Smile

Murder Everyone

I actually get a lunch break on time today. On time means nine-thirty in the morning. I didn't think I'd be able to take a break at all. Three call-outs today. One of them was Diana.

She's reliable usually, but sometimes she gets in one of her weird moods. She really likes to make people feel sorry for her. Okay, yeah, who am I to talk? Well, most of it stays in my head and definitely none of it comes out at work. Not like Diana. She's already complaining about how night crew ate her lunch. Why would you leave your lunch in the fridge overnight anyway? The breakroom fridge isn't your personal food storage. Or she makes everyone listen to her litany of medical issues. I get that she's in her 80s and that's pretty old to still be working full-time. But lady, I can't deal with my complaints and yours. I feel bad, but not bad enough to listen to you tell me all about your diabetes and gluten issues in vivid detail. And no, I'm never going on a witch hunt to figure out who on night crew ate your diabetes/gluten chili. Take it home at night. I say that every damn time.

So today was one of Diana's woe-is-me moods and when she called out she kept me on the phone for like ten minutes telling me all about how she was sick and vomiting and having diarrhea. And part of me wanted to say, "Great. I'll put you in the phone. Now I gotta go. I'm not listening anyway, because I'm currently trying to reset two of the self checkout registers while a whole crowd of customers yells that there aren't any open registers."

Dave, the guy who runs electrical, was walking past self checkout right around nine and he was busy trying to flirt with a chick on MET, but I flagged him down anyway and asked if he would cover my lunch.

He was all irritated that I interrupted him trying to get his dick wet and he snapped, "Don't you see I'm talking?"

I pointed out the throngs of customers and said, "I'm just trying to talk to you before I get caught up helping a customer." See, I can't walk away from self checkout when I have no cashiers. Somebody has to be stationed at self checkout any time the store is open. Dave knows that.

He said, "What do you want?"

"Can you cover my lunch?"

He rolled his eyes and said, "You're a new manager, so lemme explain something to you: We work hard here. We work so hard that we don't always take breaks. I go some days and don't even clock out for lunch. I grab a candy bar and scarf it down and then get back to packdown. That's the pace here. Keep up or get out."

It floored me. It just...I just wanted to disappear in that moment. It was like a sharp cold slice of realization: No matter how hard I work, I'll always be told to work harder. Because here I am working ten hour days minimum and often twelve or fourteen hour days and I haven't had a day off in two and half weeks and I'm so tired and my blood sugar is dropping and I'm getting dizzy...I walked back over to the self checkout main terminal and fought back tears. I had to get my emotions under control because I was the only person on the front end and if I cried, I'd just be stuck up there crying in front of customers who would probably use it as an excuse to yell at me.

I guess Dave felt bad, because he came back fifteen minutes later and very quietly told me to take an hour lunch. He didn't look me in the eyes and took the self checkout scanner out of my hand without waiting for me to answer.

Now I'm actually taking an hour lunch break for the first time in weeks. I've been taking twenty and thirty minute lunches. Yesterday I had an awful twenty minutes in McDonalds trying to get a burger and a coke. The cashier rang me up wrong and I very nicely pointed out her mistake and she snapped at me. And that was after an old woman tried to cut me in line and argued with me when I told her she was cutting me. I got annoyed and yelled at her and then another old woman in front of me, kept swiveling her head around to give me that obnoxious up-and-down look that people give you when they're judging you. I looked her direct in the eyes and all she did was smirk at me. It wasn't until I said, "Do you need something?" that the color drained from her face and she spun back around. Like why be passive-aggressive if you don't have the balls to match regular old aggression?

I know they say if you meet assholes all day you're the asshole...I just don't know what the hell I'm doing though. If I am being an asshole then how do I stop? All I wanna do is go to work and not be yelled at. Go on my lunch break and not be cut in line or smirked at or get attitude from the cashier when she is the one who messed up my order. Or have my coworkers act like I'm a lazy asshole because I want to take my legally mandated lunch break. Am I really some shithead lazy millennial if I just want to take a damn hour off in the middle of my...how long am I here today?...Oh, yeah, fourteen hour day. I'm closing. Which means I should have saved my break for later.

Everything is so bad. No, no...it's fine. It's fine. It's...It has to be fine. Because there's nothing else. This is my life. I live in Boston and I work just outside of Roxbury and I'm the front end supervisor and make okay-ish money and one day I'll...I'm not sure. What will I do someday? What do I even want? I don't know. I want to not be bothered or screamed at or smirked at and I want my husband to want to fuck me and to feel like I'm actually connected to him. I can't have any of that with my current job. Or current husband.

I don't walk across the parking lot to my SUV. I'm not doing McDonald's today. They're so rude at that place. Although they're pretty rude at the Burger King in the dead mall too. Fuck, maybe the problem is me. Someone tell me how and I'll knock it the hell off.

Dead mall it is. Our big box location is attached to a notoriously dead mall and it only has like three places to eat inside of it and barely any stores. It's sort of creepy at night, but during the day, it's just nice not to be observed.

My boots crunch through the slush and dirty snow as I wind down the sidewalk, passing along the exterior of my big box prison and then I dart across a road that cuts through the overpass connecting our buildings. Up the short flight of brick stairs and then inside.

Two long rows of empty storefronts stare back at me. The floor is dusty. There's a massive skylight overhead, but I don't think anyone has cleared the snow off it. That can't be safe. The first wing of the mall is much darker than it should be.

My steps echo in the emptiness, the blank glass, the lack of signs, the closed metal gates. It's nice, so nice. I'm not being observed for once.

Or this is what I think. I think this until I round the escalator and enter the second wing of the mall. At the far end, there's a Forever 21 holding on for dear life and there's one sad sunglass kiosk midway through, but nothing for quite a while. Nothing but empty stores.

I'm passing a large mirrored wall when I hear it.

Tap tap tap.

I stop.

A small and frantic voice. "It's you! Wait! The cashier who smiles like she's gonna murder everyone!"

And something curdles in my stomach. Even in here, I'm being observed.

I turn to the mirror and look into my own brown eyes. I take another step as the tapping resumes. Then my eyes turn to a vivid green and I realize I'm not looking into my own eyes at all.

"Two way mirror," I whisper.

The man looking back at me has a misplaced sort of excitement.

It scares me and I love it.