Free Before My Eyes by Caroline Bock Page A

“Cooper.” If you didn’t know me, you’d think that was my name. “You can call me ‘Maxie,’ Petey. Yup, only you.”
    Trish snorts. “If I need you, I know how to call you. I’ll whistle, sweetie.” She whistles off.
    I slump against the back wall and slug down the water. They’ve been okay to work with all summer, Trish and Peter, not that I want to admit it to them. Peter loads more ice in with a crash and a wreckage of cubes bouncing off the never-washed wood floors. He’s smiling, kneeling down, cleaning up his mess. He’s done more than his share of work. I look out to the beach, to the ocean, gulping the water down. To the side, Trish snaps the ice cream machine back in place and, calling out that we need more cones, leaves Peter and me for the supply closet in the back. We also need hot dogs for the grill. But the grill is Barkley’s job and there’s no sign of him.
    A line suddenly forms in front of the Snack Shack, and at the front of it is Jackson.
    â€œHey! Hey! Petey. Petey? You hear me? You see me? Over here. I’m right here. Come here. Your job is to wait on me. You know that’s your job, isn’t it?”
    I can’t deal with him today. Jackson. He was always one of the tallest kids in our grade, and he must have passed six feet this summer. The captain of the varsity soccer team, his hair is styled after European soccer players, shaggy-long, and streaked blonder from the sun. I run my fingers through my hair. I don’t think I even combed my hair today. Last time Jackson was here I took off into the men’s room, pleaded a break. He looks like he has spent his summer sleeping with every girl who will sleep with him, which is most, judging from the rumors at school. He gets to drive a BMW to the beach, unlike me with an old Jeep. My father says that he can’t have his son driving a nicer car than most of his constituents. I turn half away, fiddling with the ice cream machine as if something is wrong with it again.
    â€œWhere’s Cooper? Or the Bark? They didn’t leave you in charge, did they?” He says it again when Peter doesn’t answer. “They didn’t leave you in charge? Are you in charge, Petey?” On the surface, he sounds like a reasonable customer. However, I’ve noticed for the first time that he likes to repeat himself, as if, having said something once, it makes it more clever to say it again.
    Peter crashes the rest of the ice into the box. Overflowing, most of the ice scatters around my feet and into the corner, milky white, like field mice.
    â€œHow about it, Pete?” he asks. “How about it?”
    She laughs next to Jackson. Not Trish. Trish is nowhere to be seen. Anyway, Trish’s laugh, also off-key, is arguably nicer, at least until you see that it’s coming out of the three hundred pounds of her. This laugh is streaming out of Samantha, in her shiny black bikini today. This is the same bikini she wore last Friday. I wonder if she has racks of bikinis with the names of the days pinned onto them.
    â€œCan I help you?” says Peter, gripping the empty bucket of ice.
    â€œCan you help me?” Jackson asks, and then asks again, as if this is a rhetorical question, and not Peter trying his best.
    I cringe. If I could make myself smaller, lose the new two and three-quarters, almost three inches, I would.
    Peter bites his lip, glances back. He knows I’m there, about ten feet behind him, in the shadows. I don’t think I have the free will to go to the front. I don’t care what Mr. Morrison, my history teacher from last year, said. I don’t believe in free will. I’m staying back here.
    â€œPetey?” says Jackson, whistling at him like he’s a dog. “Petey, come here.”
    Peter steps forward. He’s willing to do his job but he’s not smiling. He looks back at me, and I shrug. It’s his turn at the counter,