The intercom buzzed loudly enough to make me jump.
I’d been in my office for about an hour, trying to adjust the store schedule for the next month. A couple days ago, I’d decided that I needed a vacation, and for the past sixty minutes I’d been trying to juggle my employees schedules and requests for time off so I could actually take a few weeks for myself. For my efforts, I’d worked through about a dozen sheets of crumpled up junk that littered the floor around my waistbasket.
My assistant manager, Jorge, buzzed again. “Hey, Matty! You busy?”
I crumpled another failed effort and lobbed it at the waistbasket, then jabbed the intercom button with my pen. “No. No, I guess not. What’s up?”
“There’s a young lady here to see you. She says you know her...” Jorge’s voice lowered for a second, muffled, as he spoke with someone, then clearer again. “She says her name’s Shelly. Mind if I send her back?”
Oh, God. The last fucking thing I needed today. I met Shelly, or rather, Shelly introduced herself to me, when she was fourteen. She used to hang out after school at the convenience store across the street from the strip mall where my main store was located. She and her friends would walk by on their way home, and Shelly would wave to me as she passed by. I guess she decided that I was cute. And, one day, she popped inside to say hello.
Unfortunately, I said hello back. Suddenly, Shelly stopped hanging out across the street, and pretty much everyday for the next year or so, I got to babysit a troubled teenager.
Yay for me. Shelly managed to tell me everything about her troubled past during those months; about how she’d been abused at home, then was shipped off by her mom to live with her aunt and uncle, and how she’d run away and lived on the streets for a few months until she was caught trying to steal gum and sent back home for yet another round of abuse. She’d run away again, and finally ended up in a sort of foster home for troubled youth, located just a f... อ่านทั้งเรื่อง
