North & West

Eight

“Your name is North?” The boy asked, his mouth full of braces and his voice at that stage in a teenage boy's life where it can't decide whether to be masculine or something short of feminine.

I tapped the name tag on my chest. “That's what it says.”

“Isn't that the name of a direction? Like, North, South, East, and West?” The boy rattled off, seemingly unable to grasp the fact that my name wasn't exactly conventional.

Granted, he was certainly not the first person to try and make a clever joke out of my name or just plain get stuck on it, but it was four hours into the night shift of my second week working at the cinema and I was quickly losing patience.

I gestured to the woman who was standing a few feet behind the boy, her eyes almost predatory as she watched me with obvious disdain as I talked to her child. “Go ask your mother,” I suggested, almost sighing in relief when my coworker Anthony came back with the bag of popcorn the boy had wanted. I'd run out of bags and had sent Anthony to get more.

I took the bag from Anthony, giving him a small smile tinged with a bit of something I hoped begged for some kind of help in the situation, but he simply grinned and headed back to where he was getting more popcorn bags from the back room. 

I put the lid on the soda that I'd been filling for the boy, handing him the cup and the bag of popcorn. “Here you go. Your mom already paid.”

He took his order from my hands, smiling a little sheepishly when he noticed his mother looking at me. I didn't quite blame him for appearing embarrassed. It was one thing to go with your mother to a movie – I was almost certain that the one showing tonight was some action packed thriller – but it was a whole new level of embarrassing when said mother was acting like she was going to attack the girl in charge of the food counter, that girl being me.

When the pair left, I took a deep breath and pulled my phone from my pocket to check the time. I still had two hours to go until I got a break – which I was definitely going to use to catch up on my lack of nicotine intake – and then another hour after that before my shift ended.

Somehow I'd gotten suckered into working the night shift, which went until roughly two in the morning due to when Gloria – the lady who owned the movie theater – decided to have midnight showings of certain movies, to bring in a few more bucks for the theater.

The next two hours passed in a sort of blur, the occasional customer coming back and arguing with me about the cost of a refill. It wasn't my rules, but I was always given the task of explaining that refills were not free, however, they were half priced – that wasn't quite good enough for a large portion of the customers, though.

Anthony – the only other worker who had agreed to working the night shift for the night – made his way over to me, abandoning the ticket booth where he'd been positioned for a lot of the night. He slid behind the counter and took over the register, pushing a few of the buttons to open it just because he felt like it.

“Don't you have some work to do?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

Anthony shrugged, his floppy red hair bouncing a bit with the motion. “No one else is going to come in now. There's just short of an hour and a half left, North. Don't you want some company anyway?” He asked me, bumping his hip into mine.

I rolled my eyes, bumping him back. “You're such a slacker,” I teased him,”But. . . could you maybe do me a favor?”

“What kind of favor?”

“Can you make me a bag of popcorn, with extra butter on top of extra butter?” I asked, glancing over at the popcorn machine. “I'm so tired of making bags of popcorn that I would stuff myself in the machine if it would help keep me from having to make any more.”