Heteroflexible

My heartbeat plays angry music on my eardrums as I burst into the employee break room, punch in for work, then hurry to grab a broom and dustpan from the usher’s closet and join Vince or G-man or whoever’s working this morning with me.

The day does not improve.

“Dude, did you not take out the front trashcan from the first auditorium we cleaned?” asks Vince just minutes before my lunch break. “It was completely full and Mr. Lemon just bitched me out.”

I slap my forehead, confused. “I swear I did, but—”

Vince sighs. “Where is your head at, Bobby?”

“I’ll go take out the trash,” I tell him. “I just forgot, that’s all.”

“I already emptied it. Seriously, Bobby, you are in a totally …” Vince shakes his head. “… totally weird place these past few weeks.”

We’re standing in front of the door to the break room, our brooms and dustpans in hand. I stare at him with a lost expression on my face, exhausted to my core, and utterly sleep-deprived. It’s difficult to even form my own sentences, let alone decode Vince’s.

“I’ve not been weird,” I argue back, annoyed.

And then comes another opinion this already uncomfortable confrontation totally doesn’t need: “Yeah, you have been.”

My ears practically flatten like a cat’s when I turn to face the smarmy face of Anthony Myers. “No one asked you,” I retort to him, my tone as civil as I can possibly manage.

Anthony puts himself right between me and Vince, leaning against the break room door. “Mr. Lemon knows all about Jimmy’s late-night hanging out with you in the projectionist booth during your closing shifts.”

I sigh, then glance back and forth between them. “Really, do you guys have somethin’ you need to say to me? Just say it.”

Vince, despite having literally nothing nice to say about Mr. Asshole Myers here ever, nods at him. “Well, Anthony said it. You aren’t supposed to bring friends up into the booth. I think Jimmy is makin’ you lose focus on your job. He’s distracting you. You’re forgetting some of your basic duties, and—”

“Vince, I already said sorry about forgetting the trash.”

“It isn’t just the trash,” he goes on. “You keep compacting the trash wrong on your closing shifts—always when Jimmy’s here distracting you—and then I gotta—”

I gape incredulously. “There’s only one dang way to do it! You shove the trash in and press a button!”

“You gotta hold the button down for at least fifteen seconds,” he corrects me tiredly, visibly exercising an amount of patience, “otherwise it can stop in the middle of its compacting cycle, which makes my job in the morning that much harder when I show up for work and find the compactor stuck halfway through its cycle.”

“Hell, even I know that,” Anthony throws in.

I shoot Anthony a withering glare. It isn’t lost on me what’s really going on here. I take a step toward him. “Y’know what? I think the issue here isn’t my work ethic, or whether I’m holding a damned button for fifteen seconds.”

“Oh, here we go,” mutters Vince, slapping a big hand to his forehead with a sigh, all too used to the bickering and pissing matches between me and Anthony.

“The issue,” I finish, “is that you have some personal problem with me, Anthony Myers.”

Vince eyes me. “C’mon, Bobby. Let’s not do this right now.”

I take another step toward Anthony, ignoring Vince. “You’ve been on me since day one, and I don’t know why, other than Jimmy got over it pretty fast when his prom date ditched him for you, and stole your thunder by asking me to prom instead.”

“I don’t … W-What?” Anthony laughs off my words. “What in the hell you talkin’ about, Parker? Prom was forever ago.”

“Exactly, yet you can’t seem to let it go,” I retort. “You have been antagonizing me since I was hired here, and for no reason other than you’re just a dick.” I spread my hands challengingly, putting myself in Anthony’s face now. “So what’s your problem with me? Just say it and let’s get this feud over with.”

Vince puts a hand on my shoulder. “Hey, man, it isn’t that big a deal about the trash, I’m sorry, I should’ve just—”

I swat his hand right off my shoulder. “Yeah, obviously it is.”

Vince sighs. “Look, can we just finish our duties for the day after you take your break? I didn’t mean to make a big deal out of it, I was just letting you know about the trash you forgot in—”

“Obviously you do want to make a big deal out of it,” I argue back, my temper lost, “because you’re siding with Anthony Myers here, who—”

“Wait, wait, no, no,” Vince starts, lifting his hands in defense.

Anthony’s in my face again. “Hey, don’t start goin’ off on him just because you’re the one who can’t do your job properly.”