Side Hustle

"Mrs. Peterson?"

Well, she couldn't say she hadn't seen this coming, she thought, her polite smile becoming instantly fixed as she turned to the curly-haired Dominican teen gaping at her, winged eyes widening. The possibility was far from remote, considering this was their neighborhood. She just hadn't thought it would happen so soon. Or that it would sting so much.

"I didn't know you worked here!" Now the bemusement was changing towards something resembling an existential crisis. Her pink-and-purple manicured hand on her glittery phone declined a couple of inches. "I'm shook."

Get a grip. She was the adult here, after all. "Oh, hello—" Yasmín? Yesica? She was fifth period, that she knew, part of that coterie of makeup-and-hair girls at the corner near the stations "—Yasmín."

"Fatima." But this was said vaguely, even blankly, not with the usual bite of reproach.

"Sorry, Fatima. Yes, this is just an extra job I take on weekends." Calm, polite, benign, bland, as if this were perfectly normal and common. "I could've sworn I told you guys in the beginning of the year."

She knew perfectly well she had not, not the least because she had not applied to Target by then, and the administration hadn't told her that due to budget cuts the administration would give them pay raises in exchange from docking their healthcare insurance, leading her to talk earnestly with Stanley on the possibility of taking another job.

"Good morning, Mrs. Álvarez," she said hastily. "Did you find everything okay?"

"Very well, thank you," said the elder and diminutive Álvarez distractedly, busy admonishing the two small children wrestling on the cart and most likely not understanding the English conversation with her child. As she rang up grocery items and several potato chips Fatima caught her mother up in rapid, urgent Spanish that quickly grew contentious. "¿Qué?" the mother kept saying, the only word she knew.

"That'll be thirty-seven fifty," she said over their argument, ignoring the growing pounding heat in her cheeks, ignoring Fatima's phone inching up again, her ringed finger working furiously on the screen.

By second period on Monday—surprise, surprise—she didn't last long before an eager student showed her the post on Instagram, a picture in her red Target uniform ringing up two-percent milk with a rosy filter and this caption:

I SAW MISS PETERSON AT TARGET asghjhdhhff KILL ME NOW #done #endmysuffering

***

But whirligig of time does have a funny way of bringing its ironies.

"I applied here two weeks ago." Beneath the florescent lights of the staff meeting room Fatima's face was as red as her Target uniform, her tone as sheepish as her wool sweater. "I had orientation just this afternoon."

At least, she thought as she averted her gaze, she could be sure how Fatima was making use of her weekends. "Great. I can teach you how to man the cashier, just like at school."

And she smiled blandly at Fatima's horrified expression.