Letters For Bennett

Chapter 1

104 degrees.

It was only eleven in the morning and it was already 104 degrees in the middle of June on a Tuesday.

Most people would be heading to Santa Cruz to escape the dry heat of our town, however, I was not that lucky.

Today, I have an eleven to six o'clock shift at Postal Plus, a shipping store. This means while I watch my old classmates' snapchats on my cracked iPhone 7 phone that I oh so cherish, I am walking in this welcoming weather two and a half blocks to a job I was blessed with at the beginning of summer.

And that wasn't sarcasm. This job was a blessing.

See, most of the local businesses around my hometown don't hire anyone under eighteen, especially if you were still in high school. Therefore, the moment I graduated from J. Robert High School, I began job hunting like crazy. Seventeen rejection calls, fourteen failed interviews, and one offer from a very creepy Jack-in-the-Box manager later (I turned it down after he went 17 minutes without blinking), I was gifted the a perfect job.

My old friend from high school, Tyler, who I used to tutor, posted on his Snapchat Story about a an opening at his work. I swiped up so fast I nearly flung my phone out of my hand. A few days later, and a meeting with the boss at Postal Plus gone perfectly, I could finally call myself a working gal - though obviously for social reasons I didn't say that in public.

That brings me to today.

Three weeks into June.

Two weeks into my job.

One minute away from heat stroke.

Yes, I know, two and a half blocks isn't a mile or a marathon. Although, for someone who chose the trumpet over sports and reading over running, two and a half blocks in this heat, in jeans and a polo shirt, felt like walking on the sun in a winter jacket.

I turned the corner of my neighborhood street, meeting the halfway mark. As I did, the smell of actual rotting death hit my nose so hard my eyes began to water. I looked around for source of this horrendous smell to be met with an even worse sight.

"Someone must have hit it last night," a friendly old man said, taking a break from walking his tiny two Pomeranian dogs. He was referring to the sad looking roadkill.

I couldn't quite make out what type of animal it was, and staring at it made me sad, so I looked to the cute Pomeranians to take my mind off of it.

"You're dogs are quite cute." I croaked out to the man, my throat dry out of nowhere. I sucked at making small talk.

When in doubt, talk about the cute dogs.

He chuckled a bit before agreeing. "Have a nice day, miss," he said, bidding me goodbye and ignoring my awkwardness, while pulling his pups along.

I sulked the rest of the way to work, silently scolding myself. I was awful at small talk. Not awful at being social, I am a very social person. I was into public speaking all throughout school: mock trials team, speech club, debate club...practically in any speaking based club. It was just the small, polite, little conversations that I didn't do so well in. I'm not scared of talking to people, I'm just not good at coming up with a topic out of nowhere, I guess.

This was something my manager, Tyler, knew about me before he got me my job.

"If you are going to work as a cashier," he told me on my first day, "you are going to have to be able to find something to talk about other than their package."

It took a bit before I was able to pinpoint a topic that I could talk about without causing offense to anyone.

Weather.