Page 7 of Mr. Frosty Pants
Joel pointed at her. “I swear to God, if you draw a mustache on Mary or put 666 on the Baby Jesus’s forehead, I will fire you so fast you won’t know what hit you.”
Angel sighed and capped the Sharpie. She blinked curiously at him. “You’re grouchy tonight. Why?”
“This is a job, not a game,” Joel barked, pointing between her and the Blow Mold set. “That’s merchandise, not a toy for your amusement. Stop trying to turn my store into your goth performance art piece.” He pulled his still-trembling hands through his hair in frustration. “Just sell things to people, Angel. That’s what you’re here to do.”
“But I’m bored,” she said, as if that was a reasonable statement to make to an employer. “And this isn’t merchandise to sell. It’s our display model, and you said I could give it to my mom after the season was over.”
Joel grimaced. “I said you couldbuyit from me for sixty percent off, not just take it. And does your mom want her gift vandalized?”
“Maybe. She thinks I’d make a good tattoo artist one day.”
“You can draw on it when it’s in your mom’s yard, then.” He took a deep breath, trying to hold it together. Sometimes he thought Angel acted more like a fifteen-year-old than the nineteen her paperwork proclaimed her to be. He was only twenty-two after all, but he felt a dozen years older than her most days. “It’s almost closing time. You can get through a few more minutes without vandalizing anything.”
“Can I please put 666 on the baby’s head? Just long enough to take a selfie with it?” She blinked at him with wide blue eyes popping brightly between the dark black eyeliner on her lids. “I’ll use some hair spray to clean it off before I leave.”
“No. For one thing, that’s blasphemous or something.” He wanted to escape into the backroom and get his crap together before he had to go back out there and help Casey load a tree into his SUV. Assuming Casey even wanted to buy a tree from a rude asshole like him. He struggled to come up with another reason. “For another, just no. Absolutely not.”
She rolled her eyes and wrote 666 on her left hand instead, and then returned to stand behind the register, smiling to herself as she began to draw what appeared to be a bat on her forearm.
Joel took a slow breath, walked over to the register, and grabbed a red Sharpie from the tin can of pens. He handed it to her and said with a gentler tone, “It’s Christmastime. If you’re going to draw a bat on your arm, at least put a Santa hat on it.”
She rolled her eyes again, this time with a heavy sigh for embellishment, but she uncapped the red pen and complied. Done with his ridiculous employee, Joel stomped off into the backroom and plopped down at his small desk crammed with paperwork and an out-of-date computer. He tugged his hands through his hair before burying his face in his arms. His blood zipped through his body like it was being chased.
Casey Stevens. In town. At his store.
He swallowed hard. Fuck, maybe Casey would just leave without buying anything. Leave and not come back the way he had when he left for NYU three and a half years ago. Why had he come here anyway? To rub it in? To make sure Joel was living the loser life he’d always been destined for despite his stupid adolescent dreams of getting out?
Humiliation rode him hard. Joel’s throat tightened. He wished Casey had never come around. But showing up uninvited had always been a habit of Casey Stevens’s.
“Can I watch you play?”
Joel looked up from where he was noodling on the new-to-him pawnshop guitar he’d bought with his own money from working in his dad’s store. The garage door was open, and the cool winter air mixed with the stale smell of old cigarettes and the relentless scent of diesel oil.
Casey stood there, flushed and handsome, holding a banged-up sketchbook with the winter sun backlighting him like an angel. Joel hated that he thought things like that about Casey. As if he were some kind of queer.
But he was a queer, actually.
If he were being honest.
Because there were plenty of other thoughts he cherished about Casey, too. Uncomfortable, sinful, and exciting thoughts. Thoughts that apparently showed on his face sometimes; thoughtswhich his dad couldn’t resist trying to beat out of him.
“I won’t distract you,” Casey promised, shoving one hand into the pocket of his khakis and lifting up the sketchbook with the other. “I’ll just draw a little.”
“The rest of the band will be here soon,” Joel warned him. “That’ll be your cue to scram.”
“I know.” Casey’s expression went thoughtful as he gazed at the drum kit, amps, and guitars taking up nearly the entire garage. Joel’s father might have thought the band was a waste of time, but there were several good reasons he was generous with the use of the garage space. Reasons Joel preferred not to think about—like one massive black eye that had required a cover story for a few weeks—but they were reasons all the same.
Casey scratched at his pink-tipped ear and hesitantly met Joel’s eyes. “Or I could stay? I like to listen to the band. Sometimes I don’t go home, you know. I hang out around the corner where your friends can’t see me, and I listen.”
“Stalker.”
“Y’all are good.”
“Don’t go talking like a hick. That’d be low class.” Joel teased Casey with the words he’d heard Mr. Stevens use a lot over the years of being Casey’s only neighborhood friend, but his heart swelled at the idea that sometimes Casey stayed behind to secretly listen to the band play.
“I’m not a stalker. I just want to hang out with you. Why is that a problem?”
It was a problem because if Joel didn’t ditch Casey as soon as they got off the bus at school, if Joel’s band pals acknowledged him with even a head nod in passing in the hallways, Casey Stevens might go from having the reputation of an anxious-but-cute nerd boy to…what? The pet geek of the angry, bitter, and going-nowhere-fast crowd?
