After several seconds of dramatic breath-catching and hand fluttering, the girls paid and ran off, staring at me over their shoulders with googly eyes. Oof.
A middle-aged guy with a gut spilling out of the bottom of his polo shirt ordered a “Lite and Tasty.” Then another group of girls squealed their way up to the register. These ones looked older. They were maybe freshmen. But they were all still giggling. Like, a lot. Usually even girls couldn’t find anything funny about the Burger Barn. And I couldn’t remember the last time our clientele had been so female.
Could there be some sort of event at the mall? A pop star or something? One of the girls was pointing at me and taking out her phone, like she was gonna take a picture. Which was weird and kinda creepy. I felt like telling her I wasn’t whoever she thought I was, but that would have made things worse. She might have started talking to me.
This shift could not end fast enough.
I had never seen so many girls order fries in my life. I would have snuck back to my locker to google what was going on, but I was the only person on the register on Tuesdays; usually it was dead my whole shift.
By five forty-five we’d run out of fries. We’d never run out of anything before. By six fifteen, Jim, the manager, decided to close for the night, even though it was two hours early. We were running out of too many things. The only thing left was chicken tenders, minus the sauce.
At that point, the line went past the China House and around the corner by the Gap. It was mostly groups of girls, with a couple annoyed adults stuck between them, and it had to be fifty people long.
Which didn’t make sense at all. I eat this stuff, like, every day. There’s no good reason to wait around for it.
I headed to my locker, rolling my shoulders the way I did after a tough practice. All the girls had been laughing. Most had been taking pictures. The whole thing had been . . . terrifying. It had been kinda terrifying, all of them staring at me, placing the same exact order, even using the same exact words. It was like I was stuck in a french-fries-themed Body Snatchers sequel.
At first it seemed harmless. Like maybe some girls JV team was doing, like, extra-dumb hazing. But after the third or fourth giggle-giggle-FRIESWITH-THAT-giggle-giggle, I wondered if someone was trying to mess with me. Like, me specifically. It could have been Dave Rouquiaux, from lacrosse. He was always doing stuff to try to get a rise out of us after games, or in the locker room. One time he put about half a bottle of laxatives into Eric Winger’s Gatorade because he thought Eric had been hitting on the girl he liked. Another time he stole the entire starting line’s shoelaces before practice, just ’cause. He even took his own, to throw everyone off the scent. Dave might do something like this out of boredom. Dave: just that dude.
But how would he have convinced about a zillion girls to mess with me at the Burger Barn? Did Dave even know that many girls? Not likely.
Sighing, I opened the locker and chucked my hat inside. I checked the pile of T-shirts on the shelf. Only one clean shirt left. I’d have to take the rest home and do laundry tonight. Weak.
I jogged back to the register to grab a plastic bag to put them in.
CLICK, CLICK, CLICK, CLICK.
Two girls had been lying in wait. By the time I yelled “What is going on?” they were already halfway across the food court, dodging and weaving around customers holding trays. If they had any stick skills they might have been good at lacrosse. One was making this wheezing sound of excitement, like she might faint. Or pop. This day: definitely getting weird.
I walked as fast as I could back to my locker, stopping to check my reflection in the mirror alongside Jim’s office for pulsing zits, or, like, a full-on snot mustache. Something worth lying in wait to photograph. Maybe something mangled and evil had started growing out of my neck. What were those things called? Parasitic twins?
But there was nothing out of the ordinary. I looked exactly the same as always, except I was still in my grease-splattered Burger Barn shirt. I headed to the locker and started stuffing dirty shirts into the bag. I needed to get out of here. Like now.
After I’d changed and checked the schedule to see when I was on next, I grabbed my phone from the back of the locker shelf. We weren’t allowed to have them when we worked the register.
I pressed the on button.
10 notifications . . .
The little refresh wheel at the top kept spinning.
36 notifications . . .
And spinning.
492 notifications . . .
Dang.
Then it just totally died. Turned itself off. Blip.
Seriously, what the heck was going on?
I turned the phone back on and set it on the shelf. It convulsed with notifications. Finally it chimed loudly, buzzed one last time, and came to a stop. Cautiously, I picked it up.
13,178 notifications
It buzzed again.
14,256 notifications