A short woman in a blue polo emerged from the heart of the store. From the harried, impatient way she walked, Mitch knew in an instant that this was the woman who would soon become his boss. A messy ponytail of dark, auburn hair the color of decorative flint corn bobbed behind her head, while her thick, rounded stomach pressed against the shiny fabric of her blue polo. An inviting smile rimmed by a parentheses of deep wrinkles came onto her face as she stepped up to where Mitch sat on the bench.

“Are you Mitch?”

“Yes, that’s me,” he said, nodding and standing up.

“Okay, great,” she said, staring into his eyes for three long seconds before looking away and swiveling her head left and right. Her eyes gleamed a pale greenish-gold, like a gnarled nugget of some precious mineral freshly mined from the earth. “I’m Cheryl, I’ll be interviewing you today.”

“Oh yeah, we spoke on the phone. It’s great to finally meet you in person. Do you want me to follow you?“

“Unfortunately, I’m dealing with a bit of a situation right now,” she said, shaking her head and sighing in frustration. “One of our inventory specialists didn’t show up for his shift today, and this is the third time this particular individual has done this, so needless to say—”

“He doesn’t have a job anymore,” Mitch said, finishing her sentence. 

“Yup, that’s right,” she said, with a nod. He watched as her tightly-clenched mask of formality softened a bit, now that she had found an ally. From past experience, he knew that this expression meant she had almost certainly decided to hire him already, and only a series of catastrophic blunders could sink him now. “That’s not so hard to understand, is it? If you want to keep your job, you have to show up. And if you can’t show up, just give us a freaking call. It’s not that hard.”

Mitch nodded in agreement. He knew the exact words she wanted to hear in this moment, so he spoke them.

“No, it’s not. And it’s really just about having respect for your coworkers, because they’re the ones who are going to suffer. They’re the ones who have to pick up the slack and spend the rest of the day running around doing your work. So yeah, I agree with you a hundred percent. I mean, at least give a call, or even a text. Seriously, how long does it take to type a text to you, or whoever his boss is?” To further illustrate his point, Mitch slipped his phone out of his pocket and began tapping his thumbs on the black screen as if typing a text. Sweaty thumbprints slicked the screen and blurred the edges of his grayed-out reflection staring back at him. “’Hey sorry, my car has a flat tire and I can’t come into work today, will be back tomorrow.’ Send. How long did that take? Twenty seconds?” He said, rubbing the screen of his phone against the thin fabric of his interview-day slacks. With his phone back in his pocket, he looked up at Cheryl and saw her staring at him with an incredulous expression.

He cleared his throat and glanced around the store to try to shrug off the mistake. 

“But you know about this stuff better than anyone, so I don’t need to tell you. ”

“Yeah,” she said, bending her hand backward and looking down at the inside of her wrist. The circular face of an expensive-looking sports watch pressed into her bone-white skin. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to deal with this right now. Do you mind waiting a little longer, or do you want to reschedule?”

“No, that’s fine. I can wait. Take your time.” 

“Are you sure? We might not be able to get started for over an hour,” she said, lowering her chin and fixing her fierce, raw-mineral stare on him. Looking into those eyes he remembered his geology class back in college, and the terrible, sinking fear of not knowing what to do with his life. 

“Yeah, that’s fine,” he said, with a short chuckle she didn’t return. “It’s not like I have anything better to do with my life.”

She grimaced at this comment, as if physically disgusted by it, and then scanned the sales floor for a moment before looking back at Mitch. “Okay. Feel free to browse around while you wait. I’ll have someone page you back to customer service when we’re ready to go, so keep an ear out. And your name is Mitch right? Do you prefer Mitch or Mitchell? Or is there something else you like to be called?”

“I don’t mind either way. You can call me whatever you want.”

“Pick something,” she said, her voice sharp and impatient. Now she took an exaggerated, theatrical look at her watch, which he understood to be her way of telling him to hurry the hell up.          

“Mitch is fine.”

“Okay Mitch, I’ll see you back here in a bit.”

 

***

 

Mitch spent the next hour and ten minutes wandering around the store. With his hands folded behind his back like a lonely grandfather strolling through a museum, his mind drifted into a daydream of what his life would be like once he started working here. Because, God! It was such an incredible relief to find the job he actually wanted to do in life! The job that wouldn’t require him to carve a fake smile onto his face no matter how lonely and sad he felt each day. The job that would finally make him feel like a competent adult instead of a terrified idiot child incapable of functioning in society. And to think that only two months ago, he was sobbing in his car at the far end of the parking lot of this very store, staring at the gray wasteland of the highway, and begging the God he doesn’t believe in to tell him how to survive the next sixty years of his life. Thinking about that now, it felt like that day had happened ten-thousand years ago.

Forty minutes later, a static-garbled voice spoke over the P.A. system. Though Mitch couldn’t understand anything except the last two words, which sounded like customer service, he decided to head back just in case.

 

***

 

Walking up to the Customer Service desk three minutes later, Mitch saw Cheryl standing in front of his bench with a manila folder tucked under her arm. Now she wore a menacing permutation of the cheerful, customer-service smile he had seen her display earlier. This version hovered hard and severe on her lips and seemed to say, fuck you, leave me the hell alone, rather than the intended, hello! How may I help you today?

The instant she saw him walking up, her smile changed to a big soft slice of genuine warmth and infinite patience. Mitch nodded in satisfaction at his observation of this change. Very few people ever notice little things like this, Mitch thought. Maybe these were the skills that would one day make him a great manager of this store?

After a short greeting, Mitch followed Cheryl into the backroom. There she led him into a large meeting room with a long, rectangular conference table. Sliding into the cheap plastic chair Cheryl had pulled out for him, Mitch sat down across from her.

Cheryl opened her folder and thumbed through the papers inside. 

“So. We went over your application, and everything looks really good. You’ve got a lot of experience, much more than most people we usually hire, and that’s great. We’re always interested in people like you, who are going to bring an increased level of maturity to our staff,” she said, looking up at Mitch and nodding. “There is one thing I want to ask you about, though. I see here that you’re done with school, correct? Your resume says that you—” She looked down at the papers in front of her and Mitch saw that the top page was a printout of his resume. Fat streaks of red marker danced across the page while dense paragraphs of tiny, handwritten notes scuttled in the margins. “It says that you graduated from college in 2012. Is that right?”

He nodded.

“Okay good. So what I want to ask you about then, is your most recent employment. Because it says here that your last job was all the way back in—” she looked down again to check his resume. “Wow, last year. November of 2015. More than nine months ago. And that was Value King Supermarket in Topine. Can you talk a little bit about this gap in your employment history and just, kind of, what’s been going on with that?”

Ready for this question, Mitch took a deep breath and recited his memorized answer.

“Yeah, so basically, what happened with that was, I spent a long time looking for exactly what I want to be doing at this stage of my life and beyond. Instead of rushing ahead and accepting the first job offer that came my way, I took my time searching very carefully for the right thing. And I’m really happy I did that, because that patience has led me here. And because of that extra time I took, I’m one hundred percent confident that this is exactly where I want to be,” he said. His cheeks filled with blood when he thought back to the four other times in the past year he had said these same words with this same inflection to a woman like her in a room like this. He didn’t feel guilty though. He had believed those words to be true each time he had spoken them, just like he did now. It wasn’t his fault that all those jobs had made him look like a liar by being insufferably terrible and making him quit. “And I know that this is where I want to be because this is my passion outside of work. Video games are one of my favorite things in my own life, so I consider it a privilege to have a job where I get to talk about games all day long. So I totally understand how that empty space in my resume could be worrying to someone in your position, but I’d be lying if I said it was a negative in the big picture of my career plans. I really believe it’s been a big positive for me.” He forced himself to hold his gaze on the crusty copper nuggets of Cheryl’s eyes.

She studied his face for a long moment before nodding with a satisfied look. Thumbing through the papers, she wrote an unseen note on one of the sheets. 

“That is a very good answer,” she said, without looking up. 

Cheryl continued the interview. She asked why he had applied to Tetrahedron over other stores, where he saw himself in five years, what his ultimate career aspirations were. Following this she described five or six difficult work situations and asked him how he would solve them. Then she asked him what he would do if he saw a coworker stealing an object that looked like a chocolate bar but upon closer inspection revealed itself to be an eight-hundred dollar smartphone. He answered each question with the kiss-ass responses he knew she wanted to hear, but which he also happened to believe. After all, he had always been an excellent employee when he showed up.

“Alright, Mitch,” Cheryl said forty minutes later, flashing a warm, relaxed smile. “Normally at this stage I’d sit down with your department manager and we’d go over your application materials, and then we’d make a decision on whether or not to bring you back in, but I really don’t think we need to do that in this situation. I’m prepared to make an offer right now. How does that sound?”

“That’s great, thank you so much,“ he said, feeling his lips stretch into a giddy smile. He started to tell her how excited he was to begin, but before he could finish his sentence, she was already in the middle of explaining something else.

“ . . . and this line just confirms that you’re consenting to a background check by this third-party company we use, WickInvest that looks like, which is short for investigations, I assume. And I think there is a website somewhere at the bottom here, yup, there it is.” She reached across the table and pointed at a grainy line of text printed on the piece of paper sitting in front of him. “So you can visit that website if you have any questions about the background check or the company we use to do it.”

Sliding her finger down an inch, she pointed at the next line. 

“And this line just states that you fully understand the nature of your employment with us, so be sure to read that very carefully before signing,” she said, pulling her pale arm away and leaning back in her chair. The plastic seatback on her chair groaned. 

Mitch looked down at the EMPLOYMENT AGREEMENT statement hovering just above the final line of his offer sheet. Though he already knew what it said, he read the statement anyway.

By agreeing to this statement, I acknowledge that my employment is based on an “at will” agreement between me and my employer. In this agreement, my employment can be terminated by ME, AT ANY TIME, AND FOR ANY REASON, effective immediately . . .

Seeing these words for the fourth time in less than a year, he wondered: if he hadn’t read this same statement back in ‘14 when he first started working at Value King, would he even be sitting in this room right now? Would he ever have known he could do that if they hadn’t told him? 

He signed the agreement and looked up at Cheryl. 

“Okay. Before you sign the last line and accept our offer, I always like to give the applicant a detailed overview of the day-to-day work of his or her specific job. So basically, the most important thing for everyone in this store, from you and Seth over in video games, all the way up to Maria, our store manager, is customer service. That’s number one, two, three, four, five, and six on your list of the most important things we do here. It’s service, service, service. All day, every day, every hour that you’re inside these walls, that’s what you need to be focusing on. And not just, ‘Oh, you’re looking for a new litter box for your cat? Well, that’s not my department, so the litter boxes are over there,’” she said, pointing at the wall on her right with a hard, dismissive stab of her arm. “That’s not going to cut it. That’s not how we do things here. When you’re out on the floor and someone asks you a question, you walk them directly to what they’re looking for. And guess what? If the customer is looking for a new litter box for their cat and Christine or Dustin or Abby are busy, it’s now your job to stay with that customer until one of them is available. And if they can’t get free, guess what? You just became a pet accessory associate, and this is your chance to sell someone a new litter box. Understand?”

He couldn’t believe it was happening again. Why did they always change the rules of the game at the last second? Why couldn’t he just work the job he applied for, instead of some other terrible thing he would never be able to do each day?

Withering under the heat of her intense stare, he gave her a meek nod.

“Okay, good. Second most important thing is this,” she said, pointing to her mouth, which now displayed a third permutation of her customer-service smile. This one was softer, with a gentler slope, and free of the tight, stretchy wrinkles at the corners of her mouth that had made her look standoffish when he was talking to her earlier. This version of her smile seemed to sit somewhere between the fuck you! severity of her angry variant, and the hey there! jubilation of her natural one. “And your smile is nearly as important as what you say to each customer, okay? So we need to be seeing this from you whenever you’re out on the floor. Customer service . . . with a smile. Very important. Very, very important. Have you ever heard the expression, ‘You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar’? Well, that’s what we’re talking about here. We know for a fact that selling with a smile improves your weekly numbers. And that’s good for everyone, because that means more money for the store, which means we can keep our doors open and you and me still have a job. And that also means more money in your pocket at the end of every week, or two weeks I should say, our pay period is two weeks by the way, we get paid every other Thursday. And it’s also good for the customer, because they have a pleasant experience and leave the store satisfied, which makes them that much more likely to come back to us for their next purchase. Make sense? So that’s something you’re going to be hearing over and over and over in the next few weeks while you’re training: service with a smile, service with a smile, service with a smile. No matter what. No excuses. Didn’t get enough sleep last night? Doesn’t matter. Go for a run before work. Stop for a coffee on your way here. Chug a Red Bull in the parking lot. Because no matter what happens, you’ve got to be able to provide service with a smile for every minute of every shift of every week that you’re here. Just broke up with your girlfriend? Don’t care. Leave those feelings at home. I don’t mean to sound heartless, but the customer doesn’t care about your troubles. And they certainly don’t want to hear about them. So find your freaking smile, sell your ass off, and drown your sorrows in the new PlayStation you can finally afford thanks to all the kick-ass sales you made this week. A customer is yelling in your face about how the system you sold them is a piece of garbage and it’s all your fault because you’re a phony, and a liar, and a manipulator who preys on the weak for your own material gain? Kill them with kindness. Smile them to death. Get it? I know I’m exaggerating a little bit with some of these examples, but not by much. This concept really is one of the most important aspects of working here. But the good news is, this shouldn’t be a problem for you, with the level of passion you have to be here. I have a feeling you’re going to be a rock star in this department,” she said, nodding and looking down at the papers in front of her. 

Mitch’s eyes slipped closed. He shook his head very slightly. It suddenly became difficult to breathe.

“Are you okay? What’s wrong? Is any of this going to be a problem for you?”

“No,”  he said, opening his eyes and forcing a smile onto his face. He hoped it didn’t look as tight and synthetic as hers did earlier. “I just felt a little wave of dizziness come over me for a second. Have you ever had that?”

“Heh. Only about three times a day,” she said, with a scoff and a grumble of laughter. “You’re probably dehydrated. But we should be done in a few minutes, so just hang in there a little bit longer. Now I guess the only thing left is your schedule. According to your application, it says that you have open availability every day except for Monday and Tuesday, which you’re not available at all. Correct?”

Feeling the high-pressure beat of blood in his temples, Mitch nodded again.  

“Okay, awesome, that’s great. That lets us give you the most hours per week that we can,” she said, as if that was a good thing. She pulled a sheet out of her stack of papers and, looking down, turned it sideways for Mitch to see. “Okay. So we count Sunday as the start of each new week on our schedule, and Sunday morning is when we do our aisle resets, so all of our newer sales associates are scheduled for a six a.m. to two p.m. shift in order to get acclimated with the layout of the store. And yeah, I know. It blows. But everyone has to do it for their first year, so you get used to it pretty quick. And if you plan on pursuing management training in order to start moving up, you should get used to it now, because there’s probably about one day per week where I’m not here by six or six-fifteen. So yeah, it sucks, but you get used to it after a while. And since you have open availability during the week you’re probably going to end up working a lot of seven to three, seven to three-thirty shifts or—well no, you’ll probably be working that time almost every day because we just lost Tanner. Wow, I forgot about that. Yeah, he’s starting school next week I think, so you’ll most likely be taking his place in that morning shift.

“And then Saturday I think will be the only other day we’ll have to give you a different shift. We’ll probably have you close . . . two to ten most likely, since we’re legally obligated to give you at least eight hours between shifts with you having to be back here at six the next morning. And other than that—” she said, but suddenly a splash of transparent light flickered behind her head and flashed off the metal edge of the dry-erase board hanging on the wall.

In a brief moment of silence, Cheryl closed her eyes, shook her head, and whispered a single word.

“Christ.”

An instant later, a deafening buzz cleaved the quiet air. The horrible noise trilled inside Mitch’s head and jolted his heart into a thudding sprint. 

Cheryl strode to the door and leaned into the hallway. 

“Let’s go! Everybody out, this is not a drill!” She yelled between screeches of the fire alarm. One of the screaming buzzes drowned out the last three and a half words of her sentence, and Mitch watched her lips move without a sound. Seconds later she turned around and ordered him out of the room with a harsh, impatient wave of her arm. Knocking over his chair, he jogged into the hallway and merged into the shuffling stream of blue polos making their way through the swinging doors of the backroom toward the front door of the store. As he walked, the red alarm boxes near the ceiling coughed wet flashes of clear light.

All the lights in the store were off, except for those hovering just above the sliding doors at the front. There he saw Cheryl jogging toward four other managers waving their arms like cops directing traffic. As Mitch made his way to the exit he smelled a sharp, vaguely metallic stench, and turned to look toward the back of the store. A brown, foggy haze hung about the aisles.  

 

***

 

Mitch stepped into the sweltering heat of the mid-August afternoon. Most of the Tetrahedron employees slowly clomped toward the fire drill meeting point at the back of the parking lot, but some grouped around decaying old jalopies sitting in the middle of the baked desert of pavement. As Mitch trudged to the meeting point, he watched a high school-aged employee peel off his blue polo, fling it into the window of his car, and burn his hand on the upper lip of the door. The kid yelped a pair of curse words and danced around the squatting vehicle while his burned hand flopped at the end of his wrist like a dying fish. Moments later the kid opened his door with the tail of his white undershirt and drove away without a word. 

Mitch stopped walking and looked around to see if Cheryl or one of the other managers had seen the young employee drive away. They hadn’t. Instead, they stood near the front door of the store, directing traffic and talking to motorists who had arrived at the scene after the building had been evacuated.

Resuming his trek, Mitch clomped to the back of the parking lot and hiked up the grassy slope just past the end of the pavement. He slurped a long breath and leaned his back against the stretchy wire of the perimeter fence. The sun fried the back of his neck. His temples throbbed with the sharp, rhythmic pulse of an oncoming headache. Warm beads of sweat scudded down his face, his ribs, the planes of his bony shoulders. Though he had come to this place many times in the past to admire the pretty view, he didn’t turn around. He didn’t want to look out at that highway and remember the terrible experience he’d had the last time he was here two months ago.

Two minutes later, a bald employee with a neatly-trimmed goatee lumbered up to the end of the parking lot a few feet from where Mitch was standing. The heavy man nodded at Mitch, let out a hissing exhale, and eased into a sit on the tiny lip of concrete at the edge of the pavement. He mopped his dripping face with the sleeve of his extra-large blue polo, then turned his glistening head and looked at Mitch. 

“You know, you don’t have to literally go to the very end of the parking lot,” the bald employee said, before shifting his eyes down the length of the fence. Mitch followed the bald employee’s gaze and saw at least fifteen other Tetrahedron employees leaning against the fence in the same way he was. The bald employee nodded, and then shrugged the heavy slabs of meat that were his shoulders. “Or maybe you do. I guess I just don’t care that much.” He turned back toward the store.

An SUV pulled into a parking space ten feet to the right of him. The vehicle’s engine idled and chugged and belched clear, blurry plumes of scorching air. The air smelled like gasoline, engine oil, and burning rubber. The SUV’s passenger-side window slid down; the blobby black shadow of the driver stretched across the empty seat.

“What’s going on?” the driver yelled to the bald employee, his voice mangled and warped by the humming growl of the SUV’s engine.

The bald employee squinted up at the driver and shaded his eyes with a huge, moist, red hand.

“Fire drill.”

“What?”

“Fire drill!” the bald employee bellowed.

“It’s not a drill,” Mitch said, looking out across the parking lot. “At least I don’t think so. I heard Cheryl say it wasn’t a drill.”

The bald employee looked at Mitch; the driver in the SUV shouted again.

“What did he say?”

“He said it’s not a drill,” the bald employee said, at a conversational volume too quiet for the driver to have heard over the noise of his vehicle. Either way, the SUV’s window slid back up and kissed the top ridge of the door frame without a sound. Mitch watched the car and waited for it to leave, but it sat where it was, rumbling away, belching more invisible puffs of its sweltering exhaust.

A minute later, a second Tetrahedron employee walked up and sat down next to the bald employee. A clump of rough brown hair like sun-scorched scrub grass spiked up from the second employee’s head. The second employee elbowed the bald employee on the arm. 

“Hey Rooob,” the second employee said, drawing out the bald man’s name as if the word itself would eventually become hilarious if given enough emphasis. “You know what this whole thing reminds me of?”

“That time you did that thing with that guy in that place?” The bald employee said, with deadpan seriousness. He stared straight ahead and didn’t look at the jokester employee.  

The jokester leaned back in mock surprise and stared at the bald employee as if amazed.

“Exactly man, how’d you know?”

The bald employee shrugged and sighed heavily.

“But no, seriously, this does remind me of a weird thing that happened to me a few years ago. Have you ever seen that movie from a while back where Tom Cruise is a guy from the U.S. who becomes a—”

“The one where Tom Cruise is a guy from the U.S.? Jesus Christ, Joel, what kind of crazy shit are you watching?” the bald employee said, nearly shouting in fake disbelief. His gesticulations and movements had suddenly grown even more animated than the fidgety jokester.

“You asshole,” the jokester said, grinning. “How about you let me finish my sentence before jumping in with some—”

“Like this? Should I let you finish your sentence like this?”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what you—”

“So, like this right? This is what you want me to keep doing?”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I want you to do,” the jokester said, giving the bald employee a serious nod.

They both broke into laughter and then went silent for a time. Mitch sucked in a hot breath; a rusty, metallic taste bloomed on his tongue. Inside his mind, he begged the two employees to keep talking. He didn’t want to be alone with his thoughts for a single moment.

The bald employee yawned and stretched his thick back with a satisfied exhale.

“So what does this remind you of, Joel?” The bald employee finally said.

“Well, a few years ago, I went to see that Tom Cruise movie where he is a guy from the U.S. who becomes a samurai in Japan. Have you ever seen that one?”

“I don’t watch movies,” the bald employee said.

“Well, whatever, it doesn’t matter. Anyway, I was sitting in the theater and really enjoying the movie, but about forty minutes before it ended, the fire alarm went off, and long story short, they canceled the rest of the showing and I never got to see the end of the movie.”

“Wow. That’s a great story,” the bald employee said, in a bored monotone.

“Yeah but that’s not even the best part. Once the movie came out on DVD, I bought a copy just so I could see the end. So I fired it up and watched the whole movie again, but then the thing crapped out on me two minutes after the last part I saw. So I took the disk out of the player and looked at the bottom of the DVD, and there was this huge scratch right on the edge of the disk. So when I saw that, I was just like, ‘screw this, I guess the movie gods don’t want me to see the end of this movie.’ So I threw away the disk, and to this day I still have no idea what happens at the end of that movie. Can you believe that?” 

Mitch cleared his throat.

“I’ve actually seen that one. Do you want me to tell you what happens?” Mitch said, looking at the jokester’s wild frizz of electric-shocked hair.

Both men looked back at Mitch for an extended moment. Then, without a word, they turned around and ignored him, as if he wasn’t there. The two men went on talking as Mitch trudged down the grassy slope and started walking across the parking lot. He watched as Cheryl shuffled around the front of the store, barking orders at people and pointing up at the roof with the flopping antenna of her walkie-talkie. Mitch stopped walking and stared at her for a long time. After a while he realized he had been staring at her for five minutes or more. But she didn’t look back at him. Two yellow fire trucks turned into the parking lot and pulled up to the front of the store. Mitch looked around. No one was watching him. Everyone was looking at the fire trucks.

A cool breeze knifed past Mitch’s face. A fat droplet of sweat dripped from the end of his nose. A giddy flutter of relief danced in his stomach and disappeared a moment later. Understanding that he was completely alone as usual, he walked to his car and drove away.