CanIHelpYou?’s Boxing Glove
I haven’t sold one green milkshake all day. But I just made two hundred bucks selling weed to mostly strangers. Jake Marks has weird friends. At least three of them wouldn’t be allowed to park in the high school parking lot.
The speaker beeps.
“Welcome to Arby’s Drive-Thru. Can I help you?”
“Gimme a number two meal with a Coke.”
God, sometimes I wish there was one of those big boxing gloves rigged into the speaker so I could press a button and punch people in the face.
“Eight fifty-four. Second window.”
“What?”
“Eight fifty-four. Second window,” I repeat.
“Weren’t you trained to be nice to customers?”
I am pressing the boxing glove button. I am punching this person in the face a hundred times. I don’t know what to say. I’m tired of being a doormat. I say, “Second window.”
I have never spit on anyone’s food. Never. I’ve never done anything remotely tempting like that, even though I’ve had opportunities. Suddenly, I’m looking around the Drive-Thru for anything to put on this guy’s order.
I look under the register and there’s glass cleaner. Too obvious. On the tiled floor, jammed in between the stainless-steel counter leg and the plastic wall protector is a lump of mop dirt—the kind that looks like a miniature dead mouse—part mop fiber, hair, dirt, and the gray goo that probably used to be grease. Len has the place wired with two cameras in case cashiers steal money. I make it look like I’m picking up a dropped napkin. I drop the napkin first, then bend down to pick it up and grab the mop blob and put it next to the register. Then, as I’m bagging the sandwich, I open the wrapper while it’s still inside the to-go bag and stick the blob into the roast beef sandwich and rewrap it. It feels equally wrong and right. If the boxing glove was real, I wouldn’t have to do this.
I take my time filling the Coke. I think about what I’ve done. I consider sabotaging my own sabotage—dropping the sandwich on the floor and asking for a new one. I decide Gimme people deserve what they get.
I don’t want to hold their hands through life anymore. I don’t want to help them with the real problems that await. I don’t want to help them understand that a simple please or thank-you goes a long way. I want them to fall into impossible love with their best friend. I want them to be kidnapped from a mall. Live in a tunnel.
“Eight fifty-four,” I say when I open the window. I don’t make eye contact even though I can feel his stare.
He hands me a ten-dollar bill.
I get his change and hand it back to him along with the Coke, and then I hand him the bag.
“Have a nice day,” I say, and close the window.
I want to text Ian and tell him what just happened but I also want to pretend what happened didn’t happen. Just like being in love with Ian. That can’t happen. Nothing in my life can happen.
I feel like I’m getting a manicure in Wichita. Twenty-four hours a day.
I turn to Susan, my manager. “I don’t feel well.”
She doesn’t say anything.
In the bathroom I’m in the tunnel. The stall walls are gray, like my submarine. A cockroach skitters by and says hello. I reply, “Hello.” It stops and adjusts its eyeglasses and says, “You know you can’t really be in love with your best friend.”
I want to kill it, but I don’t. It’s probably not even there in real life. It’s just my brain fucking with me. The tunnel. There are rules. The rules are: nobody helps you in here. No one can give you answers. No one can give you a hug. Other people come and go, but you can’t see any of them. Makes you want to get out as soon as you can, but once you get out, you only want to go back in again. It’s comfortable because it’s what you’re used to. The truth lives here. Underground.
“Do you have any spare toilet paper?” someone in the stall next to me asks.
The bathroom was empty when I got here.
“Hello?” she says. “This stall is out. I could really use a little if you have some.”
I take a bunch of toilet paper and hand it under the stall wall.
“Where did you come from?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I was in a field a minute ago and now I’m trying to find the boy with the shovel. I think.”
“You sound as confused as I am.”
“Just trying to find the right time to do the right things. It’s hard to know.”
“Yeah.” I don’t tell her that there’s no right time to fall in love with your best friend.
“You’re right,” she says. “There’s no right time for that.”
I don’t say anything because this has to be a hallucination, just like the bug with the glasses.
“Not so. I’m real. So was the bug. It was a cockroach.”
I must be going crazy.
“You’re not going crazy. Believe me. You should see what I have to deal with in a day.”
“Who are you?” I ask.
“I’m The Freak. Who’re you?”
“CanIHelpYou?, I guess.”
“You’re not really in love with him,” she says. “You just have a bond is all. It’s normal. Girls our age just want to find one guy who isn’t out for pussy or a blow job.”
“Um.”
“Too harsh?” she asks.
“Don’t know. Could be accurate. Not sure,” I say. I remember her name from the night Ian and I tripped in the park. Hard to forget a name like that. “Is that what the shoveler guy wants from you?”
She blows her nose and I wonder if she’s crying. Can’t hear it in her voice, but it sounds like the kind of snot that only happens when you cry. “I don’t know what he wants from me. I just showed up one night to help him and he thought I was the meaning of life or some shit.”
“Oh.”
“I’m hungry. Any chance you can give me some food when we get out of here?”
I think about what I just did. How I put mop dirt on a sandwich. Crossed the line. “Sure. What kind do you like?”
“The kind with the cheese on it. The gooey cheddar from the can.”
“You want fries with that?”
“Potato cakes if you have some.”
That’ll be a pain. We usually make those fresh. But I say, “Okay.”
We meet at the sinks and look at each other through the reflection in the mirrors. She was totally crying in the stall—her eyeliner is a mess. “You’re pretty,” I say.
She laughs. “Don’t go falling in love with me, now, too.”