Kiwi |H.S.|

six

    Three days.

    It took three tedious, tiresome days to even find a place that hired seventeen year old high school undergraduates. After scouting all of campus during busy hours to see which places were hiring or not, I'd realized that most of the small cafes or maintenance buildings were either strictly family owned, or required a high school degree for employment. Almost every place I'd gone to was within a mile radius of my dorm room, both on and off campus. I'd noticed that not one high school, nor college student was working at any of the places I'd visited. Every manager I'd spoken to seemed shocked to even have me there begging for a job.

    When I'd brought the idea of working at 'The Bistro' on the other end of campus with Ariana, she practically laughed in my face. The students here didn't work minimum wage jobs, she tried explaining to me in the most humble way possible. She had said that there was no point for anyone here to work because if you could afford tuition in the first place, you should be able to afford lunch everyday, and be able to pay for extra school fees. She couldn't understand why I was trying to find a cheap job in the first place.

    I told her I simply wanted the experience.

    She easily bought into my lie, but my true intentions were to spend the money on Christmas and birthday presents for Calum. Not only that, but I owed lots of people back home money, and if I didn't pay them back soon they'd probably track me down. And I still hadn't purchased my book for Spanish class because it was a whopping three hundred dollars and I hadn't yet accumulated all of the cash I needed. Spending my week searching around campus in the scorching Malibu sun was the last thing I'd wanted to do. I didn't want a job, I needed a job.

So I applied for 'The Bistro' by myself and hoped for the best. The only hours they had available were in the mornings, and I'd be working only a couple days a week. This was fine, however it still wasn't as much money as I'd hoped on making, so I applied for another job.

As a librarian's assistant.

    The job itself didn't seem all too appealing to me, however the librarian had been so desperate for some help that she'd offered to pay me thirteen dollars an hour, which was almost three dollars more per hour than I'd make at the other job serving soup. The hours were perfect too. The librarian, Ms. Ellison, told me I could come in and work whenever, as long as I'd gotten everything that needed to be done finished by the end of the week. The hours were good, the work was easy, and she was so desperate that she hired me right on spot.

    I flickered through some of the pages on the hard-spined book absentmindedly as Ms. Ellison gave me a quick run down of everything that needed to be done. She told me I could come into work whenever, but I decided nights would be best.

    "So you see Ms. Knight, I need you to sort each and every one of the leathered covered book in alphabetical order and place them on the shelf over there." She pointed a long bony finger towards one of the tall shelves towards the back of the library. She'd been talking to me for well over an hour, reading off of a paper that had all the instructions for me typed down in Times New Roman. There was really no point in her going on and on, it was all pretty self-explanatory. If I got confused I could either read off the paper or ask her at the front desk.

    I stared at the older woman and pretending like I was listening intently. After awhile her voice began to drown me out in my own thoughts.

    Her strawberry blonde hair was immaculately held together in a chignon with only one or two visible fly-aways that I could see from my spot on the maroon carpet. Her finger nails were a tinge of yellow with no nail polish, and were cut into a coffin shape. Her dark lipstick lined her lips perfectly, and although she was an older woman, her teeth were a bright white. Everything about her screamed high-maintenance - not that that was a bad thing. I wondered how a woman like her could stand to work in such a scattered library.