to work even though Beth has asked her not to. The way she writes in that little book. She’s beautiful—but not in that Nanny-starlet way where she cares about how she looks. She’s the opposite. She doesn’t care at all, which makes her even more beautiful. If I was a normal kid, I’d ask her out, I guess.

But Roger, my anger management coach, told me that dating and anger management don’t go very well together. He told me that girls are infuriating. They always want to know so much. Relationships make you think you deserve things, Gerald. Deserving leads to resentment. Girls think you should be doing things for them, too. The rules are blurry. You’re doing so well.

The matinee at PEC is some singing group for kids. By the time we open and the little kids come in, the only things we’re really selling are pretzels, bottled water, and the occasional pack of red licorice. It’s slow. Most of the parents are well dressed and make their children say thank you. Here’s an example:

“What do you say to the nice man?” they say.

“Thank you,” the kid says when I hand him his dollar in change.

“You should say it more nicely, Jordan,” his mother says.

“Thank you,” the kid says, no differently than before.

I hand him his pretzel and he sneers at me because he thinks I’m some sublevel adult who can’t get a better job than concessions at the PEC Center. I hate parents like his. So concerned with appearances. I want to tell them that they’re lucky the kid isn’t taking dumps on their favorite couch. Or in their BMW.

After the preshow rush, I get to peek into the arena. Four guys dressed in different costumes—a cowboy, a railroad engineer, a suit, and a chef—play songs that use the same chords over and over again. The chef plays drums with cooking utensils. The cowboy occasionally drops the melody and takes off on a country music riff all by himself while the other guys roll their eyes. Then he hops on his guitar and rides it around the stage. The kids can’t get enough of this. The high-pitched screaming makes my ears crackle.

“That’s messed up,” she says. It’s the girl from register #1. “How can anyone even think that’s funny?”

“I know, right?” I say. Then I walk away because she’s irresistible, and I am on a mission to resist her.

I refill the cooler with bottled water and diet soda. I go to the bathroom to pee, and wash my hands exactly as an employee is supposed to. When I come out, she’s nowhere to be found. Probably out writing about me in her little book. About how she tried to talk to the Crapper, but he walked away.

6

“GERALD?”

It’s my manager, Beth. I look at her.

“Gerald, you’ve been standing there staring into space for five minutes.”

I look at the clock. I see the well-dressed parents taking their overexcited kids to the souvenir stand for cowboy/engineer/suit/chef costumes and kites and cups and T-shirts. We’ve closed our gate so we can count our drawers and switch up for the hockey crowd. I’ve already counted my drawer. I don’t remember doing it, but it’s done. I notice that Beth looks worried. As worried as Beth can look, anyway—she’s so laid-back she’s nearly horizontal. But still, she looks worried.

“Sorry,” I say.

“You can take a break if you want,” she says. “You’ve been here since we opened. And did you even eat lunch yet?” I’d like Beth to be my mother. She totally wouldn’t let Tasha live in the basement with her rat-boyfriend sleepovers. “I have leftover chicken and fries if you want some,” she adds, and points to the shallow stainless-steel tray under the heat lamp full of fried foods that never got sold.

As I reach in, Register #1 Girl reaches in, too, and our wrists brush against each other. I look at her and smile. She smiles back and takes her hand out to give me first pick. I do the same. Beth intervenes and fixes us each a paper dish of chicken fingers and fries, and we thank her. And then I go way back toward register #7 to eat, and Register #1 Girl goes to where everyone else is eating, over by the sinks beyond register #1.

I go back to my other day. The one I was living in my head when Beth snapped me out of it. My place-of-no-triggers. I invented it when I was little, thanks to Nanny. I call it Gersday. It rhymes with pairsday or daresday. It’s the extra day I get inside of a week that no one else knows about. I live it in little parts of those other, regular days like Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, et cetera. While normal people who have seven days in their week may think I’m spacing out or “off in la-la land,” as my ass**le third-grade teacher used to say, I’m really living one more day than all of you. A good day.

All Gersdays are good days.

Let me repeat. All Gersdays are good days.

The postal abbreviation is GD. For Gersday. Or good day. Or anything you want to make it, as long as it’s so good that all the bad goes away. The zip code is .

And if I take a day in GD during every other FS 00000 or UF ????? week, then I get to have a longer life than everyone else. That’s fifty-two extra days a year, which adds up.

Let me explain further.

A normal sixteen-year-old (nearly seventeen-year-old) would have lived about 6,191 days. I, Gerald “the Crapper” Faust, have lived 6,815. That’s 624 days more than other near-seventeen-year-olds. Technically, if we go by days, I’m almost nineteen.

7

EPISODE 1, SCENE 12, TAKE 2

“GERALD, YOU CAN’T keep going off into your own world like that,” Nanny said. “You need to stay here and listen to what I’m saying, do you undah-stand?”

I nodded because the director told me to nod. But I was still in Gersday, eating strawberry ice cream and walking down a happy street in a city neighborhood where none of the kids did things that made me want to beat them up.

Nanny must have noticed, because she grabbed me by the arms and put her face right in my face and said, “Gerald! You’re needed here. You either listen or you spend time in the naughty chair.”