Adrianna Jereb

Hungry Work

I had my head in the cool air of the stainless industrial fridge, looking for another bag of shredded lettuce, when Ryan came up behind me and put his entire hand across the small of my back. He kept it there, not saying anything. I didn't turn around. I stared into the white expanse of the fridge innards as if an explanation might pop out from behind a vat of sour cream. After a moment that was long enough to make me sure it wasn't a mistake, Ryan removed his hand, and I heard his retreating footsteps. When he was gone, I closed the fridge and went back to the front.

I forgot the lettuce.

A boy had touched my ass once at a school dance. I told all my friends how I'd been wronged, but really, I was gloating. Finally, proof I had a body boys wanted to touch. My dress was skintight silver sparkles that swooped low on my chest and barely wrapped over my underwear. School let you wear whatever you wanted to a dance, but during the day, teachers would send you to the office if your shirtsleeves didn't cover enough of your biceps.

I liked my dress. But I looked at the boys in their jackets and pants and felt a longing I couldn't place. The boys let their shirts come untucked when they danced. They let their hair get stringy with dampness. They held hands with girls and danced with their hands on girls' waists, and I was sure their hands were sweaty.

At Taco Bell, everything was sweaty. My black polo shirt, my hair, Ryan's face. After every shift, I got home and stripped off my clothes, and threw them in the washer, even though the grease smell never came out. I ate the food at work even though it smelled like grease, too –  crunchy shells, melted toxic waste cheese, everything smothered in taco sauce. I liked reading the silly messages on the taco sauce packets, written in the voice of the sauce. They said things like, "Ah, so we meet again," and "It's dark in here!" Someday I hoped to find one I hadn't seen before, proof of an individual packet with a consciousness beyond the shared one of the masses.

Ryan ate like a wolf. On his breaks, his order would cover a whole tray, and he always ate everything on it, reducing it to a pile of crumpled paper in mere minutes. Despite that, he was skinny. Always swaddled in his XL shirt that made me wonder if he'd asked for it thinking he was going to hit a growth spurt, or if it'd been thrust at him when he started and he was too shy to ask for a better fit.

At the end of the night he'd touched my back, Ryan helped me drag the kitchen trash cans to the dumpster. The trashcans were so heavy they made me understand physics, how a collapsed star is so dense that a single teaspoon weighs ten million tons. We gripped the handles of a yellow bin and walked with that as a spacer between us, both of us leaning and shuffling, then grunting when we tipped the bin up into the dumpster, and the trash bag rolled in with a thump like a body. We didn't speak, and he didn't try to touch me again.

After we locked up, we all walked to our cars in the parking lot. The bell sign glowed in the dark above us. This was before Taco Bell started serving breakfast, before they discontinued the cinnamon-apple empanada, my absolute favorite that I never let cool long enough, and the sugar always burned the roof of my mouth on the first bite. Besides McDonald's, Taco Bell was the last restaurant open at night in the cluster of fast food around the interstate.

The north end of town was a separate economy from the crumbling downtown. The north was funded by truckers and roadtrippers on their way to Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, or the waterparks in the Dells. I felt spared by this arrangement. There were very few regular customers at the drive-thru, very few chances I had to interact with someone I knew in a context outside of where I usually knew them, a situation that always gave me intense anxiety. I needed the people in my life siloed: my family at home, my friends at school, coworkers at work – and no crossover episodes.

Fortunately, even though we were in the same grade, Ryan went to a different school, so I only saw him at work.

I lingered over my keys, fumbling them as I stood at the door of my car. Everyone else had gone, and I was waiting for Ryan to say something to me.

What did I want? I didn't want to date him. I didn't even like him like that.

Cleaning the kitchen at night, he always played music on his phone that he put on a shelf over the sink. Electronic beats that I didn't know but that the boys bobbed their heads to in sync with each other. They all looked like goldfish to me.

But it would be something to tell my friends. Our lunch table had eight spots: me, my three friends, and their three respective boyfriends. The eighth stool was perpetually empty.

          "It looks like a full moon," I said.

Ryan nodded. I dropped my keys and picked them up again. My hands trembled.

Were we going to kiss? My friends had all done more than kiss boys. Callie even had a birth control implant in her arm. She showed us in pre-Calc, and we all squealed when she squeezed it and we saw the tube protrude under her skin like a parasitic worm.

Ryan's face was violet under the glow of the sign. The contrast of light and dark smoothed his skin. He looked a lot better. I hoped my braces wouldn't be a problem when he kissed me.

            "See you Friday, right?" he said. He ducked into his car, and I waved as he drove off.

I started my car, and the radio played "Take Me to Church" for the millionth time. A song I loved for two days until the pop station picked it up and played it into the ground. I turned it off.

Why did I want to cry? Was I relieved?

Wasn't I relieved?

The interstate was quiet on my way home. Me and the dark and the rumbling semi-trucks that crept past me in the fast lane. I saw the signs for Chicago. 240 miles.

What would happen if I didn't get off on my exit, if I didn't turn past my old elementary school, didn't watch out for deer, didn't follow the winding county highway the rest of the way home?

How far could I get with $80 in my wallet?

How long before my parents started to worry and called to ask where I was?

There were so many roads out of town that I'd never driven, and I couldn't imagine what it looked like where they ended. Someday I would. I promised myself that.

I wasn't working Friday. But it was payday, and I needed to pick up my paycheck. So, I would see him Friday.

Bio

Adrianna Jereb is a queer writer who loves any story where something weird happens. Her work has appeared in Stone of Madness and Runestone. She lives in St. Paul, MN.