A Girl Called Shameless. Laura Steven

uniform-wise.”

      We stroll toward Carson’s locker, where he’s picking up books for math. “You’ll be great.”

      I slip my hand into his and give it a grateful squeeze. “Thanks. Although as a bona fide slacker in all things, I’m marginally concerned at having to perform actual manual labor. Do my limbs even work that way?”

      He laughs and drops my hand so he can enter his locker combo. “You’re no slacker, O’Neill. Just selective in what you spend your energy on. However, they do know you gotta be fed every half-hour else you turn into Medusa incarnate, right?”

      I shove him playfully, and he shoves me back, and then I’m squealing as he grips me in a bear hug and pretends to eat my shoulder, and oh God we’re one of those obnoxious couples everyone hates but I just don’t care because it’s so fucking nice.

      In all seriousness I’m actually excited to start work at the diner. Betty and I are no strangers to being poor. We’re not. Things that other people take for granted – things they consider necessities, like batteries for the TV remote – are luxuries to us. And to be fair I’ve never known any different, so it doesn’t bother me that much. We get by.

      For me and Betty what it comes down to is this: we’ve always managed to stay afloat, and that’s all that matters really. But now, with me working too, maybe life will be better than just staying afloat. Maybe we’ll be able to go out to the movies, or get takeout from the fancy Chinese restaurant uptown. The thought makes me fizz with excitement. It really does.

      I mean, I’d even resigned myself to being poor forever. Poverty is a cycle, by design. Let’s take shoes, for example. Reasonably wealthy people can afford to buy a decent pair of shoes made from leather or, I don’t know, dragonhide, which will last them a few years. But the lower working class cannot. We buy cheap, terrible shoes made from awful materials and stitched together by exploited southeast Asian kids. And they fall apart within months, and we have to buy more cheap terrible shoes because we need shoes, damn it, and we end up spending way more than the wealthy middle-class people ever did. All because we couldn’t afford the initial upfront cost of a $100 pair of shoes. So we stay poor, because we’re forever using our only slivers of disposable income plugging the shoe-shaped holes in our lives. It’s impossible to ever save money, to ever work yourself out of the poverty pit. Because shoes.

      Anyway, “shoes” is starting to not sound like a word, so I’m going to move on. TL;DR, bring on my first ever shift.

       3.42 p.m.

      The perks of spending half my life at the diner and being bought overpriced milkshakes by Ajita is that training is actually pretty straightforward. I already know the menu inside out, and also the price list, because that’s what happens when you have no mullah. You look at the price before the actual item.

      Anyway, it transpires that the only thing I really need training on is the till system, but as a digital native who’s grown up with intuitive technology skills, it’s a breeze. So after three and a half hours of training, now I’m sitting in the back wolfing down some chili cheese fries. Betty never mentioned the free food! This changes everything. In fact, I might never leave the diner. I was here all the time anyway – at least now I’m getting paid for the privilege.

      Once I get off break, I’m going to be shadowing another hostess just to get a feel for how she manages her section of tables, and I’ve also been charged with taking down the Christmas decorations when it gets quieter later. Part of me will be sad to see the derp elf go. He really does bring a certain level of festivity/insanity to proceedings.

      Do we think anyone will notice if I leave him front of house to play hostess while I hide in a corner and work on my screenplay? If you strain extra hard, it does almost sound like he’s saying, “May I take your order?” instead of “herpy herr-lerr-durrrssss”.

      Although if you don’t strain quite hard enough, it more resembles “herpes her like dicks”, so that’s perhaps a bit of a gamble. Back to the drawing board we go.

       7.24 p.m.

      So I’m crouched behind the tinsel tree, trying to find the best way to dismantle its clunky base, when Ajita and Meg arrive in the diner, greeted by the increasingly dogged drone of the derp elf.

      The petulant third-grader inside of me is all, “RUDE! How dare they hang out without ME? I hope they both break out in hives!” And the even more petulant second-grader inside of me is all, “How dare Ajita give me shit for inviting Meg to act in our show, then betray me like this?”

      In any case, even though they must’ve come in here to pay me a visit, they don’t see me wedged under the tree with my ass crack on display to every Google Earth drone in the state. Nor do they appear to be looking for me particularly hard. Instead they just park up in a booth nearby and chatter away about what burgers they’re going to order.

      “I feel like you can’t go wrong with a chicken mayo,” Meg says. “I mean, usually I would posit that any and all lettuce has been summoned to this earth by Lucifer himself. But you can’t beat a bit of crunchy iceberg in a southern fried chicken burger.”

      “Fair point,” Ajita agrees. “On behalf of vegetarians everywhere, I accept your stance that lettuce is the devil’s work. In fact, I believe every vegetable on this earth, up to but not including the humble potato, is just plain arrogant. Like, they know they’re nutritious. They know they’re better than you.”

      I feel a sharp pang of . . . something. Maybe FOMO [Fear Of Missing Out, if we have any grandmas in the house], but I don’t know, it’s a little more than that. Why is this bothering me so much?

       8.52 p.m.

      Lol, never mind. Period just started. As you were.

       9.04 p.m.

      After I clear up the tinsel debris and whizz through the rest of the decoration removal, and obviously stop and say hey to Ajita and Meg for as long as possible without being hung, drawn and quartered by my manager, I head back to the kitchen with several buckets of potatoes to peel and leave in water for tomorrow, which is a great relief. I’m irritable and exhausted and my feet hurt from pounding hard tiles, so to be in a quiet corner of the kitchen alone is a blessing from above. Literally if you asked me whether I would rather have sex or peel vegetables right now, I would be elbow deep in potato skins before you’d even finished your sentence. [Does “elbow deep in potato skins” sound vaguely rude to you? Or am I just delirious at this point?]

      Seriously, though, I have all new respect for Betty after just one shift. If my eighteen-year-old body is struggling by the end of a ten-hour shift, how must hers feel?

      This is all just reinforcing the fact that I can’t possibly go to college come fall. I need to stay in this sleepy little town and work in the diner every day, so that Betty can finally retire in peace. I can write screenplays on my days off, or on my dinner breaks, or in the small hours of the morning while the rest of the town sleeps. Like some sentimental hipster type.

      Oooooh, I might go full Romantic poet à la Samuel Coleridge. I mean, I’m not sure he moonlighted as a pancake chef, but he had the right idea. Do we know anyone who can hook a girl up with some opium?

       10.59 p.m.

      Sweet angel Carson Manning meets me after my shift to walk me home. He even brings me a leftover pizza from his own shift. A customer unfathomably ordered Hawaiian pizza, on account of the hallucinogens they were clearly under the influence of, then came to their senses and amended their order to the hugely preferable pepperoni pizza. But not before the chef had already put the first pizza in the oven. So now I have the original Hawaiian pizza in my possession, and I’m too hungry to shun the presence of pineapple on the world’s greatest food. [Well, world’s greatest food apart from nachos. Omg, are nacho pizzas a thing? If not, can we make them a thing? Who do I have to call to make this happen?]

      “So how’d it go?” he asks as we walk side by side back to my