Dirt

8

Princeton

"How was school? The first week back, right?" Shelly wipes the counter so slow, drawing out the action.

Last costumer was half an hour ago. It's a slow day, though Saturday afternoons aren't ever really busy. Only a few old men wandered the book store, a college student tapped away while they drink iced coffees and a couple of middle-aged woman gossiped in the cafe. 

"Awful as usual," The one class I should be able to like the most is already packing on the most homework. Homework is the death of my high school diploma. It wasn't helping that all my motivation was leaking out of me like I had bullet wounds.

Cleaning isn't as much work as serving customers and putting on a nice and bright smile so i don't mind one bit. Though I wish I was working the store so I could pretend to be shelving but finally finish Turtles All The Way Down. The fucking library's not willing to buy more than one copy and some asshole college kids are hogging John Green. Aza's relatable which makes it so much harder to have to wait days to read more. 

The good books are like that. They wrap you up in a world safe from reality. They make the troubles and isolation less, well, isolating. The books that can tell you just how real you are are the hardest to read. But they're also the hardest to put down. 

Mom would read to us every night. Never Dr. Suess or Mother Goose. My mom didn't know how to be a mom so she read us Giovonni's Room or Catcher in the Rye. In the beginning, when I can remember her sitting on my bed, where I was crushed in with Stan so he could hear the story too, I can only remember getting stuck on the hard words and trying to figure out if I was missing something that made the book make sense. 

But I loved my mom. Reading to us at night was one of the few things she was excited to do with us so I would be damned if I ruined it. As we waited for her to get the book and come in at night I would ask Stan if he knew what was happening. Before she came in Stan would whisper in my ear all the things I missed and all the things I should look for. I love Stan just as much, I love him more knowing now, knowing how helpful that was. 

Quickly I picked up the ability to understand bigger words through context. Books made so much more sense when I learned to read between the lines. The more I understood the more exciting it was for mom to brush my hair back, rub into a spot on my bed, and crack open a story fifty years old. 

My mom didn't want to be a mom. I don't think she ever liked it. It was in the few moments here or there that she lived up to it all. 

She made me into a man she never wanted to know. 

Shelly laughed, lightly flicking the rag around as she walked to the sink, "It was one week, Prince! How bad could it honestly be?" 

Shelly doesn't know shit. She went to a nice, full high school an hour away. Though she's one of those kind airheads, so she was probably pretty popular in high school anyway. It's the airy-ness that has her doing college up the road and work 30 minutes from her house in a cafe/book store.

"Shelly, I don't want to be the one to tell you this but high school isn't fun for us ugly ones."

"Huh! Prince, you are one handsome man," I can't help but slowly turn around, from cleaning the blenders, with a still and stony face. But Shelly just huffs while shaking her head, "Really! If I was into younger guys you know I would hit on you, you know that-"

Yes, I know that. Shelly told me at closing one time when I gave the last customers cookies we had left even though it was against policy. Luckily for Shelly, I'm not into older women.