Chapter 02
Another day of work and another day of beating out the minimum wage.
My name tag is on, my name in all caps and printed clearly—Troy, and my coffee is in hand. A bagel in my other hand that I had to double fist the two to really get it down my throat and out the door under five minutes. Honestly why the fuck do old people like breakfast so much? Is it a rule that once you're over the age of sixty you can't sleep past six in the morning?
Every day all I see are old folks up at six in the morning, rise and shine with their newspapers, black coffee, grits, and two eggs over medium. I finally got down my own version of a breakfast, a bagel and instant coffee, before heading out the door and into my car.
Then I remembered why I wake up at six in the morning to deal with these old people. It was because of this car, this house, and the bagel I was eating. It all came out of my wallet and my paycheck every month.
Driving to work was the same everyday. Three stoplights, when one is green, the other two are always red and a right turn down the block and I'm here, in front of Dory's Diner.
Dory really needed to renovate the place. Every time I walk in, I feel like I just stepped into a 1970s based romantic comedy. The wallpaper is out of fashion and Dory herself is out of fashion with that dry 1970s disco haircut.
Dory would stand behind the counter, yapping away with the chef and ordering for us to refill coffee every two seconds. These are the things I am accustomed to deal with every day, making me regret that one decision I made when I was eighteen. Why didn't I go to college?
Wait, I know why. I married my high school sweetheart instead. I stayed in this small town and decided to live a white picket fence small town life. It sounded like the best idea at the time, but of course now I look back at it in retrospect, I realized how stupid I was.
Love isn't forever, but your education sure is.
Too late to think about that now with my car payment, insurance, and other costs of living on hand.
After clocking in, Dory immediately called me over to take a table by the far right corner. A regular. They called themselves Mr. and Mrs. Miller. An old couple who didn't know how to tip, just great.
After the breakfast shift, I counted the cash tips in my server apron, seventy-five dollars and twenty-three cents. Not too bad.
Living life from one shift to another, one paycheck until the next was the most horrible idea I had ever had in my life.
I thought I had it all, a beautiful blond wife and a love that seemed to last forever. But who knew one day she would sleep with one of your best friends and leave you? No one ever told me that the day I decided to marry her. No one told me that the day I decided to save up and finance for her Broadway dreams with my shitty just-above-minimum-wage job.
Now that the breakfast rush was over, it was time to refill every housewife's glass with diet coke and take their orders of the variety of salads on the menu with a fake smile on my face. Sometimes I see their wedding rings and I get jealous, my eyes start to water but I don't allow it. Not here, not in front of these people that lived in my town.
Perhaps it was my fault. I wasn't ambitious enough, I was a doormat. I let my wife have the best of everything while I basically ate the shit that she spat out and she finally wanted a real man to make her happy.
Was it the sex? Am I getting old? A beer belly? Fat? What compelled her to sleep with someone else?
"Well hello Troy." Martha the town's most famous soccer mom greeted me. Martha Cox went to my high school and graduated with honors but somehow, just like me, she chose a marriage over getting out of the town. I hope she knows that one day maybe her husband will cheat on her and she'd be stuck here just like me, regretting all those life decisions society puts on you at age eighteen.
"Hey, Martha. How are you today?" I whipped out of my notepad after setting down three diet cokes for Martha and Taylor McKessie. This is what sucked most about marrying your high school sweetheart in a small town, the friends all come with you, they stay here and know every little business about you.
"I'm doing super great. Kyle is turning two soon! Jason and I are going to throw him a party." She said excitedly, referring to her husband Jason Cross and her son Kyle. Maybe if my wife hadn't cheated on me, we would be happy like this too, maybe she'd be pregnant soon and I'd have my white picket fence dream just like Martha.
"How's Sharpay?" Taylor asked. The sound of my wife's name rolling off of Taylor's tongue was almost stinging. I hated hearing her name, thinking of her face and that bleach blond hair I once buried my face in when I embraced her. Betrayal was all I could taste in my mouth every time I heard her name.
"She's… fine." Of course they didn't know anything. Sharpay isn't friends with them, she never was. In fact, Taylor and Martha never liked the idea of us getting married. But after five years, they learned to accept it and set our differences aside to support me, their friend, in my life's endeavors.
"I saw her out and about with Zeke the other day." Martha shrugged as she set down the menu. "Maybe she's buying you a birthday gift…" She said playfully with a giggle that came after.
Right, my twenty-sixth birthday was coming up. The first time in eight years that I'd celebrate it without Sharpay.
I wish one of my best friends, Zeke, was in fact just out and about with Sharpay trying to buy me a birthday gift. Maybe in a perfect world, that would be the case. But in this world, which sucked by the way, they were out and about enjoying each other while I sat at home and cried over being cheated on.
Zeke was the only one of my friends who was ever fond of Sharpay and look where that got me. I used to think he was the one friend that could be happy for me no mater what, but it turns out he really had been thinking about fucking her this entire time. The scene I witnessed of walking in on Sharpay and Zeke having sex on my bed in my own house replayed in my mind and all the times Zeke tried to apologize to me are never enough, never enough for me to erase that scene out of my head.
"Anyway, we're ready to order, Troy." Taylor set down her menu also. She was the only one of my friends that actually did something with her life. She even influenced my best friend, Chad, to go to law school after his undergrad at the University of Albuquerque. "You guys serve breakfast all day, right?"
"Yep."
"Okay, I'll have the spinach, feta, and tomato omelet with a side of hashbrowns."
I scribbled the 'Sp, f chz, and tom oml' onto my notepad along with 'HB'.
"I'll have a Chicken Caesar Wrap with a side salad. No onions and light on the ranch please." Martha smiled when she handed me the menus.
"Thanks. I'll put those in." I took the menus from her hand and walked over to key in my order in the computer. Another day and another goal of beating that minimum wage of three dollars an hour plus tips.
I made a left turn after the last traffic light and pulled into the curb right up the sidewalk of my front door. A hundred and eighty-four dollars. Not too shabby for today's work.
The sun was down and the sky was dark but clear with all the stars in the sky. A classic Albuquerque night sky. I lived in a dessert after all. The lights in my house were off and dark. No wife, no one there to listen to my hard day's work. No one there for me to sleep next to at night.
I had to start getting used to this instead of being a sad sack of shit.
As I got out of the car, I could see a light in that bedroom on the top right corner of the Montez home next door. That very bedroom where magic happened when I was a kid. I couldn't help but smile at the memories whenever I look up at that room. It was the first time in years since I've seen it lit.
Gabriella Montez seemed like a memory so far away from now. She was in my life at times when everything was innocent. She was my neighbor, a neighbor that went out there and achieved everything I never could.
Gabriella is the first girl I knew, first girl I touched, first girl I slept next to—when I believed all my firsts would be my lasts.
"When's your mommy going to be home?" I could hear her asking me in that voice of hers when she was five. It seemed like just yesterday when I would stay at the Montez home while my parents worked until late at night.
Ms. Montez worked from home. She was an accountant that did personal tax for others in town while my mom worked as a nurse at the hospital. My dad was a car salesman and they worked late hours which resulted in me staying at the Montez home constantly.
"Why are you always reading that stupid book?" That was my favorite question to ask Gabriella as we sat in her room. I had Power Rangers on full blast on her small little TV that her mom put in her room to keep her occupied while she worked downstairs in her office.
She never stopped reading. Gabriella always read Junie B. Jones while I watched Power Rangers. I always wanted to snatch that book out of Gabriella's hands just to see how she'd react. And one day I did.
She was sitting there reading that book of hers, one of those books that I swear she didn't exactly understand all the words. Gabriella always tried to overachieve even at the tender age of five.
I watched TV as I imitated the rangers, sticking my arm right out at Gabriella before snatching her book away from under her nose.
That set her running after me and all around the room. The room that seemed so big at the time with our small bodies. "I'm going to destroy this book." I had my evil laugh imitated to a tee.
She chased after me screaming and trying to kick me the second I climbed onto her bed, jumping up and down in victory.
"Choy…" She said in that baby voice, not really knowing how to pronounce the T and the R in my name. And her eyes started to water, her tears falling down her cheek right in front of me.
That was when I knew my weakness would be Gabriella. Her tears were my first weakness. And it was the first time I had seen a girl cry in front of me.
"Gabi…" I stopped jumping as I sat down on her bed, letting the book fall loose onto her sheets. I no longer cared about destroying the book the moment I saw her tears fall.
"I hate you." Life was simple when we were five. A stolen book resulted in hatred and tears were only for stolen books. And hate was such a simple word. But now, hate is filled with cheating wives and backstabbing best friends.
"I'm sowy."
"Okay." Gabriella had the blackest and curliest hair I've ever seen. She was destined to be the first woman in my life.
And with those innocent tears and a simple 'okay', I never wanted to hurt her again.
How simple life was and how fucked up my life is now. I doubt Gabriella ever even thought about me ever. In fact, it had been a while since I thought about her, but what I didn't realize was that every thing I did had remnants of her.
She was the first girl I'd ever done anything with.
She's now rich and famous and successful. Everything that I'm not.
It's silly to even think about her as a five year-old in that little bedroom when she's long gone in a huge bedroom, eating all her favorite foods without lifting even a finger.
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