Love Bites

Chapter 7 - She Said Yeah

- Two more cheeseburgers, quicker!

Charlie didn't want to move quicker. She had no desire to serve rare customers, the most of which were usually rolling drunk by that late hour. All what she wanted to do was lie horizontal on the sofa in her pajamas and watch 21 Jump Street, like normal people did on the weekend. She wished she could have been seeing Johnny Depp's handsome face instead of Mr Jackwill's unpleasant, filthy features. She's been trying to shake off the thoughts of Elle living it up somewhere in Hollywood.

- Fine, Wendy! Which table?

- Number twelve! Move!

Charlie reluctantly doddered to the kitchen, shuffling. If only Wendy didn't make her do all these nasty jobs! She could easily serve the customers herself, but she preferred to stroll along the tables in her teeny-weeny skirt that barely covered her butt, and pretend she was the manager, the big boss.

"Like if I want to clean up the vomit or carry these stinking onion rings!" - Charlie thought to herself angrily, putting two portions on a tray, -"what a cow!".

Wendy seemed to be nice from the very day Charlotte got her job as a waitress, but with every shift she got worse and worse. She acted as if she was superior to every one of the other workers just because Mr Jackwill complimented her on her dexterity and quickness once, whe he apparently was in an uncannily good mood. Sometimes Charlie felt a sudden urge to knock Wendy off her feet and pull her hair out one strand by one, but she suppressed it successfully each time. Charlie knew she didn't want to have troubles at the job she wasn't planning to have for more than a year. She found out there was an arts school in the county not very far from there she lived, and she promised herself she'd give everything she's got to enter it as soon as she could. She wasn't particularly ambitious, she wasn't even pinning her hopes on becoming a professional painter, but little did she knew she needed to get a good education unless she wanted to be a waitress until her last days. Seeing a lot of jobless and homeless people on the streets only reassured her in a statement that you have to be very lucky to make it in Los Angeles without any schooling whatsoever.

- Could you increase your speed? You know the customers are not happy with waiting too long, and when they are not happy, they complain! - squeaked somebody in a voice that resembled Mr Jackwills's. Charlie didn't really want to know whether it was him or not, so she didn't turn her head. Anyway, it is very unlikely that he's at the place at 12 past noon.

"His last name should have been spelled Jekyll. No surprise if he has turned into Mr Hyde for the night. Maybe Dee's put out for him?" - Charlie wondered as she was putting the glasses on the table number 12, - "they're in love, and she already has plans to marry him and become a Burger Queen?".

She shivered, trying not to picture Mr Jackwill without clothes. Two guys from the table twelve , who seemed like high school drop outs, were eyeing her up. One of them had a disgusting grin on his face, and he tried hailing Charlie after she's put the food on the table and was about to walk away.

Charlotte just ignored him and made her way back to the kitchen as soon as she could. She felt a sudden twinge of disgust as soon as she saw those two. Naturally, people like that weren't out of the ordinary to her as far as night customers go. It turned out that Johnny Rockets, that Charlie has previously considered to be a safe place mostly visited by school kids or young families wasting their cash, was a popular meeting point among smelly creeps during the hours of darkness. Not like they were really dangerous - Charlie had doubts if mania dons had any interest in Los Angeles burgers at all - but they and their stupid comments made her slightly uncomfortable.

Somewhere on the street a klaxon sounded, and a couple of other waiters that Charlie didn't really know personally started running around and making a fuss. Apparently, there was somebody on the drive-through, which was a common situation, and yet, most of her co-workers had a habit of bustling around when they heard a car arriving.