Parakeet Princess Read online

  ***

  Jeff’s shift at Pizza Paradise started at 4:30 pm. It meant he needed to drop me off at TacoTown fifteen minutes early for my very first shift. A little sheepishly, I pulled open the glass door, grasped my locket, and made my way across the restaurant’s dining room to the table reserved for the staff to use. A tall, fat kid was already sitting there reading the newly drafted work schedule. He looked up at me as I took a seat on the opposite side of the table.

  “Hey. You must be the new girl,” he greeted me, “Heather M, right?”

  I groaned. There was already a Heather working here – of course – so I’d have to wear the initial of my last name as a permanent accessory. I leaned forward to look at the schedule myself, reading upside down. “Which one are you?” I asked.

  The boy as I pointed to the list of names. “I’m Tom,” he said, gulping down a mouthful of cola. “I just started a month ago, when they were desperate for people.”

  “Desperate?”

  “Yeah. The labour market’s a fickle thing, eh?”

  I shook my head but I smiled. This Tom guy seemed safe. He was more like a walrus than a dragon. It could have been nothing more than my preference for awkward, quirky people. I was a recovering ugly girl myself – the girl once unofficially voted the ugliest in her junior high school by the table of cool boys in the cafeteria. That phase of my development had left me a little scared and uneasy around beautiful people like the perfectly nice girl from my Upton High School French class that morning. Maybe that’s why I felt I had to protect myself from her and her prettiness with the big, bristly wall of a different language. But around guys like Tom, I felt secure and I could magically just act like myself.

  I smirked across the table at him. “At least you didn’t get hired by making yourself pathetic enough to offer to work for free.”

  Tom smirked back at me. “I heard about that. You’re kinda nuts.”

  “Nah,” I said, “just afraid of going hungry.”

  “So who else can we expect here tonight?” Tom said, turning away from my poverty and back to the schedule. “Ooo, the triplets.”

  “Seriously? Triplets?”

  “Sure.” Tom pointed to the name “Wayne” written on the schedule in Sandy’s curly handwriting. “This is the alpha male. He’s a shift supervisor and he likes to act like a jerk.”

  “Dark hair? Totally obnoxious?” I asked.

  Tom nodded. “That’s Wayne, all right. This,” he pointed to another name, “is Crystal, his sister. They’re fraternal twins.”

  “Yeah, most opposite sex twins are,” I snickered.

  “True enough,” Tom nodded. “They’re the only children of a classic, bitter single mother. Don’t let all their squabbling fool you. They’ve got this real strong loyalty thing going on – like bear cubs.”

  “Or dragon pups?”

  “Huh?”

  “Nevermind,” I shrugged.

  Tom was moving on. “Now this,” he pointed to the only familiar name on the schedule, “is Darren. He’s not a blood relative of the twins’ but he’s been Wayne’s best friend since they were little kids. They’re like this.” Tom crossed his fingers. But he dropped them quickly and spoke his next words toward the tabletop. “Here they are now: the triplets themselves.”

  I looked up at the glass front doors of the restaurant just as the triplets walked into the building. The girl, Crystal, came in first. She didn’t even look at me but marched, quick and straight backed, right into the ladies’ room.

  The two boys came next, Wayne first and Darren behind. Darren was tall enough to look at me from above Wayne’s head and he grinned as they advanced toward the table. Fraternal or not, Wayne did look a lot like his sister, right down to the dark, flat Hollywood mole above his lip. For a boy, he was pretty in a dark eyed, Johnny Depp kind of way. The natural, easy confidence I’d enjoyed when I was alone with Tom started to slip. I hated myself for it but I couldn’t seem to help it. Maybe I was still the ugliest girl in my junior high school after all. It didn’t help matters that pretty dragon-boy Wayne was already glaring at me. I fumbled for my locket.

  “So you’re starting tonight, are you?” he said to me, already sounding aggravated and territorial.

  “Yeah,” I answered. “And you’re, like, the boss for tonight?”

  “The supervisor.” He sounded disgusted as he corrected me. “How come you’re not dressed yet? Don’t you like your uniform?” He wasn’t trying to relate to me in a jocular, commiserating kind of way. He was daring me to risk complaining about my job on the night of my very first shift.

  “It’s fine,” I mumbled. I stood up and moved past him to the ladies’ room, hoping Crystal would already be finished dressing by the time I arrived. I needed a minute of solitude to take some deep breaths and quiet my frazzled nerves.

  “Come on, Wayne,” I heard Tom begin as I walked away. “I thought you liked blondes...”

  I found Crystal standing in front of the mirror, finishing the braid in her thick, dark hair as I stepped into the ladies’ room behind her.

  “Hi,” I said.

  Her reflection looked out of the mirror at me with huge brown eyes. They were just like her brother’s only without all the scorching hostility. “Hi,” she answered, not unpleasantly.

  I waited. I don’t know why. Maybe I was hoping she’d say, “Sorry about my brother. He’s really not so bad. I’ll try to keep him away from you,” or something like that. But she didn’t. She hadn’t even seen how Wayne had looked at me or heard how he’d spoken. Maybe that’s why all she said was, “See ya,” before she left me alone in the small, beige, tiled room.

  I put on my uniform, calmed down as best I could, and went to report to Wayne for an evening of dehumanization.

  What a relief it was when I found Sandy, not Wayne, waiting for me at the door of the kitchen. “I try to do all the new hire orientations myself,” she explained. I was so pleased I actually took comfort in the smoky smell that drifted around her as we moved through the kitchen.

  After a detailed tour of the restaurant, Sandy stood me beside a line of three huge, stainless steel sinks. They were full of dishes caked with refried beans and sour cream and whatever other dregs were left of the bins of food the day-staff had prepared and dispensed while we were all still at school.

  All through the evening shift, Wayne didn’t talk to me except to holler, “Tables,” through the window whenever it was time for me to take a rag and a spray bottle out to the dining room to clear up the debris people left behind after eating. He and his fellow triplets worked the front of the serving area while Tom and I toiled in the steam and molten vegetable shortening of the back kitchen.

  By nine o’clock, the restaurant was quiet except for the screech and wail of the classic rock radio station playing over the dining room speakers. Darren came and leaned over the counter where Tom and I were portioning a huge vat of hot sauce into tiny plastic cups.

  “You guys can go home,” Darren said.

  It was subtle, but I could see that even this was a slight from Wayne. I was so low he wouldn’t even bother to dismiss me himself. He’d sent Darren to do it instead. I’m not sure if any of my anger showed on my face. Maybe it did.

  Maybe that’s why Darren made sure he grinned as he took hold of the back door handle, as if to hide it from me. “You can use the front door this time,” he said, goofy but friendly, apologizing ever so slightly for Wayne.

  I didn’t even turn my head as I stormed past Wayne and Crystal to get my street clothes from the locker area. Footsteps sounded behind me as I reached for my bag. Was it Wayne, coming to spit brimstone at me for walking out without taking leave of him? Was I about to get to blow off some of the tension that’d been building in my shoulders all night by finally having a spat with him? I was still on TacoTown’s new employee probation. Would Sandy fire me if I disrespected my supervisor on my first day – ev
en if he was insufferable?

  “Hey,” a voice said – a warm, girl-voice. It wasn’t Wayne but Crystal who had stepped up behind me. “I like what you did with your pants.” She pointed to the neatly tapered legs I had re-sewn into the former bell bottom trousers of my uniform. “I’ve tried to do the same to mine with safety pins a million times. But I can never get it to stay. The pins just break open in the middle of my shift and stab me in the leg. How did you do that?”

  A bit of the stress of the evening left me as I propped up my leg on Sandy’s desk and explained my simple sewing secrets to Crystal. “Cool,” she said. “Could you help me do the same to mine? We don’t have anything like a sewing machine at our place.”

  I smiled, for real. “Sure,” I said. “You don’t really need a sewing machine, anyway. I’ll bring in a needle and thread the next time we work and we’ll figure something out.”

  “Great,” Crystal said. She smiled so widely she felt like she had to cover her mouth with her hand. “See ya.”

  Outside the restaurant, I sat on the curb beside Tom and I waited for Jeff to arrive to drive me home. Insects beat their exoskeletons against the glowing TacoTown sign over our heads.

  “I think two of the triplets might be willing to accept me,” I told him.

  “Which two?” Tom asked.

  I laughed, loud and bitter.

  “Seriously,” Tom hurried. “Wayne’s funny. He probably likes you fine. He was just mad that the wrong Heather came to work tonight.”

  “You mean, he would rather work with Heather V.?” I asked, remembering the initial of the other Heather penned on the schedule.

  “Exactly. He’s dating Heather V. She used to work a lot of hours when they first got together but she’s coming in less and less these days. Everyone thinks it’s because she’s trying to lose Wayne – and he knows it,” Tom explained.

  “Lose Wayne?” I repeated with a sneer. “Why would anyone want to lose Wayne?”

  Tom laughed. “Anyway, sorry it looks like he’s taking it out on you. But it’s not like he’s a monster or anything, right? There’s my ride.” He stood up, his sloppy black jeans now covered in road dust. “Have fun back in your Mormon fairyland. See you Friday.”

  I’d never thought of Upton as a fairyland. I wondered for a moment if any of the old map-makers ever wrote “Here there be fairylands” in the margins of their maps. If Tom was trying to say Upton was sheltered and mild, I had to agree. But living in Upton had a kind of difficulty all its own. People there were close but so far away, friendly but not inclusive, kind but not quite loving. And even when they were mean to each other, they were always so nice. Upton had its own kind of dragons: soft, fluffy, happy ones. But they were still dragons.

  In the hours I’d spent at TacoTown, I hadn’t thought about Upton, or my new school, or the bundle of extra math review I’d brought home that afternoon. It would all be waiting for me back at my grandparents’ house when we got home that night, just before eleven o’clock. This was my new life – the rush, the scramble, the late nights, the fairies and monsters and walruses. I sat alone on the curb in the light of the restaurant sign and sounded my emotions. The hysterical grief that had struck me when Dad first announced we needed to move away had subsided to a quiet ache. I still wished the move had never happened. Nothing, I thought, would have made me happier than to pack everything up and go back to our old lives.

  But I pushed the wish aside and closed my hand around my locket. Right now, I was just trying to understand whether the demanding new schedule of my new life was going to make me into a new kind of sad—not just lonely, but harried and worn out. And I found that, beyond all reason, as if by a miracle, I was somehow happy – or at least happy-ish. And for now, that was enough.