Pirates of the Retail Wasteland (15 page)

“That rocked,” said Anna. “I’ve always wanted to tell that guy to go to hell.”

“He never expected it coming from me!” said Jenny gleefully. She was actually jumping up and down now.

She’d just stood up to authority for the first time. I was getting used to doing it, but for her to do it…well, that really
was
pushing the bounds of reality.

In the parking lot, Mr. Streich was just getting out of his car.

“Hey, guys,” he said, a bit surprised to see us. “Working on your movie?”

“Yep,” I said. “We wanted to get some shots of the new downtown for contrast.”

“Good idea.” Streich nodded thoughtfully. “I’m just here to meet up with your dad.”

“So I hear,” I said. “He’s already in there.”

“Great,” said Streich. “I wondered if he’d make it through the snow. Barely did myself! I’ll see you guys on Friday!” And he walked off. If Harold had stopped ranting and raving, Mr. Streich would probably end up none the wiser that ten minutes earlier, the Wackfords had been an accounting and midlevel management strategies office. Dad would surely tell him something weird was going on, but he’d take that in stride.

The snow was still coming down, though not nearly as hard as it had been earlier that morning, and there were plows rolling down Cedar Avenue.

“Well,” I said to Anna, Brian, and Edie, “I guess that’s a wrap.”

“Well done,” said Anna. “We managed to get plenty of footage, and we didn’t even get arrested.”

“Hang on,” said Brian. “One more shot.”

And he picked up his camera and aimed it at the front door of the Wackfords.

The pirate flag was still there, flapping in the snow.

Brian filmed it getting smaller and smaller as we walked away.

Well, that was it. Our career as pirates lasted about four hours, and at the end of it, I’d annoyed a gym teacher, seen my father accused of being a skinhead punk, struck a blow against what Edie always called “the corporate takeover of America,” added experience in accounting and midlevel management strategies to my resume, filmed the better part of a movie, and acquired an official girlfriend—not bad, considering I’d done it all before the time I normally woke up on a Saturday.

We were all pretty excited on the walk away from the store, but no one was more excited than Jenny. She could hardly stop skipping and saying, “I can’t believe I said that!”

We walked to my house first, since I lived the closest and we all needed to warm up. We dropped off the plants and filing cabinet, then headed straight down to Douglas and Venture to take some establishing shots of the old downtown—something to compare and contrast with all the shots we had of Cedar Avenue. It had stopped snowing by then, which would make the contrast even better. The air would be clear in the shots of the old downtown, where the fresh snow lent an additional bit of charm, while the retail wasteland shots would almost look like they’d been filmed in Siberia or something.

“Man,” said Brian as we walked into Sip, “this is going to be a pain in the ass to edit. We’ve got, like, six hours worth of footage between the two cameras to wade through and put into a movie short enough to show in class.”

“Who says it has to be that short?” I said. “We can make it a regular-length movie and just show a trailer for it as the presentation. Then they’ll all have to see the whole thing separately. They’re all going to want to.”

We roamed through the shop to our usual table, and Trinity danced her way over to us.

“What happened?” she said. “You pirates didn’t stab Troy and bury him at sea, did you?”

“Oh no,” I said. “We’re friendly pirates.”

“I’m not!” said Edie.

“Okay, well, we aren’t the violent kind.”

“Unless provoked,” said Edie.

“And there’s no sea to bury him in anywhere near here,” I said. “Unless you count the pond. And that’s frozen.”

“Whatever,” said Trinity. “And he didn’t get fired or arrested or anything, right?”

“Nope,” said Brian proudly. “We told his boss we were selling Girl Scout cookies, and he fell for it.”

Trinity chuckled. “You met Harold, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“And I told a teacher to go to hell!” said Jenny proudly.

“Wow,” said Trinity. “Just don’t start climbing on the tables again, okay?”

“Anyway,” I asked, “do you mind if we record some things here in the store?”

“Be my guest.”

We wandered around, filming the inside of Sip. We asked the few customers who had braved the snow why they came to Sip instead of the Wackfords, and they all had pretty much the same answer: they liked going someplace that was
their
place, not just another link in a large chain. One woman said she felt like she was just in a glorified Burger Box when she went to Wackfords. That was movie gold, right there.

“Well,” said Edie to Trinity as we finished up, “I hope we can help you stay in business.”

“What do you mean?” asked Trinity.

“Aren’t you having trouble staying open with a Wackfords to compete with?”

“Are you nuts?” asked Trinity. “You talked to all those people at Wackfords, right?”

Edie nodded.

“Do you think any of them would have been caught dead here in the first place? And do you think any of our customers are going to go to the Wackfords?”

“Well…no,” said Edie.

“See?” said Trinity. “We’re doing fine.”

“Oh,” said Edie. Honestly, she looked kind of disappointed that Sip wasn’t going out of business. I was a little surprised to hear this myself, but I guess it made pretty good sense.

“Wait a minute!” I said. “I heard George telling Troy you guys were closing in six months! That’s part of why we did the takeover!”

“George is always saying that,” said Trinity. “It’s just to bother Troy. We aren’t going anywhere.”

“You said you had to sleep with him in the back room to get company secrets out of him!”

Trinity snickered. “I think that’s excuse number two hundred and thirty-six.”

I was relieved, of course, but more embarrassed than relieved. I’d just taken over a Wackfords, possibly risking jail time, to save a coffee shop that didn’t even need saving. After a while, though, the embarrassment was gone, and I was just relieved that Sip wasn’t closing.

“We aren’t out of the woods yet,” Anna said as we sat down. “Someone could still call and complain. We could still be in trouble.”

“There weren’t that many people,” said Brian. “And only a couple of them didn’t get a drink in the end.”

“One is all it takes,” I said. “We just risked some serious trouble to save Sip, and it didn’t even need saving.”

“That wasn’t why we did it,” said Anna. “It was never going to do that, anyway. We did it to make a point about the new downtown.”

“And to bring down big business!” said Edie.

This brought Anna into a little argument with Edie over exactly what we’d hoped to accomplish with the whole thing, but the truth was that there were a lot of reasons. We’d done it out of frustration over poor city planning that had caused our part of town—Anna’s and mine, anyway—to go from being the main part of town to an afterthought. Out of despair from thinking our favorite place was closing. To make a good movie and a monument to the old downtown. And in my case, to prove to myself that I had the guts to do it.

Brian and Edie stuck around after that so Edie could beg Trinity for some tango lessons, and Jenny called to get another cab to take her home. She was still buzzed from having told Coach Hunter to go to hell.

Anna and I started walking home. We held hands the whole way, and when we got to her house, she grabbed me and kissed me long, and hard, and good.

“So,” she said when we paused for a breath. “You never told me…Have you?”

“Have I what?”

“Seen a naked girl.”

I pulled back a step and blushed about three different shades of red. “Well, define the conditions of seeing a naked girl,” I said. “Do you mean, like…live and in person? Or just pictures?”

She laughed out loud. “I know you’ve seen pictures, dummy. Ever seen a real one, not counting, like, when you were a baby or anything? Your age or older.”

“Well,” I said, “I guess not.”

I don’t know exactly why this embarrassed me; I mean, it’s not like there are a lot of nudie bars in the suburbs that let minors in, and I’m pretty sure air vents that offer a view of the girls’ locker room only exist in a few of the best movies ever made.

“Didn’t think so.” She smiled.

“Same question to you,” I said. “Have you seen a naked guy?”

“Sure,” she said. “Sometimes when my dad is working at his office, I sit in on the life drawing group at the college. You know that. So I’ve seen naked guys and girls. Mostly college aged, some older.”

“I can’t believe they really let you into those.”

“It’s just an art class,” she said. “No big deal. I’ve seen more erotic bug documentaries on public broadcasting.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but that means, you’re like…one up on me.”

“So?” She smiled.

“So…,” I said.

“So you’re just going to have to live with it.” She smirked. And she kissed me again, and walked into her house.

Anna was not one up on me, she was about a million up on me. Not only had she seen a lot more naked people than I had, or probably would in the near future, she also knew all about art and movies I’d barely even heard of. She played classical music with her parents while I was at home listening to my dad butcher “Smoke on the Water,” which, honestly, should not be an easy thing to butcher. She was sophisticated and cool, and I was just a suburban slob being raised by a pair of dorks.

But she liked me. And she was kissing me.

If I didn’t know better, I’d even say she liked to think of me as a bit of a dork. And not even in a condescending way.

That evening, Mr. Streich came over to my house with a bass guitar. This was the first time I could recall ever having a teacher in my house, and even though I liked the guy a lot more than I had at the beginning of the year, it was still awkward, especially when I had to hear him and my dad trying to harmonize on “Day Tripper.” The Wildewood Singers probably did it better. But Mr. Streich didn’t ask me about the takeover, so I assumed that he hadn’t found out, which was a relief.

To my even greater relief, he left before Dad put on his True American gear, though if he’d stayed, maybe he could have told Dad ahead of time that trying to grill indoors can cause a fire. He was a science teacher, after all. Not that you should need an advanced degree to know that starting fires indoors isn’t the safest thing you could try. Luckily, Mom talked him out of the idea just before he lit the match.

It started snowing again that night, and it kept coming down on Sunday, enough that we actually got a snow day from school on Monday. The roads being too snowy for the buses didn’t stop us from moving around ourselves; I went over to Brian’s house, where we got a jump start on editing.

By midweek, we were deep into editing the footage of the takeover into a pretty good movie. Edie found out from Trinity, who found out from Troy, that a couple of people had called the store to complain that there’d been kids bugging them, but the complaints weren’t really about us—they were about Andy, and most of the customers, like the lady in the tacky suit, weren’t taken very seriously, even by Harold. After all, if they fired everyone people complained about, there’d be no employees left in town.

In fact, the only customer who really got Andy in trouble was a woman, presumably Mrs. Smollet, who called the corporate office to say that he’d called her an idiot. Andy had happily offered his resignation before Harold could fire him.

On Friday, Coach Hunter apparently found some more poems in his office, because, true to his word, right after lunch, he enacted a locker search of everyone in the gifted pool. It was all done very quietly; he didn’t gather the whole school together to watch or anything, like they do on TV. I only knew about it because as I was walking between classes, I saw the janitor opening James Cole’s locker. Coach Hunter dug around for a bit, but the only thing he found was a large piece of paper taped to the inside of the door on which James had written “Hi, Coach!” He dug around, found nothing else besides a coat and gloves, and slammed the door shut. Locker slamming, of course, was strictly against the rules for students.

At the pool meeting that afternoon, Mr. Streich asked if we were all aware that our lockers had been raided that afternoon.

“Yes,” I said. “Coach Hunter was behind it.”

“That’s right,” said Mr. Streich. “And I imagine you all know what he was looking for. Dustin, James, I’m looking at you guys in particular.”

“Did he find anything?” asked Dustin.

“No,” said Mr. Streich. “And for the record, I have a bit of a problem with him deciding to search your lockers because he suspects somebody’s writing poems. There’s nothing illegal about writing poems, and singling you guys out just on a hunch is a little dicey. So I haven’t told him what kind of project you guys said you were working on.” I imagine that would give him quite a clue.

“Thanks!” said James.

“However,” he continued, “I can imagine that you guys know pretty well who’s responsible for the poems he’s been finding in his office?”

“Do you know how many he’s found?” asked Dustin.

“As of lunch today, he says he’s found fourteen of them.”

“Fourteen!” I said. “That’s pretty impressive.”

“Well,” said Mr. Streich, “the problem is, you’re sort of walking that fine line between pulling a prank and stalking. I’m going to go ahead and let you guys do your project about making a tombstone for him, and I’ll refrain from ratting you out on two conditions.”

“I’m willing to negotiate,” said Dustin.

“Number one,” said Mr. Streich, “you have to stop sending him the poems and trying to depress him. That goes without saying. Number two is that, in addition to making the tombstone, you and James will both be delivering eulogies for him at the presentation—nice ones. And you can’t call him by name as part of the project, it has to be for an anonymous gym teacher. I could get in trouble myself over this.”

That, I had to admit, was pretty clever. Tough, but fair.

“That’s going to be hard,” said Dustin. “Saying nice things about him?”

“We always say nice things about the dead,” said Mr. Streich. “Even if you didn’t like them. If I speak at my mother-in-law’s funeral, I won’t be saying a word about her having horns.”

“Well,” said James to Dustin, “I’m game if you are.”

“Deal,” Dustin sighed.

“In that case,” said Mr. Streich, “congratulations on writing some fine poems. Hang on to them; I’m sure you’ll find a way to use them for something eventually. You kept copies, right? Somewhere other than your locker?”

“Yeah,” said Dustin. “And if he says that there’s been fourteen of them so far, then he still has three more to find in his office.”