Mel found herself staring blankly at her reflection in the lid of the ice bin. She was all wavy and her chest was covered in big round spots.
There was a promotion going on at P. J. Mortimer’s: The Great Guinness Experiment. There was Guinness in everything. Guinness burgers. Guinness baby back ribs, Guinness mixed in with fudge and put on top of ice cream.
Management was going overboard with the Guinness buttons. They’d ordered a huge carton of them, some with just the logo, some with old pictures of pelicans. The new rule was they had to wear at least six of these on their front and eight on their back. Mel’s suspenders were overloaded; they sagged and kept slipping off her shoulders, making it impossible to move her arms freely. She tried pinning the buttons right through the suspenders and straight through her shirt, but that didn’t work either. The buttons were cheap and poorly made, with too-long pins. They pricked her chest and her collarbone. No matter what the slogan said, Guinness was not good for Mel.
Weeknights were usually sluggish, but tonight was particularly bad, hardly even worth the trip in. She was killing time in the pantry marrying ketchup bottles while her one table was eating. When she first got the job, she thought that was a funny term—marrying ketchup. It was a lot less funny when she had to scrape the disgusting black residue from under the caps and the tops of the bottles. The whole thing was a little nasty, even though she knew it was probably fine to dump ketchup from one bottle to another.
She felt alone. She’d felt alone all day. It only got worse when she messed up with the note and then got all weird about Avery’s rehearsal. Why did she do these things, things she knew perfectly well would make Avery stress out?
Parker came in from the dish room with a large bin of freshly washed silverware. He fished a piece of lettuce from the pool of rinse water that the silverware was drifting in and grimaced.
“So worth missing the hayroll for,” he said. “Want to take a break?”
“Sure,” Mel said.
Outside, Mel walked along the parking lot dividers like they were balance beams. Parker walked alongside her.
“Can we talk for a minute?” he asked.
“Okay. About what?”
Parker went back over to the service door, opened it, and looked inside. Then he closed it again and walked over to the Dumpster and leaned against it.
“I heard something,” he said, gazing down at his shoes.
Mel stopped her balancing and put her toe on the ground to steady herself.
But it was already clear from the way Parker was chomping at his lower lip. She braced herself—actually tensed her legs as if preparing to be hit by a wave.
“Are you gay?” he asked.
He was leaning forward just a little, his hands burrowed deep into his pockets.
“Who told you that?” she asked.
“A guy in my Spanish class.”
That was bizarre. Some guy in Parker’s Spanish class knew about her. Maybe everybody knew now.
“I usually wouldn’t believe something like that,” he said. “But I guess I’ve been curious.”
Mel teetered a little and stepped down off the divider.
“You can tell me,” he said. “I’m all hooray for gay. It’s not a problem. I just wanted to know, from you.”
She looked up at him. He had a strangely expectant expression on his face, and he was pushing back his hair more than normal.
“It’s true,” she said softly.
There was something about saying this out loud that made it seem more real, more official, like paperwork might be required and perhaps even a notary.
“Oh,” he said.
The wind whistled under the Dumpster lid, rattling it, banging the top like a drum. They both stared at it.
“You’re the first person I’ve ever really said it to on purpose like that,” Mel added.
Parker mused this one over for a second.
“This is going to sound wrong,” he said with a touch of hesitation. “You don’t … look gay. I know gay doesn’t look like anything—but sometimes you can tell, right? With some people you can definitely tell.”
They stared at each other.
“This is weird to you,” she said, “isn’t it?”
“It’s not the gay part. Well, it is, but …”
He stepped on some flattened lettuce and ground it in with his heel.
“I had a huge crush on you,” he blurted quickly. “Can I tell you that now, or is this a bad idea? We’re being honest here. So I’m being honest. I’m insanely jealous of Avery, but I guess I’ll get over it.”
He gave a little laugh, and Mel looked down at her puffy blue coat, concentrating hard on the square islands of downy filling. She sat down on the divider, and after a moment he joined her.
“You know about Avery too?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Parker said. “It was all part of the story. That’s true too, right?”
Mel nodded.
“I thought Avery could be,” he said. “I guessed that.”
“She’s freaked out about something,” Mel said. “I get that she doesn’t want to be seen with me around school, but it’s more than that now. I wish I knew what.”
“So why don’t you ask her?”
“You can’t do that with Avery.”
“Because you can’t get in Avery’s face with things.” Mel sighed.
They sat in silence for a minute, listening to the song of the Dumpster again. It banged harder now. The sound was almost reassuring to Mel. She liked its loudness.
“Are you really okay with it?” she finally asked. “Nothing’s changed between us, has it? I mean, if I wasn’t gay …”
“You don’t have to go there,” he interrupted. “At least you’ve got a really good reason for not wanting to go out with me, you know? I can’t really take offense if the problem is that I’m too masculine. I’m too much man!”
He flexed and then winced and grabbed his shoulder. Mel tried to laugh, but the sound that came out was more like a croak. All of her emotions were close to the surface. Parker’s face fell.
“Hey,” he said. “Hey, come on. Friends, right?”
“Right.”
Parker hesitated for a moment, then quickly threw his arms around her. Mel got the feeling that he was working something out of himself by gripping her so firmly. That was fine with her. It felt good to be here. She rested her face against his wool coat. They stayed there like that for a moment, then Parker flinched slightly and reached under his coat and adjusted his suspenders.
“These suck,” he said. “I didn’t really want acupuncture, you know?”
He pulled off a pin and slam-dunked it into the Dumpster with a yell. He jumped up, grabbed onto the edge, and continued screaming at the garbage, giving his very definite opinion of the Guinness promotion.
“If only the public knew what really goes on here,” he said, sliding down and wiping his hands on his coat. “Family fun, my ass.”
Mel managed a smile.
“Come on,” he said, reaching down a hand to help Mel off the divider. “Let’s go inside. I’m sure we’re missing out on something fun.”