The Beginning of the End: Chapter 2

Chapter 2: “Just Dancing”
All high school girls need cash, if mommy and daddy don’t pay for everything, then you are most likely working and going to school. In my case, I had a truck payment, insurance, and gas to buy. Welcome to real fucking life. I started working the graveyard shift as a waitress at a truck stop in my town, just the usual tired trucker, beat cop, or lot lizard. No serious business. So, like a good student I worked on my homework. Calculus spread across the formica table top, legs crossed under the table with a coke in my hand. I spent many a night doing just that. It was after a couple of weeks, that we developed a regular. Levi owned a tiny establishment way out of town and almost habitually stopped in around 11:30 pm for coffee and apple pie; nothing more American, so cliché. I hated him from the first moment I took his order. Long and thin, he was balding and crude. He was shameless around the girls, and it only took one bitchy comeback from me to shut him down. One night, hip deep in dirty dishwater with chemical equations bouncing through my head, I turned on the radio. I’m well-known for my obsession with country music, so of course I had the tunes blasted. I never cared much for others opinion of me, and without a single thought to the trouble I might cause, I began to dance. Giggling and swaying my hips back and forth, I scrubbed to a rhythm; my hips bumping the sink and my feet sliding back and forth across the broken tiles in the kitchen. Spinning quickly so as not to lose pace, I dropped a steam table tray into the water and it soaked me from collar bone to bellybutton. Cursing loudly, I strutted towards the front, hell-bent on the dry towel I knew was underneath the register.