says.
I don’t ask him to clarify. I get the gist.
After we’re done eating, Mackenzie texts her dad to come pick her up. When he gets there, he parks the car, comes inside, and shakes Darrin’s hand and mine too.
I can tell he’s sizing us up. It’s bad enough, probably, that his academically wayward daughter is in summer school; he wants to make sure that she’s not hanging out with complete losers. His parental concern is adorable.
Mackenzie and her dad drive off, and Darrin is about to ask if I want to hang out, I can tell.
I ball up the paper wrappers from my tacos and shove them inside the plastic cup. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I say.
Darrin gives me a halfhearted wave as I head out the door.
***
The problem is, I don’t know where I am going. Not home—our box of an apartment would be frying on a hot day like this. Not my studio—it would be even hotter. I think about dropping by Marissa’s place, but she doesn’t answer my text, so who knows what’s up with her.
Actually, my mom’s terrible idea about me getting a summer job is starting to sound slightly less terrible. At least if I find employment somewhere with AC, and if it’s a kick-back kind of a job, maybe I can muddle through my mounds of geometry homework in relative peace and quiet. And the idea of getting paid while I’m doing my homework sounds better than not getting paid while doing it. If I decide to do it at all.
The flaw in this plan, as I discover over the next few hours, is that not a lot of places want to pay you to sit there. Restaurants I rule out right away—anything in the food service industry is going to mean work and lots of it, the physical kind. Waitress is the kind of job my mom would probably approve of, and it’s the kind of job she could walk into any day of the week, if she wanted to. People love to be served by beautiful women—especially here. It makes them feel better. No one wants their burger brought to them by a big fatty or someone with a face full of zits. That’s way too real. It makes you think about the burger and where it’s going to go after you chew and swallow it, what it’s going to do to you next, how your body is going to process it and store some of it and eliminate the rest, through your pores and your asshole. If a beautiful woman hands you your burger, it’s like a promise: the burger won’t make you fat. How could it, if she’s the one to deliver it to your table? It’s, like, blessed.
Retail would pretty much suck too. You can’t just sit behind the counter and ring up the occasional sale; the owner wants you to wander around the store and offer to help and generally keep an eye on everyone to keep them from pocketing the merchandise. I’d be useless if the store had anything good to sell … Marissa would be stopping by in no time, and I don’t think she’d avoid helping herself just because I was on the clock.
And probably I’m unqualified for anything other than retail and food service, which gets me thinking again about what I will do next summer, after high school is over, when a job isn’t going to be an option anymore.
Even if I did want to go to college, it isn’t like my mother has set up a savings account. Either I’d need to take Naomi up on her offer or I’d have to figure out a way to bring in money. Some of the allure of college tempts me, of course—all that potential, balled up into one campus … art supplies must be just floating around. But what would be the point? There isn’t a career out there that I want, and so far anything I’ve ever wanted to learn about I’ve managed fine on my own.
My mother didn’t go to college. For the last five years or so she’s been working at the dental office, and before that she was a personal assistant for this banker who divided his time between LA and New York. He liked to call her his “West Coast Girl.” She organized his dinner parties and picked up his dry cleaning and paid his housekeeper.
I don’t ask him to clarify. I get the gist.
After we’re done eating, Mackenzie texts her dad to come pick her up. When he gets there, he parks the car, comes inside, and shakes Darrin’s hand and mine too.
I can tell he’s sizing us up. It’s bad enough, probably, that his academically wayward daughter is in summer school; he wants to make sure that she’s not hanging out with complete losers. His parental concern is adorable.
Mackenzie and her dad drive off, and Darrin is about to ask if I want to hang out, I can tell.
I ball up the paper wrappers from my tacos and shove them inside the plastic cup. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I say.
Darrin gives me a halfhearted wave as I head out the door.
***
The problem is, I don’t know where I am going. Not home—our box of an apartment would be frying on a hot day like this. Not my studio—it would be even hotter. I think about dropping by Marissa’s place, but she doesn’t answer my text, so who knows what’s up with her.
Actually, my mom’s terrible idea about me getting a summer job is starting to sound slightly less terrible. At least if I find employment somewhere with AC, and if it’s a kick-back kind of a job, maybe I can muddle through my mounds of geometry homework in relative peace and quiet. And the idea of getting paid while I’m doing my homework sounds better than not getting paid while doing it. If I decide to do it at all.
The flaw in this plan, as I discover over the next few hours, is that not a lot of places want to pay you to sit there. Restaurants I rule out right away—anything in the food service industry is going to mean work and lots of it, the physical kind. Waitress is the kind of job my mom would probably approve of, and it’s the kind of job she could walk into any day of the week, if she wanted to. People love to be served by beautiful women—especially here. It makes them feel better. No one wants their burger brought to them by a big fatty or someone with a face full of zits. That’s way too real. It makes you think about the burger and where it’s going to go after you chew and swallow it, what it’s going to do to you next, how your body is going to process it and store some of it and eliminate the rest, through your pores and your asshole. If a beautiful woman hands you your burger, it’s like a promise: the burger won’t make you fat. How could it, if she’s the one to deliver it to your table? It’s, like, blessed.
Retail would pretty much suck too. You can’t just sit behind the counter and ring up the occasional sale; the owner wants you to wander around the store and offer to help and generally keep an eye on everyone to keep them from pocketing the merchandise. I’d be useless if the store had anything good to sell … Marissa would be stopping by in no time, and I don’t think she’d avoid helping herself just because I was on the clock.
And probably I’m unqualified for anything other than retail and food service, which gets me thinking again about what I will do next summer, after high school is over, when a job isn’t going to be an option anymore.
Even if I did want to go to college, it isn’t like my mother has set up a savings account. Either I’d need to take Naomi up on her offer or I’d have to figure out a way to bring in money. Some of the allure of college tempts me, of course—all that potential, balled up into one campus … art supplies must be just floating around. But what would be the point? There isn’t a career out there that I want, and so far anything I’ve ever wanted to learn about I’ve managed fine on my own.
My mother didn’t go to college. For the last five years or so she’s been working at the dental office, and before that she was a personal assistant for this banker who divided his time between LA and New York. He liked to call her his “West Coast Girl.” She organized his dinner parties and picked up his dry cleaning and paid his housekeeper.
Similar Books
