Free Inbetween Days by Vikki Wakefield

moved it over.’ She pulled down the waistband of her skirt. ‘Bruises, see?’
    I eyed her suspiciously.
    ‘It’s good to have you back.’ She tried to smile and stood too close. ‘This place isn’t the same without you.’
    Why did that sound so ominous? She was just Astrid, my friend.
    ‘Where’d my toilet paper display go?’
    Astrid shrugged an apology. ‘It fell down. You nearly killed a customer. They’re stacked along the back wall.’
    I wandered along aisle two to the rear of the roadhouse. Where the racks of empty cartons used to be stood a wall of white. At a rough guess, there were at least thirty diamonds hidden under there.
    ‘You’ve been busy,’ I said, but Astrid was gone. Why was she being like this? Why did she have to change everything?
    Somewhere upstairs, her new keys jangled. I hated the sound, like a cheese-grater on my nerves. Next to my checkout, taped to the column, there was a carefully typed list of procedures I’d been carrying out successfully since I’d worked there without a fucking list—at the bottom, Alby’s scrawled initials and a smiley face, presumably Astrid’s.
    I spent the next two hours moving every single packet of toilet paper back to the front of the roadhouse. It had to be done—only the everyday things in my life were holding it together.
    I started rebuilding my display. Astrid said nothing, but her sighs came at a rate of about one every two minutes. This time I went one better, spanning two aisles with an arch of epic proportions, supported by two flimsy bridges of flattened cardboard. The arches sagged in the middle, but held.
    When I had finished, I sat on top of the stepladder and counted the packets to make sure they were equal on both sides. I became aware that I had an audience.
    ‘Twice in a week,’ I said without taking my eyes from the display. ‘You never used to shop here, Roly.’
    ‘Ode de toilette,’ Jeremiah mused in his deep, deep voice.
    ‘Jeremiah needed a laxative suppository,’ Roly stated, staring at my great white behemoth in awe. ‘It’s a portent. You’re uncanny, Jack.’
    ‘Roly needed a packet of cancer,’ Jeremiah said. ‘You know, if you interlocked the packets the whole structure would be more stable.’ He scratched at his chin. ‘That cardboard will weaken through the creases. A buttress could work.’
    I came down from the ladder backwards, missed the bottom step and landed in Jeremiah’s arms. He set me upright like I was a salt shaker.
    Astrid appeared, carrying two more packets of toilet paper. ‘You missed a couple,’ she said and laughed, but I could tell the difference between her plastic laugh and her real one.
    ‘A buttress will transfer the downward force of the arch into the column. Like this.’ Jeremiah took a pen and notepad from behind my checkout and started sketching. ‘It’s rudimentary, but you get the idea.’
    ‘Silence, wretch! The flapping of your gums wearies me,’ Roly interrupted, holding up a hand.
    ‘Go on,’ I said.
    Roly snapped his fingers. ‘Let’s go, J. Yoo-hoo .’
    Jeremiah only frowned and kept writing his notes.
    ‘Help. J’s fallen down the well again.’
    ‘Jack, we really should be getting back to work,’ Astrid warned. ‘I’ll just add these.’
    She went up the ladder before I could stop her, placed the last two packets and all of her weight (I could swear) onto the fragile bridge above aisle two. As the display came down, she teetered on the top step, and dived elegantly into the carnage.
    Jeremiah stopped drawing.
    Roly had a nice view of Astrid’s knickers and took his time hauling her out.
    ‘Are you okay?’ I asked.
    ‘I told you! It won’t work. You nearly killed me!’ Her face was flushed and pretty. Her expression was mean.
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    Jeremiah said, ‘Toilet paper isn’t hazardous…statistically speaking.’
    If I so much as twitched my bottom lip in the hint of a smile, she would scratch my eyes out. I bit it