So this was my final English short story for the year. I won't lie--half of the reason it's set in a 7-11 is because of Charles' short story. After reading that, I went through this huge phase of writing short stories that take place in 7-11s and this is kind of what came out . . . let me know what you think. It is kind of long.
So, you walk into a seven-eleven. It’s the third Sunday in August, and you’re more than glad to escape the burning sun. A voice replaces the typical welcome bell: “Don’t you dare wear that camisole without a bra ever again, missy.” You spot Eric at the register and sigh; his manicured nails holding the pages of Glamour magazine won’t get you a free slushie today. You suppose that’s alright, you were kind of sick of flirting with seven-eleven perverts anyway, and it doesn’t matter how you look, you feel comfortable in your five dollar sweats and green tank top. Besides, free or not free, you’ll get that slushie.
You don’t just go to the seven-eleven for the slushie, though; there are other things on your shopping list. Maggie wanted a corn dog and last night you ran out of your pretzels trying to perfect that history paper. Brett asked for cigarettes or he’d tell Mom about the fake ID you got last month and Mom mentioned before you left that she’d be out late tonight, so could you please pick up some frozen lasagna for your father? That’s the first thing you grab, from the freezer glowing along the right wall of the store. While you’re at it, you grab a large and cheap bottle of beer because Jacob wanted to head over to the baseball field for a fun-filled night of disgusting alcohol and summertime sweat and what could be more fun? You wander back up to the front of the seven-eleven and set your stuff on the counter, and go back for round two.
You pick up the lukewarm corn dog for Maggie and a pre-made sandwich that hopefully doesn’t have too many tomatoes for lunch, and you walk down aisle seven in search of your favorite brand of pretzels for three entire minutes before another sound is made.
“So tell me, what are you exactly? A man?” you hear Eric say, indicating company.
“Fuck off,” you hear in a woman’s voice. Again, you sigh. You prefer to shop alone. Eric is really the only company you need, and even that’s stretching it. The pretzels, you find, are right in front of you and you grab them and hurry back to the front, in hopes of getting out of the store as soon as possible.
Lasagna, corn dog, pretzels, beer, sandwich, goes the mental tally in your head. Five things. You run back to the back of the seven-eleven for the second-to-last-item: your well-deserved slushie. The largest size is thirty-two ounces and you grab it, attach the round plastic lid, and place the cup beneath the dripping silver spigot. You won’t lie to yourself, blue raspberry is by far your favorite flavor, but the blue doesn’t suit your lips well, so you stick with cherry. You are convinced that boys are attracted to cherry slushie lips.
As you watch the liquid–or is slushie a solid?–sop into the cup, you hear the clunky boots get closer. You stare harder at the cup, wishing that the stupid machine wasn’t so slow so that you can go and buy your deadbeat brother his cigarettes and get out of the seven-eleven. Usually, this place comforts you, because who is in a seven-eleven at this hour of the afternoon in this heat on a Sunday? No one goes anywhere on Sunday, not in this town. Usually, this third Sunday every other month, the seven-eleven is empty for the entire fourteen minutes you need to get your stuff together. And yet, it is undeniable, the damn footsteps are still getting closer.
“What the fuck do you need three watches for?” the owner of the shoes asks, and you’re surprised to see that she’s just a girl, maybe a year or two older than you. She’s about five-eight–almost a foot taller than you could ever hope to be–and isn’t nearly as overweight as most of the people in this city. You slowly bring your gaze down from her head to her feet, where you see the combat boots that you had been picturing stomping around the place for the last several minutes.
“I don’t. Two of them are dead,” you deadpan, having been asked this question far too many times.
“Which two?”
“The gold one,” you say, pointing to it, “and the Mickey Mouse one.” The gold one you got from your grandfather two weeks before he died three and a half years ago. The Mickey Mouse you found in a box of cereal last Christmas, and the battery worked for about a week before it died.
“Well, fuck that,” she says. “I wouldn’t wear them if I were you. Too much dead weight.”
“Eh,” you say, trying to shrug her off. You almost tell her that you wear the gold one because it was the only thing your grandfather left for you in his will, and even if it was broken when you got it, you in your heart that he wanted you to have it for a reason. As for the Mickey Mouse watch, your cousin is only five years old and she loves Mickey Mouse and has one just like it, and it doesn’t matter to you if the watch is broken, you just know that she smiles when she sees you wearing it, when you visit during
school vacations. You almost tell her this stuff, but you don’t. No need to make angry combat boots girl any angrier.
“For real though,” she says, and you’re sure she's about to say something else but she's interrupted by the sound of the door opening again.
“So, how many steroids did your team take this season, Michael Jordan?” You hear Eric greet the newcomers, who ignore him, instead running immediately towards the back of the store. The sounds of sneakers skidding on linoleum hurts your ears.
“How dare you! They're only innocent children,” a woman, who you figure entered with them, exclaims.
“It's approximately three o'clock, do you know where you're children are? Probably not,” Eric replies, and you imagine that he hasn't looked up from his magazine for the duration of the non-conversation. You feel slushie run across your hand as the cup begins to overflow and you hear the girl in the combat boots snicker. You didn’t mean to keep pulling the lever, honestly you didn’t, but it’s too late now. You walk next to the firewood display and grab some napkins, first brushing a strand of hair out of your eye. Combat boots girl laughs again, and you laugh too, because you know you just got slushie mess all in your hair, and there’s no way that sticky stuff will come out until you take a shower. You look at the girl in the combat boots to see if she’s still looking, and she is.
“You’ve got some,” she says, tapping her finger to her eyebrow, and you use the napkin in a half-hearted attempt to clear away some of the mess. Did she really have to be standing there at that moment? Gosh, why is she still standing–your thoughts are cut off by the quickly approaching sound of sneakers-on-linoleum. You don’t want people to see you like this, they aren’t supposed to be here, it’s three in the afternoon! You were so sure that this place would be empty that you didn't even wear a bra. Besides, you were pretty sure that Mike was the one who was supposed to be behind the counter, not Eric. Boy, do you regret that decision now.
You reach out to grab your slushie when the footsteps stop. A chorus of “I want blue!” “Why isn’t there any green?” and “I need to pee!” fills the back of the room and you turn around to face seven little kids. They are not pleasant-looking to any degree of the imagination; you figure that they are, in fact, what an eight year old would look like if he’d been on steroids for a year. They each wear a basketball jersey, colored blue and yellow, with baggy shorts that don’t start until halfway between their waists and their knees. The tallest is only a few inches shorter than you are, which is impressive for a kid his age, and the redhead has a meaner eye than any guy you’ve known in the last three years of high school. A woman comes running up behind them.
“Cody! Andrew! Go to the boys’ room. Dylan and Frank, collect seven corn dogs and do not, I repeat, do not pass go!” she continues to rattle off names and instructions to the boys, and after a few seconds they’ve all disappeared from sight even quicker than they arrived. You look around and you can’t see the girl who was in the combat boots, so you figure she must’ve been scared by the little ones.
“You live here?” the kids’ chaperone asks you.
“Yes, ma’am, all my life,” you say. You can feel the tension build up in the store as you smile, showing off your clean, white, and recently metal-less teeth, and inside you start to pray that they leave. “What brings you here today?”
“Just had a basketball game in Mount Lockleir. I’m their coach. We creamed ‘em, and I told ‘em we’d get corn dogs and slushies on the way back if they were good, and I’d be damned to say that this wasn’t the best that I’ve ever seen ‘em! Truly remarkable these kids are, truly remarkable,” she says, staring over to where Dylan and Frank are trying to figure out how to each hold four corn dogs without dropping anything.
“Well, they sure do seem like a fine group of kids, ma’am,” you say, flashing her another smile as you grab your still-overflowing slushie and walk back to the front of the seven-eleven. Forget the cigarettes, if Brett really needed them he could get his own ass off of the couch. What you really need is an energy drink.
The refrigerators line the right side of the seven-eleven, and you know that the energy drinks are all the way at the end, just your luck. You try to run to the end, anything to get out of there as soon as humanly possible, but before you’re even half way there you have to stop running because two of the little kids are right in front of you. One, the tall one, walks fast and with a sense of purpose. His blue boxers conveniently match his jersey and hang elegantly over the elastic waistband of his shorts. He’s trailed by the shortest of the group, a small boy with glasses whom you can’t help but feel bad for. The small boy is laughing loudly and obnoxiously and you can’t tell why, you just wish you could get past him and his friend.
“So, wait, what was that story? Why did you call me a damn bastard again?” he says, laughing loudly again. The talk kid doesn’t respond. Clearly, this memory encompasses the small kid’s seven seconds of glory, and he’s trying to live it up as best he can. You kind of feel bad for him, and even though you want to push him aside, run ahead, and grab your other drink, you don’t really have the heart for it.
The tall kid rolls his eyes–even though you can’t see his face, you know he’s rolling his eyes–and starts reciting the story. They’re on a bus, a big yellow one, and everyone is sitting in the back. This makes sense to you, you know that the back is always the coolest place to sit. “And you walked up to us in the back and you asked Jay if you could take the seat next to him. Jay said no, you couldn’t, and then you sai–”
“Wait, wait,” the small one says, “let me do it! I told Jay, ‘Get the fuck outta here!’ and then you, you said–”
“I called you a damn bastard because Jay was saving that seat for Mariana and you knew that!”
“Yeah, but everyone laughed when I told Jay to get the fuck outta here, and you know it. You know where I got it from? You know where? I saw Jack sayin’ it to one of his friends after a game. He shoved him to the side and said, ‘Man, get the fuck outta here!’ just like that, just like how I did it. Man, I was a riot, wasn’t I?”
You have given up. You cannot take the story anymore, you gently nudge between the two kids and rush ahead to grab your drink.
On your way back to the register, you see the two kids who were assigned to get corn dogs–Frank and Dylan. The redhead, who you think is Frank, picks up two with one hand successfully, but as he reaches for a third with his other hand, the first corn dog he picked up falls to the ground. Dylan laughs and points at him and you can’t help but snicker a little bit. Frank carefully places the corn dogs safely to the side counter before kicking Dylan in the shins, hard. Dylan grabs his ankle and falls to the floor, his face red and he begins to force tears down his cheeks.
Trying desperately to avoid getting involved, you rush back to the counter, where your slushie (among other things) is waiting for you. You hope that it hasn’t melted–it would be awful if it had melted. The coach is standing at the register, surveying the seven-eleven.
“They’re some fine kids, they are,” she says to you. “Really some remarkable kids. That one George is mine,” she points to the small kid you nudged, “never been so proud of anyone in my whole life.” You imagine that she must not have done much, but you don’t dare say it out loud. You can still hear Dylan crying on the floor, and you want to say something, but the coach’s obvious ignorance holds you back.
Banging comes from the boys’ restroom. Then screaming. The coach walks towards the door and says, “What’s going on in there?” but it’s no use. Cody or Andrew’s screams are muffled by Andrew or Cody’s insistent crying. The coach gives up quickly and returns to the register.
“They’re just having some fun, you know how little boys are.” You want to point out that you’re pretty sure they don’t act like that, but then again Brett is older than you and when you were eight you weren’t really interested in sports. In the back of the store you hear shattering–of glass, plastic, possibly bones–and you’re afraid to look, but you can hear the sound of liquid flooding down to the floor and soon it’s at your feet and you remember that the seven-eleven isn’t really as big as it seems when you have it all to yourself. There are screams too, more of them and louder and you know that the store has at last crossed the line between rambunctiousness and panic.
“They get like this sometimes, but it’s nothing we adults can’t handle. This is my first week on the team you know, George decided he wanted to join last Tuesday. Can’t say we weren’t surprised, he’s not much of an athletic one, but you know what they say–” you’re pretty sure you don’t, “–you’ve gotta let ‘em do what they want to do. We’ve always been supportive, John–that’s my husband–and I.”
You hope that she’ll stop, but she keeps talking, pointing to the tall one and telling you his stats, and you want to get out, you want to get out now. You quickly brave a glance to the back, and it doesn’t matter how quickly you bring your gaze back to the register, you still saw a dented, flooded slushie machine, and what you’re pretty sure was blood and a kid on the floor screaming. Another one, the tall one, starts fisting the vending machine on the other side of the automatic doors. You wonder if it would be possible to break the glass, but you aren’t sure. If anyone could do it, you suppose that this kid could. Eric does not move an inch from behind his Glamour magazine and for once in your life you feel like you understand where he’s coming from.
“Eric, ring me up, please?” you beg him, smiling, hoping that the blue and red mess doesn’t destroy your shoes. Your mom got you these flip flops at the beginning of the summer and you would hate to tell her that you’d ruined them. It takes a full three seconds–yes, at this point you’re counting–for him to move his magazine, and another four for him to place it next to the cash register.
“Miss,” he says to the coach, “could you please tell your devil-spawn to pull up his pants? His boxers really don’t match that jersey so well.” The coach glares at him and takes it as a request to put them back into their places. She walks over to the tall one and tries to pull him away from the machine.
“I am never, ever going to have fucking children,” someone says, and you realize that the girl with the combat boots has returned, with a blue slushie in hand.
“Amen to that, sister,” Eric says, scanning the pretzels.
“Oh, uh, Eric, could you add a pack of cigarettes, please?” you ask him because you suppose you feel bad for Brett. Eric knows you aren’t eighteen, but he puts one of the more expensive packs into your bag, anyway.
In the background chaos continues to ensue, and purple slushie goo pools closer and closer towards your lazy, flip-flop wearing feet, and you question your unconscious decision not to buy painkillers. Each move that Eric makes seems to take minutes instead of seconds, and you wish that your walk home was short enough that you could carry everything instead of needing a plastic bag. You can feel the slushie on the floor begin to push against your flip-flop. Eric hands you your bag and you throw a twenty on the counter, telling him to keep the change even though he certainly doesn’t deserve it. You turn to the door, but combat boots girl is in your way and won’t move. You start to walk around her, but she points to the back of the seven-eleven.
“Go on back in. Your feet can take it,” she says and you roll your eyes but you go anyway, because you know she won’t get out of your way if you don’t. You step carefully into the slushie mess and follow her back towards the root of it all. The closer you get to the back of the store, the thicker the mess gets. You can see it clearly now, the slushie machine with the front punched in and both taps stuck on, but there is no more sweet liquid left in the poor machine to flood the store. The kid lying off to the side a ways, still screaming in pain and clutching his bloodied knuckles. Combat boots girl reaches the end and you see that she’s holding her own seven-eleven bag.
“You’ll probably want to take off your flip-flops. You’re going to need to run,” she says, checking the contents of her bag. You wonder if she’s mentally insane, but figure that it would be too impolite to ask. “I know that it’s gross, but really, you’re going to want to be able to run.” You can’t do much but shrug and slide your feet out of your flip-flops, which were seconds from being destroyed, anyway.
“Now here, hold this,” she says, handing you a metal can. It’s cold to touch, and you look at the label: aerosol.
“What do we need–” you start, but she doesn’t let you finish.
“Eric is such a fucking homo,” she declares. She’s searching around her jacket for something, you aren’t sure what.
“No he’s not,” you say, but only because you know it’s true; you’ve had this discussion with him before.
“I know, but he wishes he fucking was. He’s still a fucking homo,” she says. She pulls a lighter out of an inside pocket. “And what the fuck is up with all these fucking kids?” You shrug. You don’t like where all of this is going. “Is this what we’re fucking teaching everyone?” she continues even though you wish she wouldn’t. Your feet are getting cold and sticky and now, on top of wanting to get out of here, you want to take a shower. “Are we teaching kids to fucking jack up on steroids while they’re young, while they still have a shot of not getting caught? It’s fucking ridiculous. Now, press the button and get ready to run.” It’s almost like she’s saying everything in the same sentence and she’s so convincing, so right, that you start thinking in the same sentence and before you know it, you’re pointing the can towards the firewood display just next to the slushie machine and you’re pressing the button and you tell yourself that it’s just because you’re too tired not to. You’re too tired to deal with all of this . . . this fucking shit. Yeah, that’s right. That makes sense. The girl flicks the wheel of the lighter and produces a small but steady flame, and you stop watching and listen to the screams.
Cody and Andrew are still going at it from the bathroom, which is still locked. You think that Dylan is the one holding his injured hand and if that’s Dylan, then it must be Frank who’s standing off to the side, pointing and snickering and trying to steal bags of potato chips by stuffing them under his shirt. The tall kid is still punching the vending machine and George is still laughing to no one at all, just laughing. You know there was another kid on that bus, you counted seven kids, and you look to your left and to your right for him but it doesn’t matter–the girl has waved her flame in front of the spraying can of aerosol and immediately it catches and everything is orange and red and hot. You want to drop the can and run, but you can hear her muttering, “Come on now, let it burn, let it all burn,” and so you do, you gently wave the can from side to side and you let it all burn. After the firewood, the napkins are the first to catch fire, followed not so shortly by the plastic of the slushie machine.
“To the right, don’t forget to the right! Ah, yes, perfect, watch it go, and now don’t neglect the left, you’re neglecting the left!” the girl in the combat boots instructs like a music conductor, waving her arms around and you take her directions like a clueless child and soon, the walls have caught on and everything is getting hotter by the second, and you almost don’t hear it when she whispers to you, “Drop it and go.”
You do. You don’t care that your feet are cold because you know that the wall behind you is too hot to go back. The only way out is forward. Above the cries of the children, the cackling cannot be heard. You can still hear her in front of you, repeating over and over, “Those fucking kids. On steroids or something. Is this what we teach our fucking kids? Steroids or homo? Fucking kids.” She looks back at you to make sure you’re okay, and together you stop running and you walk the rest of the way to the front of the store, acting as though everything in back is okay. The coach is still trying to calm down the tall kid, trying to talk him through it, and then trying to scold him, threaten him, bribe him. She cries out to him, begging him to stop so that they can get on with it. They won, goddamnit, why aren’t they satisfied?
“She can’t even handle them. She’s such a fraud. Such a fucking fake soccer mom. So fucking afraid of everything.”
Eric still sits there with his magazine, and he has zoned out of the world.
“Such a fucking homo. He doesn’t even turn the page, have you ever noticed that? Forever on the same page, just wants to look like he’s stylish. Fucking homo freak.”
You want the girl to stop. You want the fire in the back to stop, but you can feel the heat move from the back wall to the side, and you still haven’t seen that seventh kid, that stupid seventh kid that you don’t even remember what he looks like or what his name might’ve been.
“And the fucking kids. So loud and obnoxious like they’re already famous. Fucking nerve, fucking kids.”
You hear someone shriek and you turn in every direction. There he is, the seventh little boy, standing over just past the vending machine. He’s looking back, the first one to notice the fire, and he’s yelling loudly but there is nothing to distinguish his yelling from the yelling of Cody or Andrew or Dylan or Frank or George or the tall kid whose name you still don’t know.
“Let’s get out of here,” the girl in the combat boots says and she almost sounds normal. She takes a deep breath and you take a deep breath but you both cough because the place is quickly filling up with smoke. You exit in step with each other, and you aren’t sure if your feet are relieved or petrified at the thought of walking barefoot on the cement sidewalks all the way home. Your mom is going to kill you without those flip flops. You look at the girl and she looks at you.
“You’re fucking different from all of them, alright?” she says, and it’s the first time in the last seven minutes that she hasn’t been able to entirely convince you. “You’re not a fucking homo or a fucking b-baller or a fucking wannabe soccer mom.” You look down at your feet, which have turned purple for what you assume are a number of different reasons. “At first I walked into that place and I thought you were a fucking slut, cause you’re not wearing a bra or nothing, but then I saw your fucking watches, and man, that stuff is wack. Too wack for you to really be a slut. Can’t get action with that fucking stuff.” You don’t know whether you should be flattered or insulted. You nod because you can’t help but agree. The girl turns around and starts to walk off.
“Well I suppose I won’t see you here again?” you say, attempting a laugh.
“No. Fucking slushie,” she says and then she’s gone. She walks away and you know that it doesn’t matter what comment you make or what question you have, she won’t be saying anything else. You turn around and you see that the fire is expanding exponentially–almost the entire back wall is gone and the rest of the building is catching quickly. The fire jumps from space to space and the store fills with more and more smoke, and glowing ashes fall from the ceiling and land on the dividers between the aisles, making sure that everything is equally burned. The flames crawl down the moveable shelves, carefully destroying everything in their path, and then they reach the floor and you see what the girl meant when she said, “Fucking slushie.”
The walls burn down and the shelves burn down and everything burns with them, but as the flames reach the floor they simmer out against the cold, wet texture of the slushie, leaving the linoleum in tact. Nothing can touch the floor, it remains as it was. Black and white. Shining. Covered in blue and red slushie. You wonder if your flip flops in the back of the store will make it, if they can find refuge beneath the moisture and wait it out until morning. The screams, you realize, are beginning to finally fade out behind the cackling. Fire truck sirens are approaching from a far distance. You think about the seven children, one woman, and one man stuck inside, and how it won’t matter to anyone that they were fucking arrogant or fucking oblivious or fucking fake, they’re just dead bodies now, dead bodies that we can pity. No one will know why, why they all had to die, and you keep telling yourself that it all makes sense but really, you have no idea. You turn your back on the seven-eleven and let your red cherry slushie drop to the floor; the idea of slushie just isn’t as appealing as it had been this morning. You turn to the right and you start to walk home with your pretzels and a frozen lasagna and the bottle of beer and a corn dog wrapped in a napkin and the pre-made sandwich and the energy drink and, oh yes, the package of cigarettes.
On the corner is a boy in a blue and yellow basketball jersey. You don’t know his name and you don’t remember hearing the door open; you certainly don’t remember anyone escaping. From a distance you smile and wave, but as you walk past you look down so that maybe he won’t see your eyes and know who you are or what you’ve done. You walk a block before turning back, but it doesn’t matter, the boy is gone, back out into the world, ready to become a basketball star.
