Perks of the Job

Chapter Eleven

"I can't believe he accepted," I said, looking at the screen in front of me with Kathryn to my side. I'd sent Nick a friend-request on Facebook not half an hour ago, and he'd already confirmed it. I guess this made me feel good, knowing that Nick didn't think I was annoying and that I still had a shot at being able to stay friendly with him.

I didn't base too much off of this. Social media does not equal friendship and ever since I'd made my account, I refused to replace real life interactions with a notification email, though this at least have us the chance to IM, but is only do it of we actually talked in real life too.

Kathryn was, unsurprisingly, still stuffing her face with whatever Chinese food remained. She could eat more than the average man and still have room left for dessert.

"Just embrace it, Ev," she said before taking a bite of her dumpling. "He likes you, I don't know in what way yet, but he at least seems to think you're cool." This was new.

At my school, I was the farthest from cool you could possibly get. I liked 'emo' music and barely had any friends. I was just some lonely loser who sat by herself at lunch and shut out the rest of the world. For someone to think I was cool would mean they didn't know me.

Since Nick went to a different school than me, he didn't know about my reputation as the class freak. To him, I was just another girl who happened to like the same music as he did. He probably knew more people like that besides lowly, 'ole me.

"Dude," Kathryn exclaimed after chewing and swallowing her food. Thank god. "This could be your chance; escape the labels, start over with Nick." She had a point. Nick not knowing me gave me the chance to show him the real me; the 'me' I wished everyone else could see. I'd already acted myself around him and he didn't seem to be pushed away, so what did I have to lose? Maybe things with me and Nick could turn out better than I'd planned.

The next time I saw Nick at work, I promised myself I wouldn't change to impress him. I'd been one-hundred percent, genuinely 'me' since the day I'd met him and since he seemed to like her, I kept her around.

Along with constantly seeing someone once you meet them for the first time, I found it strange how people seemed to disappear once you realized you'd fallen for them. What used to be a shift filled with Nick's presence and breaks spent with him, were now long and lonely hours barely seeing him at all.

It was one of those rare days that I was free from the imprisonment and never-ending boredom inside the fitting room. I was sent to work out on the sales floor, organizing clothes and helping whatever customers had questions. This also meant that I had a good chance of seeing Nick.

He'd been working in the storage room for the majority of the night before I'd gotten any sort of chance to talk to him, but when he finally resurfaced, I made my move.

He'd stopped over by the men's clothes, so I decided to take over the shirts I had to put away and seize the opportunity to chat with Nick. "So," I started, catching him off guard and causing him to jump slightly. He smiled when he realized it was me. "Sugarcult is kind of amazing."

"Oh really? You know them?" he asked. Though the music conversation was being pushed to its limit, I figured I could still wring out was last conversation to buy myself time while I thought of something else for us to talk about.

"No, but you put them on your list."

"Oh, that's right," he said, the exchanging of our lists coming back to mind. "So you liked them?"

"Yeah, they were alright. I only heard a few songs, but I think they're going to be one of my favorites." I replied to him as I matched up shirt sizes.

"They're not as heavy as some of the stuff I know you like, but I figured I'd give it a shot and put them on the list anyway." I thought it was kind of cool how Nick knew the kind of music I liked; loud and heavy. He took note to remember it after our conversation, earning him major bonus points in my book.

"They were still good though, kind of like . . . nineties, teen-aged boy, garage band type stuff." I laughed at my own failed attempt to describe the band's sound, and Nick chuckled along with me. I was glad, despite me not trying to be funny, that he was finding this amusing. "I'm terrible at categorizing music."

"No, it's okay," he said through his chuckles. "It's always hard to put a music to a genre, but you just know it when you hear it." He gave me a look to gauge whether I was getting it or not considering his attempt at explanation was no better than mine.

"Yeah, I know what you mean," I said with a smile though I was still too nervous to look right at him for more than a few seconds. I'd finished putting away what I needed to so I started to feel awkward about talking to him while I was probably needed elsewhere.

Our conversation didn't seem like it was going to go anywhere else, so I took this as my opportunity to quit while I was ahead. "Okay, well," I began gracelessly. "I'm going to go see if Maxine needs me. Good talking to you."

Nick nodded his head and replied, "Yeah, you too. Later."

I started to walk away, but something came to mind that I felt that I needed to address. "Nick," I said as I turned around in a very cliché, Hollywood-movie fashion. He picked his head up and met my eyes, only adding to the surreal, dramatic effect. "Was it weird that I sent you a request over Facebook?"

I'm not quite sure why, but I'd been feeling weird about it since the moment I clicked 'Add Friend,' and even though Nick accepted, it was still bothering me. "No, of course not." Admittedly, this still wasn't very reassuring.

"Are you sure? I felt weird about it," I confessed, though Nick seemed to think it was totally normal.

"Don't, it was nice," he reassured me. "It's good to make friends." I smiled at this, happy to hear that Nick had taken it so well and that it wasn't a total mistake to add him to my friend list. After all, it was just some stupid social site that meant nothing compared to real world friendship. At least I'd still talk to him in real life.

"Okay, well, I just wanted make sure you were cool with it."

"If I wasn't cool with it, I wouldn't have said 'yes,'" he said causing me to blush and look down before he could see it. I didn't say anything back, just mumbling a shy, and hopefully charming, 'kay,' before smiling to him once more and going off to find Maxine.

Things between Nick and me after that were relatively the same. Actually, that'd be a lie.

Things between Nick and me weren't the same, but they weren't better and they weren't worse. I'd reached the end of my rope when it came to talking about music. I was finding it more and more difficult to hold a conversation with him, even if only for five minutes. If I didn't have something work related to tell him, it was likely that I wouldn't speak to him at all.

My lack of interaction with Nick led me to believe that he was gaining a lack of interest in me; as a friend or as potentially anything more. What guy would keep his heart locked on a girl that he never spoke to, that was, if Nick even had his heart set on me in the first place, let alone locked.

There were lots of girls, much prettier who had much more in common with Nick than me. He probably already liked some gorgeous cheerleader in his own school, or if he did like someone at work, it was probably Erin or one of the Henderson twins. Certainly not me.

To him I was probably just some kid he worked with, nothing more. I doubt he went home and thought about me after he got out of work like I thought about him when I did. I bet that even before he was gone, any thought of me had already left his pretty, blonde head.

The one thing that gave me hope that Nick and I could ever have a relationship, even just as friends if nothing more, was our music. Though I was sure our music conversation was beaten far past the point of dead, the fact that we liked the same stuff helped me believe that there was more commonality between us that had yet to be uncovered. To be honest, since first meeting things definitely had become much less gauche between me and Nick.

After all, if it wasn't every day that I met a guy with the same taste in music as me, it probably wasn't every day that Nick met a girl with the same taste in music as him. This wasn't over.