Steamroller

“Man, I so don’t give a crap about you,” I assured him snidely. “If I had time, if you had showed up earlier, we would have run it. This is so not personal.”

“Well, it is now.”

I rolled my eyes, because who talked like that? Well, it is now. Why did there have to be drama when there was such a simple solution? I hated people who bitched just to hear the sound of their own voices. Go do something about it; don’t stand around and whine. Christ.

I left him there with his buddy, both of them fuming, and went out to help a customer waving at me from the self-serve department. He didn’t know how to add a picture to his Facebook page. Normally we didn’t help with that kind of stuff, but other than our oversize and color, it was dead, so I had time. When I got back, the two football players were gone.

“But I need it,” Mike whined for my benefit.

“But you can’t have it,” Lucy bantered back, shaking her head and pouting for me. She even stomped her foot. “So sorry, Vin.”

“God, what a douche,” I grunted.

“I know, but that’s the kind of shit Alex would pull on those nights you weren’t here. That’s why we got stuck pulling all that overtime. He would stay and do that crap for those guys. Everyone he was trying to impress… girls too! All the cute model types playing with their hair in front of him. God, I wanted to puke,” she growled.

“Oh!” Scott made his voice high as he walked up beside us. “Thank you, Alex, you’re so sweet. You want me to blow you in your car?”

I started laughing.

“Ohmygod, Alex was such an ass,” Mike griped as he took the meter reads off the machines. “I mean, no cute girls ever paid for shit while he was working.”

“Well, I don’t charge hot guys,” I chimed in.

“Yes, you do,” he snapped irritably. “That’s the thing about you, Vince. You don’t jump in and say, ‘Oh yeah, sure, we’ll do that even though we all have school the next day and we’re tired and we all have homework. Yeah, no problem.’”

Lucy scrunched up her face. “Worst of all, Alex couldn’t even run any of the machines. So he’s saying yes when we’re saying no because we know what’s in production, and he has no clue! Then on top of that, he can’t help because he was hired from the outside and he didn’t know how to do shit.”

“So he’s overruling us on what to take in, and then he’s, like, ‘Okay, now you do it.’” Scott sounded very bitter.

“God, I hated that guy,” Mike said, clapping his hand down on my shoulder. “And I know you’re workin’ like a dog, but I for one have enjoyed the hell out of having you here all the time.”

“Me too,” Lucy agreed.

“Me three.” Scott grinned wide. “It’s Friday. After this, let’s go get a beer. At least we don’t have to be up first thing in the morning.”

I squinted at him. “It is Friday—what’s with all the posters, then?”

“They have to be up in the hall before nine a.m. tomorrow morning to be graded.”

“On Saturday?”

“Yeah, they’re graded over the weekend.”

“Why?”

“Since all four professors have to look at them together, they take the weekend instead of trying to make time during the week. Their aides check to see who has it put up by nine tomorrow morning, they record it, and then sometime either on Saturday or Sunday, they lock themselves in, and whatever is in the exhibition hall gets graded, whatever isn’t gets a zero.”

I nodded. “Got it.”

“So? Beer?” Mike prodded.

I needed to let them wind down from their week, even if that meant I would be going home alone. “Well, you guys can, but I—”

“No,” Scott cut me off. “You’re going too, Vinnie.”

“Yeah, but—”

“I forget sometimes that you’re just a pup.” He smiled, ruffling my hair. “Let’s do this. We’ll go to Mario’s, and you can have pizza and Pepsi, and the rest of us can have pizza and beer.”

I turned and smiled at him because it was really nice. They were all over twenty-one and could have gone somewhere and drank. I wasn’t; I couldn’t. Normally they didn’t include me. We were work friends, and we didn’t hang out otherwise.

“You coming, Vince?” Scott checked.

And for once I was.

On the way home from the pizza place a little after one in the morning, I had to walk by the twenty-four-hour location of Ace Graphics. It was the one located on Rose, close to the college, that I had sent the football players to earlier. There were windows along one side of the building, and when I looked in to see who I could flip off, just to be a dick, I saw Monica Wrigley running toward the automatic doors at the front entrance to cut me off.