Ryden Oneshots

The One Where They Work In A Dairy Queen

The One Where they Work at Dairy Queen
Warning: high sugar content.

Ryan never intended to spend a large part of his sophomore year working at Dairy Queen. But when he gets a facebook message from Pete Wentz, the most popular senior on campus, saying he's seen Ryan's "desperately seeking employment" status and that there's a job opening at the Dairy Queen he manages, Ryan isn't about to say no. True, the "frnd me so i cna see yr pics" should be slightly creepy, but... Pete Wentz. So anyways, that's how Ryan Ross, veritable poet and Kerouac devotee, ends up spending his Saturday nights scooping ice cream for drunk teenage hipsters.

Sadly, the substance free Saturday nights and drunk teenage hipsters aren't even the worst part of the job. That title belongs, wildly uncontested, to Ryan's annoying freshman coworker. Brendon wears pastel hoodies and ugly glasses, squirts softserve directly into his mouth on an hourly basis, and insists on blasting a mix of Disney and American Top 40. Ryan doesn't know which is worse: the fact that, despite all this, Pete Wentz seems to really like Brendon, or that after only two days of work, Ryan knows all the words to 'Big Girls Don't Cry'. It's kind of a toss up.

When Ryan actually thinks about it, one of the only good things about his job is that his best friend Spencer works at the Starbucks across the street and visits over his lunch break so they can bitch about their jobs. Most of their conversations go something along the lines of: "So I told him, no you can't have a MCFLURRY, does this look like a fucking McDonalds, and he STILL didn't get it," followed by a sympathetic nod and a, "Yeah, this one guy always orders a medium coffee, like, saying GRANDE isn't that hard." Then they'll share a long-suffering look and once again, come to the conclusion that other people suck. So yeah, it's a nice arrangement.

Except three weeks into the semester, Spencer suddenly starts really liking his job, so much so that his visits to Ryan become shorter and shorter and the bitching becomes pretty much nonexistant. Well, on Spencer's part at least. The whole situation makes absolutely no sense until Ryan meets Jon. 

Ryan wants to hate Jon, he really really does and he really really should, because the first thing Jon does is order an Americone Dream McFlurry with a gummi bear mix-in (Ben & Jerry's, McDonald's, Coldstone, in that order) and then proceeds to sing the entire Aladdin soundtrack with Brendon, but he can't. It's basically impossible to hate Jon. Jon is hilarious and cool and works at Starbucks too and is pretty much a living breathing teddy bear. So even as his ears are being assaulted by the last strains of One Jump Ahead, Ryan finds himself digging under the counter for a package of gummi bears.

Spencer's newfound love for his job, well strike the B and replace it with an N, means that Ryan now has to spend most of his breaks alone with Brendon. Not that Brendon wasn't there before, it was just easier to ignore him. True, Pete stops by on occassion to 'check up on his employees', which Ryan quickly realizes actually means 'check out his employees', but most of the time it's just the two of them. And as set as Ryan is on avoiding any form of conversation, Brendon seems equally determined to bother him.

"If you were an ice cream flavor, you'd be strawberry," Brendon announces on a day when he's being particularly annoying. It's times like these that Ryan comes dangerously close to achieving the impossible: hating Jon. Ryan raises an eyebrow and watches Brendon spray an entire can of whipped cream onto his oreo blizzard before he asks the obvious question. "What?" Because, seriously, he's always thought of himself as a french vanilla, or at least something a little more refined than plain old strawberry. "Yeah, strawberry," Brendon answers. "I don't really know why, it just fits. Pete would be rocky road because he's crazy like that." He pauses to precariously place a cherry on his dessert heap. "So, what do you think I would be?"