6. Ainsley
Chapter 6
Ainsley
“ Y ou’re late, pretty boy.”
I turn to look at the guy addressing me and cringe when I turn my head too quickly and pain shoots through my neck and shoulder. “Yeah, sorry. I had a rough night.”
“Looks like it but we don’t take excuses around here. You just show up and do your job, no matter how hungover you are. Got it?” His dark brown hair falls over one eye as he watches me, arms folded over his chest.
“I’m not hung—” I try to defend myself, but the guy exits through the swinging door he came in without another word.
I tuck my bag into a locker and close it, unable to secure the latch since I didn’t know to bring a lock. Not that I have much to steal anyway.
I was able to cancel my credit cards and text my dad from my laptop last night. I had some cash stashed in the house, but my new phone won’t be delivered until this afternoon which is why I was unable to call and let my new “job” know I was going to be a few minutes late. I woke up with a splitting headache and had to stop by the pharmacy for something to get me through the day.
“First day?” someone asks.
I turn and find a young guy at a locker behind me, buttoning a white work shirt up to his collar. “Yeah.”
“Do you have a jacket already?”
I shake my head, and he walks over to a rack and pulls one off, holding it out to me. “You look like a medium.”
Taking the offered white jacket, I shed one more layer and then pull it on over my T-shirt, buttoning the front. I’m grateful there doesn’t seem to be a mirror in this locker room. I’m sure I look like a total fool.
The Fool.
Maybe the card was telling my fortune after all.
“Come on. I’ll show you the coffee station.”
This is the best thing I’ve heard since setting foot in this giant industrial kitchen complex, so I follow him gratefully. We’re just securing plastic lids to our paper cups when the asshole from before storms out of the kitchen doors, arms folded.
“Ah, rich boy got his coffee so now he’s ready to work?”
I glance beside me but the kid disappeared. Looking back to the asshole, I cock my head to the side. “You mean me? Sorry, I thought my nickname was ‘pretty boy’. Unless I have two nicknames now. Not bad for my first day.”
I can see the tension in the guy’s jaw as he grinds his teeth.
One point for me, I guess.
“Follow me,” he barks and disappears back through the doors without waiting.
When I join him on the other side, he’s addressing a small army of people wearing white jackets just like mine. I try to join the group without being noticed, but everyone looks my way.
“We’ve got a new guy joining us this morning. This rich kid,” he spits the words pointedly in my direction, his eye contact sharp and intentional, “is here to do community service and work off some trouble he got into. Isn’t that right, pretty boy?”
“I’m fairly certain that’s confidential information, but yeah. That’s right.” I’m not backing down. If this small-time cafeteria manager thinks he’s going to get the best of me, he’s dead wrong.
“You’re in the dish pit,” he replies, cold, ice-blue eyes locked on mine.
“Thanks, Taylor. I’ll take all the help I can get.”
The voice comes from behind the manager, Taylor I guess, and we both look in that direction. It’s the kid from earlier, probably a freshman, swimming comically in his too-big chef coat and dark blue rubber apron.
“Show him the ropes, Seth,” Taylor replies to the kid before turning back to me. “And if he slacks off, just come let me know.” He addresses Seth while giving me the death glare once more.
I just smile. “Dish pit it is. Do you have any more of those snazzy rubber aprons?” I force my tone to sound far more perky than I feel.
I’m walking death. Between the split lip I’m trying hard not to reopen and the pounding headache the painkillers have yet to silence, I could really use a three-hour nap right now.
Instead, I’m faced with a mountain of dirty dishes piled so high I have to tilt my head up, painfully, to see the top.
“The prep guys start early. This is all their stuff,” Seth informs me as he starts getting the sinks filled.
“The prep guys don’t wash their own dishes? They just leave it here for you?” It seems incredibly disrespectful, but I guess I have a lot to learn about how a kitchen like this operates. If how my new manager addresses me is any indication, disrespect may just be part of the package.
“It looks like this every morning.”
“How can I help?”
“You ever work a dish room before?”
I shake my head, and he shakes his back at me. “Didn’t think so. Well,” he glances around the complete chaos of dirty pans and haphazardly stacked plates and bowls. “Why don’t you start on pans. Most of them don’t go through the machine, and even if they do, they have to be scrubbed out first in the triple sink.”
“Triple sink?”
“Yeah. Wash, rinse, sanitize. Everything that leaves this room either has to go through the machine or it has to go through all three sinks. You gotta leave things in the last sink for at least a minute. I usually just leave them there for a few rounds of washing and then take it all out. No one really checks on us.”
He hands me a pair of elbow length gloves. “Be sure to spray out most of the food stuff before you put them in the wash sink or you’re just going to make yourself soup.”
I laugh at his joke and pull on the gloves. “I’m on it.”
It’s grueling work, especially for someone in my condition. Hot and wet and sweaty—and not in the good way. I make it through the pans I sprayed and piled next to my wash sink and turn triumphantly to tell Seth, but there’s a new pile of pans waiting on the stainless-steel counter behind me that I didn’t notice people bringing in.
“How do you ever finish if they just keep bringing in more stuff?”
Seth pulls steaming hot plates from a clean rack with a sopping wet towel. “You don’t really finish. I mean, your shift ends, and someone else comes to do the dishes. But the pile never gets smaller.”
I blow a breath out through my lips and turn back to the endless pile of dirty pots and pans.
Seth takes me on break with him, and I’m grateful for the fresh air—even if it’s just through a cracked window in the small, dimly lit break room. It’s pretty clear that he would rather be on his phone, but he tucks it away politely when I don’t produce my own.
We sit down to our meal of mac and cheese and sloppily thrown together ham sandwiches just as another group of kitchen workers arrives with their own plates in hand. Soon, the room is just as noisy and stuffy as the dish pit.
“What’s your major?” I ask Seth, raising my voice slightly to be heard over the other voices.
He cocks his head questioningly. “I don’t go here,” he replies, as if that should have been obvious.
“Oh,” I reply, and glance around the room. “Do any of these people?”
He shakes his head. “We have a few work study people, and random people like you who come in for a while, but no. For the most part everyone just works here.”
“Huh.” I can’t think of anything else to say. I just assumed all the campus workers were students.
“Shove over.” The grunt comes from my left side, and I look up to see none other than the asshole himself, Taylor.
I blink at him a couple of times before snapping into action, sliding myself and my plate a seat closer to the guy on my other side so he can sit down. Seth doesn’t slide over on the other side of the table, so I’m now sitting diagonally from him, with a woman who could be in her sixties directly across from me.
“Hi, I’m Ainsley,” I say to the woman, offering my hand.
She glances up from her phone screen and blinks at me one time before looking back down.
I hear a huffed laugh beside me and glance over to find Taylor enjoying my snub quite a bit.
“Making friends, huh?” he laughs again, pulling his fork out of his rolled napkin and stirring hot sauce into his bowl of mac and cheese.
“Trying,” I reply.
He ignores me, looking up at Seth. “How’d he do in there? Should I fire him?”
Seth shakes his head adamantly. “No, he did great. He’s better than most of your actual dishwashers. You should hire him permanently.”
Taylor grunts out another laugh. “I’m sure he’d be thrilled to work in the dish pit full-time.”
“He’s sitting right here, you know.” I shouldn't let the guy get to me, but I’m too tired right now to keep it together.
Taylor doesn’t even glance in my direction. “Glad to hear you’re not just dead weight. I thought you’d be a complete waste of my time, but it sounds like you’re helping Seth out.”
It almost sounds like a thank you, so I take it as such. “I’ve never worked in a dish pit like this, but I spent some time volunteering to build schools and dig sustainable water infrastructure in Central America and Asia. I’ve done some hard work in my time.”
Taylor just shakes his head. “If you think you’re going to impress anyone around here with that shit, you’ve got another thing coming.”
“I didn’t mean…I just meant…” I’m annoyed and tired and hot and want nothing more than to be in my bed. “Whatever.”
“Yeah. Whatever. I’m sure that’s what the Central Americans said when you climbed out of your air-conditioned transport with a shiny new shovel and took their jobs. ”
I nearly choke on my sandwich in surprise. “Excuse me? No one paid me to do the work. That’s what volunteering means.”
“They didn’t pay you, no. You paid to go. And if you’d taken that ten grand or whatever and just donated it to the town where you were volunteering, they could have hired locals to do the job and bolstered their own economy. Instead, the only thing getting bolstered was your ego.”
“And his college applications,” a woman to Taylor’s left chimes in.
Taylor nods. “And his college applications.”
My sense of self-preservation kicks in, and I take a bite of my lunch without answering. This guy’s a dick, and maybe everyone else here is a dick as well, except my new buddy Seth. But I need these hours to make my own problems go away, so I have to put up with it.
And you know what? They’re right. Sure, I could have strolled into any college in the world with just my family name on the application, but my volunteering did look great. It’ll look great again when I’m applying for internships and jobs at the end of this school year.
I’m playing a different game of life than these people, and that’s okay. I just need to get through these hours, and I’ll never have to see any of them again.I’ll sure never look at my dirty dishes at a restaurant the same again, though.
“I’m going to grab coffee. See you in there?” I say across the table, speaking to Seth directly.
He nods, but the camaraderie of earlier is gone from his expression. I get it. This is his team, and I’m the outsider.
I make it through the rest of my eight-hour shift in the steamy, smelly dish room and toss my soaked jacket in the hamper next to the locker bay. My T-shirt is also pretty well soaked, but there’s nothing I can do about that now. I make a mental note to buy myself a rubber apron.
I’m not leaving without some kind of note of my hours, so I stop by the kitchen office on my way out. Taylor’s sitting at the desk, working on schedules by hand with a pencil.
“Hey,” I say. He looks up and then right back down again.
“Is there some kind of form I need to track my hours?”
“I’ll find you something tomorrow.”
“I’d feel more comfortable if I got to record my hours for today before I leave.”
That gets his full attention. He sets the pencil down on the desk and looks up at me, leaning back in his swivel chair, arms crossed. “Oh, that would make you more comfortable, would it?”
The ire in his voice leaves me annoyed and confused. “Listen, man. Did I do something to piss you off? I mean, I get that you don’t like me, but I just don’t understand why.”
He just shakes his head and stares at me, stone faced.
Like an idiot, I ramble on. “I’m free labor. Isn’t that at least a little helpful to your budget?”
“You’re not free anything, rich boy. You’re more work for me. I don’t need free labor.” He spits the words as if he can’t stand the taste of them. “Does it look like we’re hurting for money around here? We’ve got three thousand hungry students lined up out there three times a day, shelling out good money for a meal. I need real labor. I need all of my full-time positions filled with people who need these jobs to support their families and get health insurance. Not delinquent, entitled college students who are going to show up when they feel like it until they’ve completed their hours and then fuck off back to their real lives.”
If I’ve learned one lesson from my lawyer father, it’s not to argue with an angry person. “Yeah. I guess I can see that. ”
My surrender has the opposite of my intended effect. Taylor stands and places both hands on his desk, leaning over and glaring at me. “You’re going to be a pain in my ass for the next three months, and I don’t have time to babysit you.”
I know I should keep playing nice, but I’m just so tired.
Sorry, Dad.
“Then why don’t you just give me the paper I need to record my hours so you can sign off on them, and I can leave you to all of your important work.”
We stay locked in a heated glare, neither of us willing to be the first to look away.
Finally, he sits back down in his chair with a huff and opens a desk drawer producing a red folder filled with the exact forms I came in here to get. He tosses one across the desk, and I snatch it up, stealing a pen from the cup and jotting down the date, time in and time out. I pass it back to him, and he initials it.
“Don’t lose it. This is the only record of your time here,” he says, handing the sheet back to me.
“You’re not going to keep it in that folder with the rest of them?”
He shrugs. “I could if that’s what you prefer. It would be a shame, though, if it went missing and you lost all your hard-earned community service hours and had to start over.”
I take the sheet from his hand and fold it neatly into quarters. “I can hold onto it.”
He turns back to his schedule without another word, and I take that as dismissal.
As I’m passing through the busy prep kitchen on my way to the swinging exit door, however, he comes out of his office to shout after me over the din of voices.
“Better be on time tomorrow, rich boy.”
I turn, all eyes on me. “Sure thing, Swift. ”
The room full of cooks erupts into shouts of laughter at my joke and Taylor seethes as they taunt him.
“New nickname, boss.”
“You’d look hot in sequins.”
I can feel the heat of his glare all the way across the room. “You’re going to regret that.”
I just back toward the door, brushing my shoulders off to the tune of Shake It Off as the cooks continue to laugh.
When I’m safely on the other side, my energy collapses.I know it was a stupid move to poke the bear like that, especially when that bear holds my future in his hands, but I just couldn’t help myself.
Maybe he’s right, and I will regret my words. But for now, the only thing on my mind is my bed.