“Hello, welcome to Paul’s Amazeball Seafish Burger Emporium, how can I help you today?”
It was a terrible day.
It was a Saturday at two o’clock pm, and the place was crowded with people looking for a cheap, fast, and good (questionable) meal. Evan was working the counter today, which (in his opinion) was a wise choice by the manager as opposed to the alternative.
“Hi, I’ll have a bacon cheeseburger, except replace the cheese with seaweed, and add shrimp instead of bacon.”
“Is that all?” He asked, quietly questioning the woman before him’s diet choices.
“No, actually I’ll have that with a side of fifty extra large buckets of popcorn clams, each coated with mayonnaise, and twenty-four medium diet pepsis,” She replied, nodding her head to her family. “It’s for the kids,” she whispered, smiling as if he was in on some sort of inside joke.
He looked over to the corner. Her family consisted of two toddlers and their army of cow squishmallows.
“Great, your total will be five dollars and sixty-three cents,” he said, as the woman pulled out a bright neon turquoise credit card from her pearl encrusted purse, muttering under her breath about “inflation” and how “prices just keep going higher and higher”.
“Have a nice day!” he said between his teeth, as she grabbed the entire stack of his sister Pandora’s flyers from its stand on the counter. She studied Biochem at college (he studied Marine Biology), and had asked him to help her advertise the funding for her cause to restore the coral reefs in their area. She and her girlfriend Sybill Trelawney had spent a long time planning it out and designing those pamphlets, so he just hoped the lady handed them out to people so he wouldn’t get yelled at.
As he began to tape his copy of the receipt onto the side of the window facing the inside of the counter, Barty came up from behind him, plucked it out of his hand, and groaned loudly.
“What does someone need fifty buckets of clams for!?”
“Their health, I don’t know,” he muttered, watching as the woman used the flyers as bibs for her children. There goes Pandora’s advertising. He sighed internally. Now he would have to go to the library and print out more of them after his shift.
With a roll of his eyes, Barty walked through the double doors into the kitchen, where he would begin to pack the woman's clam buckets and cheese-and-bacon-less bacon cheeseburger. He heard Jude groan when Barty (presumably) showed her the list, and turned to the next person in line, who was a (way too) tall, brown haired boy who Evan recognized as Regulus' brother's boyfriend (only from the Instagram posts Regulus had shown him, but that was neither here nor there).
“Hello, I’ll have fish and chips, along with two crab cakes,” he said, as Evan noticed who were presumably the boy’s friends sitting at a table against the wall. One of them was Regulus’s brother. Hm. They probably went to the university across town.
After ordering, he made his way back to his table, just as Barty walked out to the pick-up counter with a large cart carrying the woman’s order.
“Order for Linda!” he called, placing the many bags of food on the counter as the woman from before left her children to pick up her order. As she carried them back to her table, Remus’s friend (James or whatever his name was, the one Regulus kept talking about) bumped into her, and one of her plastic bags fell, clams scattering across the restaurant floor.
“Oh my god, I am so sorry, here let me help clean that up,” James rambled, kneeling to collect the clams from the floor and throw them away, as they were now inedible. Privately, Evan didn’t think the woman would have cared much, seeing as she had so many other buckets, but oh well.
Barty stared at them sullenly, a look of disdain on his face. “That’s my job, isn’t it?”
“I’m pretty sure, yeah.”
“I’m not doing this.”
“Well I can’t, look at this line!”
“Fine, but you owe me, Rosier,” he grumbled, walking off to the woman who was now screaming at James (saying something along the lines of “you better pay for those!” while jabbing her finger at him. Evan almost felt sorry for him).
As Barty kneeled to help, scowling, he returned to the line in front of him, shifting his focus back to his job.
The next person in line was a regular at the restaurant, and his name was– (he wanted to say Lucas?? He only recognized him from the bright blue cap he always wore). Lucas always ordered the same thing (a shrimp burger), and never spoke more than a few words, which was fine by him. His only problem with the man was that he never tipped. Well, you can’t have everything.
As he typed up the man’s order into the cash register, he heard a scuffle behind him, and turned to the pickup counter where Linda and Barty were engaged in some kind of argument (in which Linda was brandishing her receipt in Barty’s face).
“It says right here that I bought fifty buckets of clams!”
“Yeah it does, congratulations you can read–”
“But when I count all the buckets, there are only forty-nine!”
“Okay, fine, I’ll make you another bucket so you can shove it up your ass–”
“Watch your attitude, young man–”
“I’ll tell you what to watch lady, and it’s–”
“Okay, Barty, why don’t we just get her the bucket?” Evan burst in, not adding that it was so she would leave them alone. Barty looked at him resolutely for a moment, then groaned, rolled his eyes, and went to fetch a bucket from the kitchen.
He heard footsteps behind him, and turned to see Jude, who was looking at him cautiously.
“Um, do you know who that guy over there is? The one in the blue cap?” She asked, cocking her head in the direction of the line.
“No, why?”
“Because he just took most of the money from the cash register and left.”
“He what!?” Evan yelped, whipping his head to see the cashbox, which was now empty save for a few bills the man had missed. Hearing the noise, Barty came out of the kitchen, placing the bucket on the counter for the woman to take and walking over to them.
“What’s going on?”
“We just got robbed by a man in line.”
“Well, what are we waiting for, let’s follow him!?”
“Why would we chase him, when we could just call the police!?”
“Oh, they’ll never find him, and we’ll get fired just to rub it in.”
“Ugh– fine, Jude could you manage things here for a minute?” Evan called, as he and Barty rushed out the doors of the restaurant. “Thanks!” he added, as the glass doors slid closed.
They hurried down the street, which was the only direction the thief (Lucas) could have gone, as the restaurant was located in a loop of shops that came to a dead end overlooking the ocean. Unless the man had jumped over and decided to brave the relentless current, which Evan decided was highly unlikely.
As they rounded the corner, Barty elbowed his arm, pointing with his thumb to the opposite side of the street.
“There!” he whispered, as Evan followed his finger to the bright blue cap making its way through the sea of tourists and pedestrians. They hurried across the street, trying to avoid detection by merging with the crowd.
Suddenly, Lucas (if that was even his name) grabbed onto a fire escape and began to make his way up, heading towards the roof of an apartment complex. Exchanging a look with Barty, he began to follow him, all efforts of remaining undetected lost to the wind as Barty made his way up as well, grumbling.
As he pushed himself up onto the roof, where the thief had disappeared to, he paused, surveying his surroundings. Spotting the man’s silhouette standing at the edge of the roof, he made his way over to him, as Barty fell into step behind him.
As he drew closer, Lucas (or whatever his name was) showed no signs of noticing them, though Evan was certain he knew they were there. Pausing for a second, he went to stand beside him.
They were silent for a moment. Evan wasn’t really sure what to say, he hadn’t ever really had any experience in chasing down a thief. Luckily, Barty broke the silence.
“So,” he began, “you stole our money.”
“Not your money, the restaurant’s,” he replied, staring resolutely to the city’s rooftops below. It really was a nice view, he couldn’t blame him, even as he resolutely ignored his fear of heights.
“Yes, but you see the restaurant sort of pays us, and they won’t pay us if they find out that we let you steal from them,” Barty continued, explaining the situation in an oddly patient way (odd for him, at least).
“So you want me to give you back the money?”
“Preferably, yes.”
The man sighed.
“It’s not you I have a problem with, it’s your boss. The owner of the restaurant. You see, a long, long time ago, he scammed me out of a lot of money. This was back in high school, but I’ve never forgotten it.”
He and Barty exchanged a look over the man’s head (because he really was very short).
“Well, how much money did he scam you out of?” Evan asked cautiously, unsure of what to say.
“Five whole dollars!” the man exclaimed, slamming the fist not holding the bag of cash down on the low brick railing (that really served no purpose, as it wouldn’t stop someone falling off the roof. On second thought, he decided not to think about that).
He and Barty exchanged another look, deciding that he was crazy. Evan looked back at the man.
“Alright, listen, why don’t you just take five dollars from the bag? That way you’ll get your money back, and we won’t get in trouble. Deal?”
The man stared out at the city for a while, seeming to think very hard about this, then looked up at him.
“Alright kid, you’ve got yourself a deal. I get my five dollars, and the two of you get to keep your jobs.”
Turning his attention to the black pouch in his hand, he opened it up and counted out five dollars. Finishing, he turned to Evan and handed it to him firmly, looking him in the eye as he stood.
“You go do great things now, alright boy?” He said to him, then walked off to the fire escape, leaving the two teenagers staring after him.
“So he’s insane,” Barty remarked.
“I hate today.”
“I don’t know, it’s kind of nice? It’s something different, at least.”
“It’ll be one heck of a story to tell, that’s for sure.”
Barty sighed, then reached into his pocket for a pack of cigarettes and his lighter (the one Evan had gotten him for his birthday a month prior). Lighting one up, he handed it wordlessly to him, which he accepted.
They sat in comfortable silence, smoking and staring out at the city, like their lives were normal (the most normal the two of them ever got, at least). The sun was setting, washing the buildings that were the structure of their life in a golden glow. He looked over at Barty. He was not a soft person, but in this light he seemed– breakable, almost. Gentle, in his way, in the odd moments scattered between the madness of their ever-changing existence. In the way that made Evan remember that whatever they did, wherever they went, they stuck together.
Barty looked back at him, meeting his eyes. Then he smiled, leaned in, pushed Evan’s cigarette to the side, and kissed him there on that rooftop, above the unmoving structures and the ever–moving pedestrians traversing the streets they had mapped with their invisible footsteps in the year and a half they had spent in their tiny little apartment across town.
It was a good day.