I’m thinking of how stupid I looked standing out there, not knowing she could see me the whole time. Just kind of walking around, looking at my phone every so often.
“You’re Hannah, right?” I ask.
“Oh yeah. You’re Seth.”
Mr. O’Neill must have told her.
“I read your application, Mr. Seth Gordon.” She gives me a grin, like she’d actually been looking through a family photo album, with pictures of naked babies. “What can I say. It was sitting on the counter and I got here early. Sounds like you’re some sort of math brain.”
You had to put down the courses you had taken the previous year.
“Not really.”
“Well you are compared to me. My goal is to take as little as possible.”
She waves me around the counter. “Come on, I’ll show you what you’re going to be doing.”
I follow her into the back room, watching the way the two pale, faded spots on the back of her jeans move with each step, like the worn denim was alive and an extension of her skin and I can’t help imagining what that might feel like if I just reached out…
As we walk through how to use the ovens, how to work the assembly area, she tells me a little bit about herself. Like how much it sucks when your parents make you move halfway across the country the summer before your senior year. Hannah had lived most of her life in New Jersey. But she didn’t really have an accent, like those kids on the Jersey Shore show.
When I ask she says, “Where I lived people don’t have Jersey accents. It’s not a plus when you interview at Ivies.”
At around five a couple of more guys show up for work, and for the next couple of hours I just sort of follow them around and watch. Hannah is working the front of the store and when it slows down at around ten I punch out. Before I head out the back door I pick up Hannah’s time card and check out her last name. When I get home I light up my monitor. It takes about two minutes to find her Facebook page.
She’s got hundreds of friends, but the only one I recognize is a guy from my school, Steve, who works with us at Saviano’s. Probably the rest are from New Jersey.
But I find out all kinds of stuff about her. Like one of her favorite quotes: “You have to fling yourself at what you’re doing, you have to point yourself, forget yourself, aim, dive.” Which comes from someone named Annie Dillard. So now I have to wiki Annie Dillard and Google the quote. It comes from An American Life and I make a mental note to grab a copy from the library.
And then I stare at her picture. It’s a weird photo of Hannah—at first I didn’t even recognize her. She’s done something with her eyebrows to make them huge and dark. They look the way painters draw seagulls from a distance—black wings. And there’s a stuffed monkey over her right shoulder, palm leaves behind her and a shell necklace around her neck. Her hair is parted down the middle and pulled back, tight. I spend a long time trying to figure it out.
And then her photo gallery. She’s got a couple dozen photos that she’s taken and they’re really interesting. Not a bunch of goofy snapshots or anything like that. They’re really complicated photos. Some of the color ones, you can’t even tell what she was taking a picture of, because it’s all sort of blurry and abstract like a painting. I stare at these for a long time too.
Then as long as I’m on Facebook I check out Brit’s page. She’s got a new photo up mugging with the same senior guy I used to see her with in the halls. Some guys, like Garrett, they must just be born with a gift. They just understand girls the way I understand numbers. Flipping back and forth between Hannah’s and Brit’s pictures, I’m thinking I got screwed in the gift department.
But all of these distractions, plus work. It’s killing my training time. And in the back of my mind, the clock is always ticking, ticking down.
20.
Next night, I just go to work like I’ve been doing it for years. And actually, after a couple of hours, I could do it without thinking. So I end up standing there elbow to elbow with Steve or one of the other guys, and you’d get to talking. Maybe that’s what Mom was saying when she said work would be good for me, because usually I’m not much of a talker. But I can listen.
My third shift I get lucky and it’s just me and Hannah working on the pizza assembly line. At first it’s really busy and we just are working and talking about the orders and how it would be nice to get a break.
Then around eight o’clock the orders slow down. We’re straightening things up, getting the pepperonis out of the olives, wiping down the stainless steel when suddenly Hannah stops and looks right at me.
“If you could do anything you wanted with your life, what would it be?”
Of course, the answer is obvious. But I can’t just blurt out that I want to play computer games for a living without revealing myself as a mega-nerd. So I just sort of shrug and grunt which Hannah takes as a cue to answer her own question.
“I want to do something that makes a difference, you know?” An order flashes up on the monitor and I pull a large tin off the rack, the ones with the crusts already on.
“Back when we lived in New Jersey, Mom and Dad would drag me and my brother to New York on weekends. Usually to a museum. Which I hated, for no other reason than I had no choice and I’d rather hang out with my friends. Anyway, one day, about a year ago, we go to this big art museum downtown. And I’m grumping about it in the car and my little brother is being a total pain in the ass, poking me and pulling my hair and whatever. So when we get to the museum I tell them that I’m going to go check out the fourth floor and I’ll meet them in the lobby in an hour. You know, just to get away from them.”
While she’s talking another order comes up and Hannah stops to grab an extra-large tin. I finish my mushrooms and see that she’s starting to work on hers, spreading out the sauce, but in slow motion, like she’s painting a picture with the ladle.
“So anyway, I’m just wandering around aimlessly and I find myself standing in front of this huge painting. It’s what they call surreal. Everything is painted realistically in detail, but the stuff doesn’t make any sense. Like a dream. There’s this giant plaza-like area in the foreground, kind of like a chessboard, and these ugly decomposing animal-like creatures are standing around, like chess pieces, I guess. But one side of the plaza is eroded away, like the way the coastline is after a big storm, when chunks fall into the ocean…”
She glances over to see if I’m following her and I look up and nod. She’s got a strange, intense look on her face and I just want to stare at her, but I start on the green peppers instead.
“Anyway, your eyes follow the lines of this plaza and there, on the edge, there’s a young girl, painted perfectly, like a photograph. And she’s hanging onto the edge of the plaza and dangling there by her hands, naked above this bottomless canyon. And there’s no one there to help her, just these creatures who look like wax statutes of weird mythical creatures who have been half melted. And I just stared at that painting for like an hour and it seemed to me that it was speaking right to me, that I was that girl, or that I was supposed to save that girl. I’m not sure…”
She seems lost in that thought and I finish my pizza, slide it down the line and take over on hers, rearranging
