I got a job at a local bookstore at the beginning of the school year. The reason was simple: I was nothing. Or next to nothing, which is essentially the same thing. I was sixteen years old and hot air in a water balloon, spending long summer days lying listless in the gravel driveway of our trailer park. Okay, that’s a lie, but it does sound more dramatic. Really, I lived in a yellow split-level in the ‘burbs, and spent the summer sitting on the back patio reading my sister’s old copies of cheesy magazines. I had no friends and no driver’s permit. I’d completed my summer reading assignment one week into the break. It sat next to the record player on my dresser, collecting dust.
The job was my idea. I wanted to get something started – to kick start my life. Light the fuse or whatever. The summer was so sleepy, and my life up until that point had been so homogeneous. So I wrote up the world’s worst resume and submitted it. I chattered idiotically through an interview with a twenty-six-year-old merchandising manager. I got the job. Twenty hours per week, minimum wage. The name tag was free and the dress code was business casual. I was given complimentary register-use lessons, and was taught a lengthy spiel about the benefits of a membership.
A long list of colorful characters marked my brief, four-month period as an employee. One of them was Val. Val was a senior, seventeen, petite like me, and a theater geek. Her hair was this long, insane mass of curls and her eyes were baby blue. I liked her because she was nice, she liked herself, and she did most of the talking. In the first few weeks I knew her I learned about her French-speaking boyfriend from Connecticut, her awful ex Eric, her uncle’s health problems, the deaths of some of her close relatives, and her Broadway aspirations. She showed me pictures of her boyfriend on her phone and told me stories about their kind-of-two-year anniversary celebration (they’d taken a break somewhere in-between). I sat with her in the break room as she wrote out drafts for the cards she was making to give to the kids in her theater department as Christmas goodies, all in pink ink. I thought about how I knew so much about her and she knew nearly nothing about me, except that I was a year younger and went to a different local high school, the one her cousin’s girlfriend graduated from last year.
I liked this, though: this quiet, not-quite anonymity. I heard stories without telling my own. I peered through clouded lenses into another person’s life. It was like reading a first-person fiction novel. There were no awkward silences. If Val wasn’t filling up our time together with talk, the quiet came natural and calm. There was no struggling. We were purely casual acquaintances; had we been a little older, we probably would have gone out for a drink.
I think about single moments, and wonder what we must have looked like, that one Tuesday in December, at ten o’clock at night, when we both grappled for the Christmas week schedule that had been tacked onto the wall, just out of reach. Both of us, the schedule flat on the table, huddled over the still-fresh, still-flat piece of paper, reading the wrong times. She gabbed endlessly. We joked together. It was good – there was respect and an understanding. We would have gone to certain lengths for each other, but nothing to the extreme. In our relationship there was a certain kind of freedom - a complete lack of in debt-ness. We owed each other nothing, and so we could cruise along, free floating, and at ease.