“Hey.” I waved at her as she stepped out onto the sidewalk in front of me.
“Vince!”
I smiled at the desperation in her voice. “That would be me.”
“Oh thank God.” She sighed deeply. “We called everybody, and nobody’s picking up, and we’ve got so much… just… please come look at the oversize printer before Sawyer’s head explodes.”
I chuckled, and she rushed forward and put her arm through mine, making sure I couldn’t get away. “What’s it doing?”
“It’s not doing anything. That’s the problem.”
The store I worked at could easily fit inside the one we walked into at least twice. It was why it was called “the big store” compared to our compact one. When I looked to the back, I saw Sawyer Downey, the assistant manager of that branch, striding toward me.
“I’ll take you for the blueberry pancakes you love. I swear to God.”
“I just ate.” I smiled at him, lifting the strap of my messenger bag with the Israeli Paratrooper insignia on it over my head.
“I’ll take that.” Monica beamed at me. “You wanna give me the coat too?”
I was wearing my green military jacket with the stiff collar that was big enough for me to wear two layers under if I needed to. As it was the third week in December, it was more than cold enough to wear it.
“No, it shouldn’t take that long,” I said as I walked behind the counter with Sawyer. “What did you try?”
“I cleaned the print heads and ran diagnostics. The print quality says it should be fine, but I’ve got nothing coming out.”
I moved around him to the main computer to check the network connectivity.
“How do you know how to do all this?” Sawyer asked, close to me, his breath on the side of my neck. “You’re just a baby.”
I concentrated on what I was doing, because Sawyer lived to give me crap about my age. He was thirty and the assistant manager of his store, and I was nineteen and held the same position at mine. He had started off not liking me at all until he realized I didn’t want to be at the big branch. I was happy where I was at the smaller one. Once he knew I wasn’t gunning for his job, everything changed and settled. Now we were friendly, and I’d even had Thanksgiving at his house—with a lot of other people he invited and his wife and daughter.
“You know how I know what I’m doing, Downey?”
“How?”
“I actually pay attention,” I teased him before I looked over at the Epson printer that was nearly six feet long as the first swipe of color hit the coated paper.
“Oh yes,” he crowed, thumping me on the back hard. “Blueberry pancakes and eggs and bacon and—”
“No.” I smiled. “Gotta go home. Tomorrow I’m actually off, so I get to sleep in for once.”
He nodded. “Sunday, then, breakfast at my house. Kimi’s making biscuits and gravy for my family, and she told me to ask you.”
I adored his wife. She would sit and talk to me and ask about my love life and school and actually listen without commenting. “That sounds good. What time?”
“Ten?”
“It’s a date.”
He squeezed the back of my neck and then tousled my hair again.
“You gotta do that?” I griped.
“Yeah, kid,” he said as he grinned at me, “I really do.”
I would forgive him because of the grin.
On the way out, I saw the same two football players who had given me grief earlier at my store walking in. Neither of them said anything as they passed me. I walked on, out of the store and down the sidewalk. Minutes later I heard my name yelled. Turning, I found the pretty one jogging toward me.
As a rule I had no use for football players. They were big dumb jocks who, if I was lucky, ignored me, and if I wasn’t, knocked me around.
In high school I got called “faggot” a lot, and sometimes “queerboy,” and with it I was shoved up against my locker or whichever one was closest. There were the times when I was tripped and pushed and even run into during PE. Two ribs were bruised once, but really, the online stuff was the worst. The Facebook crap used to hurt because I was frustrated that it even showed up, but almost worse was the fact that in the time it took to shoot a video of me and put it on TikTok or post some picture of me on Snapchat, we could have been talking and working it out. Why didn’t anyone ever want to just work it out? Why the bullying? And who had that kind of time to be so deliberately mean? They all needed to get a life. My grandmother always said to stay strong; Matt used to say the same. The thing was, though, I was in no danger of hurting myself, killing myself, because I had a whole world to look forward to.