Lee and Millo

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“Come in, Bailey.” He said it in the flat, boring tone because he was a flat, boring person. I can’t remember how many times Mr. Burrows’ muffled voice told me to come in from behind his office door. I’d knocked three times. It would take him seven seconds each time to indicate he was still alive, or he was still in his office, or that he wasn’t too wrapped up in video chatting with his wife. Two seconds later, I would usually turn the doorknob, hesitate for another two seconds, and come in.

My job was all about numbers, from the simplest task to the most complex. The number of customers I tried to convince to buy the ugly mom jeans that were collecting dust in the back of the store, the number of times I’ve been caught texting, the number of arguments I got into with the assistant manager when I didn’t want to clean the bathroom.

They’d stick dirty sanitary napkins on the stall walls and tied the strings of used tampons to the toilet flusher. Piles of wet toilet paper would squish underneath your heels if you weren’t careful where you stepped.

You’d think that a store full of sophisticated middle-aged woman shopping for last minute birthday gifts for their prepubescent daughters would know how to clean up after themselves. I guess they think that just because we are being paid over minimum wage in this suffering economy, we would be willing to get down to the nitty-gritty. Well, not me.

I told Gary, the assistant manager, this once, and he screamed at me so much his neck turned a hot shade of red and spittle flew from every direction his mouth could think of, onto my face.  Everyone in the department store turned around and stared at him questioningly. Why is he yelling at this sweet girl? Is he insane? Has he lost his mind? Is he single? Small bubbles of warm spit would catapult against my cheeks when he accused me of being a lazy, no good filthy liar. I stood there and waited patiently until he was done. “Go look for yourself.” He stormed away and looked. He came out and the blood went from his neck to his cheeks. He never asked me to clean the bathroom again.

At Bee’s Jeans, you had to know how to count. You had to be able to count fast, so you had to be able to add. You had to be able to add fast, so you had been able to multiply. Me (+) Mr. Borrows (X) the six or so times I’ve been ordered to his office in the past two months (=) I’m getting fired. I knew that as soon as I touched the doorknob. It was cold and sticky when I wrapped my fingers around it. I could feel the angry electricity flow through me. “Come in,” Mr. Borrows repeated. His voice was still flat and boring. My usual two seconds turned into five, and then eleven, and then twenty-six.

I took deep breaths. I kept my hand on the sticky doorknob. I took more deep breaths. I looked up at the cracks engraved in the off-white ceiling. It was going to fall on me any second now. I knew I deserved it for what I done. I closed my eyes. If anyone walked by, they would think that I was getting some sort of sexual stimulation from the doorknob. I opened my eyes and let go of it. I heard footsteps from behind the door. The sound of his footsteps was replaced with my own as I bolted down the hallway. I ran as fast as I could. I heard Mr. Burrows yelling my name from his door, but I knew he was too fat and too busy with boss stuff to run after me. I held my breath.

I pushed open the emergency exit door, ran down the stairs three steps at a time and then broke off into a full sprint. Was I running from getting fired? Yes. Was I a coward? You bet. I was only two hours into my shift. Mr. Burrows would have fired me and told me to finish the rest of my four hours and he wouldn’t pay me for it. I knew this because he wasn’t a very nice man. That wasn’t the only reason I was running, but I wasn’t sure of the other reason. Maybe when I stop running my brain will catch up to me, scold me, and tell me how stupid I am. I was running away from my common sense. I finally made it out of the building, onto the corner of 45th and 7th, and bumped into an old lady with a bad perm. She looked at me with conviction in her eyes. I kept running.

It was already dark outside and the streetlights seemed to be casting its judgmental lights directly on me, as if they knew what I did wrong, what caused me to get fired. I pumped my legs as fast as they would go, trying to run away from the lights. They followed me. I ran faster. If I had eyes in the back of my head or a rear view mirror attached to my forehead I would have seen a thick trail of dust being produced from my sneakers. I ran past the diner Linda, my mother, worked at. The wind blew and my dark hair whipped my face, scolding me. My jeans began to chafe my thighs. I never liked running.

The perfect circles of the streetlights in my peripheral vision blurred into shaky ovals. Everything in front of me became a blur. Tears started to manifest and skydive out of my tear ducts. The wind caused them to skid across my cheeks into my ears. I wasn’t crying because I knew that I didn’t have a job anymore, or because I would no longer going to have the money to go to the Slipknot concert with Dylan, or because I forgot how to make my legs stop moving. I was crying because I, once again, disappointed myself by doing something I knew I shouldn’t have done. Oh, and I forgot my iPod on the bench in the employee locker room.