“Zoe!” the girl shouted again. Zoe kissed me on the cheek and turned to race down the hall. Whatever. The final bell rang, and Mr. Thompson came to shut the classroom door that I was still standing outside of.
“Coming in, Marissa?” he asked.
I didn’t even pause. “No, sir. Not today.” And I left school.
****
“I’m still not happy you left school early.” Gram said while drawing a card from the stock pile.
I grabbed the eight of hearts from the discard pile to complete my set of eights. “Nobody cared. Besides I wanted to see you.”
“When am I going to pull a six?” She discarded a five of clubs, which I quickly scooped up to complete a run.
Gin never was Gram’s game, and I was proving that again today. “Gin.” I laid my cards out, and Gram rolled her eyes.
“Gin’s not a game.” Gram tossed her cards by her side. “Poker’s a game.” She readjusted her sheets, pulling them closer to her chest. “Too bad you don’t like poker, Marissa.”
“I stink at it.” I began shuffling the cards.
“That’s why I want to play you.” She winked at me.
I was happy to see she was looking better. Her color had returned, and it looked like she had done the French braid in her hair by herself. The doctor had told me before I went in to see her that her most recent tests looked good. Her levels were where he wanted them to be. Stuff like that, doctor talk, whatever the terminology; he was saying that she was slowly improving. That’s all I needed to understand.
****
I was actually relieved to be at work that night. Work was stable. Work didn’t throw me massive curveballs. The store wasn’t going to suddenly get sick. It wasn’t going to have its feelings hurt. And it wasn’t going to want to know more about me or my life. The table of button-down shirts in front of me just wanted to be folded. That’s all. No more, no less. I could relax here.
“Marissa, I need you in the back. Now!” Taylor barked at me from the back of the store.
Okay, so maybe I couldn’t relax, but it was still better than being almost anywhere else right now. I walked into the back room to see Taylor standing with her hands on her hips. She was visibly upset. And I swear I saw the vein on the side of her neck throbbing.
“Look at all this!” She motioned to piles of clothes that surrounded her in the shape of a horseshoe. “I can’t believe this.” She dramatically threw her hands up in the air.
“Taylor, what’s wrong?”
“Wrong?” She whipped her head towards me. “What’s wrong, Marissa, is that every single one of these pieces of clothing that surround me is tagged incorrectly.” Again, she motioned to the mounds of clothing. “There was some screw-up at the factory, and all of this is priced wrong. Now we need to change out the tags on every piece.” She huffed.
I was guessing that “we” meant me. Changing out tags was a pain. I hated using the tagging gun that attached the plastic pieces of the tag to the garment; I always managed to poke myself with it. “So where do you want me to start?” My tone was less than enthusiastic.
“You start on that section over there, and I’ll start over here.” She grabbed a tagging gun and a pile of price tags, and plopped herself down at one end of the horseshoe of clothes.
“You’re repricing too?” I couldn’t hide the surprise in my voice.
Taylor raised an eyebrow at me. “Yes, I’m repricing too,” she mocked me. “So, how’s school going?” Taylor said while clipping off a price tag.
I was completely thrown off by her question. Was Taylor making small talk with me? It was weird. “Good, I guess.”
“So, do you, like, come from a big family or anything?”
Were we honestly going to have a conversation? “No. Small family.” I felt a prickling sensation go down my back.
“So, like, who’s in your family then? Mom, Dad, sister, brother?”
I laughed out loud.
“What?” Taylor said.
I had to deflect the conversation somehow. “Nothing. It’s just funny, that’s all.” I concentrated on retagging a pink miniskirt.
“What’s funny?”
“That we’ve, like, never had a conversation and now you want my life story.” I laughed again, trying to lighten the moment that was causing a balloon of tension to fill my chest.
“Whatever, Marissa, I was just trying to pass the time faster. It’s not like I even care.” The hard, defensive Taylor was back.
Maybe she was just trying to be social. But who comes out and just asks people about their family life? Most people, I guess. And I guess most people have somewhat normal lives. But not everyone. Not everyone had a mom and a dad and other normal things. When you didn’t have a normal home life and people asked you about it, there was a place inside you that turned red with anger. It was a place that I swallowed down every time another teenage girl talked about her mom.
After about an hour of tagging, I had managed to poke myself with the tagging gun six times, three of which required bandages. Taylor had turned on her MP3 player to fill the quiet between us. Even though she played country music (gag), I was glad for the deviation from talking about my family, or my lack thereof.
“Hey Taylor,” Sarah, one of the cashiers, said. “The registers are a little backed up, and the front of the store is a mess.”
Taylor let out a heavy sigh. “Fine. Marissa, please go straighten up the front of the store. I’ll stay back here in
