[REG] Working For The Man [Charlie, Miriam] [FIN]

[codalion]

Five hours into Charlie's new job at Things Recollected and his only coworker, to date, had not said a single word.

Less than five hours and it might not have been remarkable. One hour and Charlie might not have really noticed at all. At 12:00 noon, the beginning of their first shift together, their manager Linda introduced them with a pat on both of their polo-shirted backs. "This is Charlie Boyle, he goes to Meadowview," she'd said brightly, giving his shoulder a companionable shake, "and Charlie," Linda moved to do the same to the girl but apparently thought better of it, "this is Miriam Jacobs. She'll be working the engraver and the stockroom."

The dark-haired girl, dressed in the same embarrassing Things Recollected uniform as him, had given him a nod and looked away. Shy, Charlie decided. There are worse things to be. She'd stared at Linda while Linda enumerated their duties in the store once again, in case either of them had forgotten (they both shook their heads when asked if they had any questions), and still not said a word when the manager took her cheery middle-aged leave, nor when she and Charlie set about their assigned duties for the day.

Nor when Charlie, tiring of the silence, tried to make small talk -- or comments about the weather -- or anything -- nor when he went to check on her, hunched over the engraving machine and fiddling with something that appeared to take a great number of minute calibrations. In fact, after two hours, he was beginning to wonder if she was not only shy, but desperately afraid of other people.

Hours of work passed. Manning the front counter at Things Recollected was only somewhat humiliating. It was no senshi skirt, to be sure. His coworker was mostly invisible in the stockroom; occasionally she'd come out to the main store to get something or replace something, but she'd do so with lightning speed, no eye contact and absolutely no chance for either Charlie or any customers to engage her in conversation. Judging by her behavior so far, he was beginning to suspect that the latter, at least, was probably a good thing.

After three hours he was starting to wonder if she spoke English. After four he was starting to wonder if she possessed a larynx.

He locked and pulled the bars over the shop's front without a hitch. Then he breathed a sigh of relief that his first day at work had gone so uneventfully (probably not as great for TR's corporate headquarters, he reflected) and turned his attention again to his coworker.

Miriam Jacobs was not hunched over the engraving machine when he opened the door to the backroom. She was fetching something from a very high shelf -- so when he ventured, "Miriam?" he supposed she had an excuse for how excruciatingly long it took her to acknowledge his presence. Maybe. It did take her a very long time; she didn't so much as flinch or nod at being addressed, just finished getting what she needed, stacked it in her arms, stepped neatly off the stepladder and turned to look at him.

She did have a larynx. "You didn't make any sales today," she said, staring at him over the boxes in her arms. "You're not very enthusiastic."  

[Shazari]

Well, that was rather a fine how-do-you-do from someone who, he suspected, couldn't sell water to a man in the desert.

On the one hand, it was perhaps true: he hadn't made any sales today. And Charlie could admit that he really didn't feel any passion budding within his heart for the art of selling things you could engrave things on. A billfold was just a billfold, and, in the end, a pen was something you were going to pick up when you needed to write something and put back down when you didn't. 'Merry Christmas Old Chum - Love, Oliver' was not going to fundamentally alter their functions in any way.

On the other hand, it seemed like an utterly spiteful thing to say to someone. Had he died and elevated her, via longevity with the company, to a position of seniority over him? He didn't remember having died. So far as he knew, they had both being working at Things Recollected for about five hours, and although in that time she'd been utterly disinterested in interacting with her coworker, apparently the mere idea of occupying the same thirty square feet of space as someone who was unenthusiastic about cufflinks with people's initials on them was so abhorrent that she just couldn't keep silent on the matter.

Why she had chosen this remark to break her silence with was a mystery. Shy didn't seem remotely to account for it. Maybe if she'd had an incredibly bad day and was in a foul temper, certainly -- but she'd spent the last five hours moving things and fiddling with the engraving machine. How bad could that have possibly been? Had the engraving machine engraved an insult about her mother onto a glass beer stein?

"Maybe I should be chipper like you," he answered her challenge. "I'm not sure how much enthusiasm I'm supposed to muster over fashion accessory dog tags."  

[codalion]

There were three boxes in Miriam's arms. The largest one was labeled 'Mugs,' and presumably contained mugs; the next largest, 'Blotters,' with the same presumption; and the last, 'QCQ,' a total mystery. She took her time placing QCQ on a shelf before she answered him, setting the entire pile down so she could do so: and then, bizarrely, adjusting the box so the corners lined up with the box below it just so. "I'm not a salesperson," she said without looking at him. She peered at the alignment of the boxes, frowned, and slid one corner in just a tad. "Only a fool would hire me to do sales. They hired you to do sales, Charlie."

Charlie. For all her entirely antisocial tendencies, she did feel quite entitled to call him by his name. In fact, it didn't seem to bother her at all to do so, or that he'd used hers. Not much did, apart from mis-aligned boxes and unenthusiastic salespeople, apparently. Well, it wasn't 'Charboyle,' that was something.

Miriam re-adjusted QCQ again, then set about doing the same with Blotters. "They hired me to engrave thirty-five personal accoutrements and to replenish and re-organize the shelves when necessary. Why don't you indulge me? Look over there. In the box by the engraver. What do you see?"

Charlie didn't indulge her. Miriam couldn't have expected him to, as she went on, "Thirty-five engraved personal accoutrements, and if you'll look around you I'm sure you've noticed the shelves replenished and, in a moment, re-organized." This was true. Actually, the storeroom looked absolutely nothing like what it had looked like when Linda had shown them in in the first place. Good God.

"So, tell me," she went on, aligning Mugs with Blotters as if the failure to do so would fail to defuse a bomb, "what have you done for Things Recollected today?"  

[Shazari]

"Presumably my job," he snapped back, folding his arms over his chest. "Let me explain. You see, it takes two people to run this store. One to man the register, and one to do the engraving." It seemed to Charlie that his life was fated to contain an overly high percentage of people who were just this side of sane. Miriam was perhaps one, or else some kind of secret agent of TR sent to weed out unmotivated salesmen. "And as we were the only two people who applied to work at this store whatsoever, that means we each got one of these jobs."

They had, in fact, been the only two people to submit applications the entire week, apparently, and it was obvious why. A new store with a villa-style awning and palm fronds bursting out everywhere had opened directly next to them, something called Hollystar where they wore beach shorts and flip-flops and blasted the heat all year long. Apparently every student within fifty miles who was looking for a seasonal after-school job, with the exceptions of Charlemagne Boyle and Miriam Jacobs, had applied at Hollystar for the chance to wear daisy-dukes in December. Charlie would have rather sawed off his own toes and eaten them, he thought.

Now, experiencing Miriam Jacobs, he was reconsidering. After all, he was a track runner, he was fairly certain he didn't look half-bad in shorts. This was an idle fantasy, he knew: in reality having to sell clothing to spoiled, demanding teenaged fashion plates would have had him perilously close to suicide and very quickly.

"For five hours I stood by the register, in the unlikely event of customers intending to actually purchase anything. And I smiled. And said, 'Welcome to Things Recollected. Let me know if I can help you find anything.' And was suitably friendly. And since I'm not paid on commission, that was my job." He demonstrated his friendly employee face.  

[codalion]

Miriam straightened up and blinked at him. She was an unquestionably tall girl, an inch or so shorter than him -- about his age, somewhere around there. He wondered where she went to school: he'd never seen her around Meadowview, and Crystal girls didn't waste their time engraving claddagh rings for Things Recollected. She was Jewish, probably, though she had very pale eyes that gave the impression that she was staring all the time. Maybe not an inaccurate impression. Well, he didn't know everyone at Meadowview, and if Miriam Jacobs was this charming all the time it wasn't hard to imagine why he hadn't heard of her.

She drew herself up a little further, haughtily, and narrowed her eyes. "I don't see the need to be so defensive," she said (I don't see the need to be so defensive?!) with a toss of her hair, which was currently pinned primly back with a white Alice band. "I wasn't attacking you. You aren't a failure at your job, you just aren't very good at it."

Miriam gave him a look of assessment, and then went on, picking at her words like brussels sprouts at the edge of her plate. "You've got a lukewarm smile. You look insufferably bored. You look, for all the world, like an insufferably bored high school student doing an insufferably boring job. Which you are, but it won't convince anyone to have their things recollected. It's not my problem," she said, concluding what had to be about a hundred times as many words as Charlie had to this point heard her say, "if you can't handle the truth."  

[Shazari]

Charlie was now pretty sure he didn't like Miriam Jacobs. Whoever had pissed in her cornflakes this morning, it hadn't been him -- so whatever reason she had for unleashing her condescension on him, he didn't deserve it. "So I take it you're not interested in a second date," he said, glib.

He had out the long row of wedding and engagement rings which stayed in a locked glass case out front during store hours. The key to the heavy safe in the back was long, with tiny tiny teeth just at the very very end of it, so that it looked like an old crocodile which had practiced very poor dental hygiene. The tumblers all rolled into their places, and he pulled the heavy leaden door open to stow the overpriced diamond rings safely inside.

"Customers will have to get used to my insufferably bored smile," he decided, irritated with her pickiness about how he did his job. How was it any of her business? "They're not buying me, they're buying chintz. Ridiculous chintz with their name scrawled all over it." He moved some of the boxes of spare rings over to one side, to better make room for the cash drawer. Apparently Miriam's majestic and saintly Reorganizing of the Stockroom hadn't included the inside of the safe. So much for her.  

[codalion]

Miriam furrowed her brow and wrinkled her nose slightly, as if there were some kind of problem she was utterly stumped by. What was there to be stumped about? She had absurdly high standards for a part-time after-school job. He didn't. He was pretty sure they'd made these respective things abundantly clear. In addition, she had made it clear that nothing on this green earth could compel her to be civil to him. That was just fine, he thought irritably. Civil didn't matter. He could deal with uncivil. See if he couldn't.

She shook her head. "It's up to you," she said finally, "but you're not very good at your job. You're better at it than you are at taking criticism," she shot back, crossing to the machine to power it down, "but that's not very hard, is it." Then she added, "We're not dating," as if this needed clarification.

As far as she was concerned, the matter must have been settled, because she glanced at him and at the safe and at the register. "If your pride's still wounded I recommend you kiss it better. Otherwise, I need you out of the stockroom once you finish with the safe."  

[Shazari]

Where did she get this ridiculous sense of entitlement to order him about like she was God's gift to stockrooms? Charlie was not liking Miriam Jacobs. He was really. Not. Liking. Miriam Jacobs. He could now safely say that the previous five hours, the ones in which she hadn't spoken to him, had been the good ones: this one, the clean-up hour, not so much. He felt like he was in the Charlie Brown cartoon where Lucy grabbed the football every time he was about to kick it, sending him flying through the air and then crashing, sprawled out, on his back. They could call it You're A Good Man, Charlie Boyle.

Well, they'd finish out the night in silence, then. He could do silence, considering the alternative was Miriam.

Earlier in the day, Linda had explained the coin-counting machine in the back, and how to weigh each tray to see how much money was in the register when he went to reconcile it for the night. It was, he had to admit, a fairly neat little tool -- something someone had invented twenty or thirty years before, back when technology was meant to be useful rather than distracting. Charlie would rec his drawer, which should be easy since he hadn't made any sales, and then lock it up in the safe, then sweep the front of the store, and he'd be done for the night. None of this required talking to Miriam Jacobs any further.

He found the key that worked the register, and spun it in the lock -- the drawer sprung open cheerfully, as though in hope that now -- finally, now! -- it would be making a sale. It would be disappointed.

Charlie was -- also disappointed. To say the least.

"Oh my God," he said, not really to Miriam, but also not not to Miriam. "The money's gone."

The money was, in fact, gone. The cash drawer, Linda had explained, normally started every day with a steady assortment of seventy-five dollars broken down into different bills and coins. However, there was definitely not seventy-five dollars worth of bills and coins in the register. If Charlie had to judge, just eyeing up quickly what was in the register, he'd estimate about thirty-four cents: three dimes and some pennies. It was hard to tell at a glance -- sometimes pennies could hide under other pennies.

Thirty-four cents.  

[codalion]

One moment Miriam was in the stockroom; the next, she was next to him at the cash register, having virtually lunged for it the moment the words the money's gone had left his lips. "Give me that," she snapped, shoulder-checking him out of the way to grab the register with both hands and search it before he knew what was going on. She stared at the cash register like it was the vivisected insides of an alien. It occurred to him, vaguely, that she'd never operated one before. But then she scooped up the thirty-four cents, counted them out in her hand at breakneck speed, re-counted them, counted them backwards, and then nearly threw them down in the register with agitation. She glared at the register and he expected her to curse, or berate him, or one of these things, but she said nothing. A moment later she seemed to have reined herself in, and she was back to the same non-expression she always had.

She searched the cash drawer again, tried briefly to pry the plastic tray out of the drawer ("hey," said Charlie in alarm, but when he tried to intervene she smacked his hand unceremoniously out of the way), dropped to her knees to look on the floor, and then shut the drawer again and leaned on the counter with her elbow. Her forehead was in her hand.

For a while it seemed like she'd renewed her vow of silence, but as he was considering what to say she spoke up again, levelly. "I'm going to check in the safe," she said. "While I'm doing that, turn out your pockets and your wallet. I'll do the same when I get back."  

[Shazari]

She took him for some kind of idiot. He definitely wasn't in the mood for her sucked-lemon attitude now that they had a real problem on their hands -- did Miriam actually have no off switch whatsoever? "Fine," he snapped back just to be rid of her. He was already inverting his pockets on the sides, reaching in his back pocket to fetch out his wallet.

It was ridiculous; only some kind of idiot would steal from the register on his first day and for seventy-five dollars. That was only two days' wages. He didn't quite take Miriam for that kind of idiot either, though he really, really wished he could. But the money was gone somewhere, all the same, and most likely his job with it.

Charlie followed his coworker back to the stockroom, hovering over her even though she'd clearly expected otherwise. Well, too bad for Miriam. "You're wasting your time suspecting me," he said to her back. "Those wedding bands are worth way more than seventy-five dollars, if I was planning on stealing something."  

[codalion]

"I'm not suspecting you," she said simply, holding the safe open as she made a quick search of its insides. No luck. She didn't look like she'd been expecting any, but her eyes narrowed just a jot. "I want to be able to say in good faith that I searched you and you searched me and neither of us had seventy-five dollars anywhere on their person."

As if to prove it, she got down on one knee and rummaged through the black school bag she'd stored in one corner of the storeroom. She produced a plain brown leather wallet, one that might belong to a middle-aged Japanese businessman. Definitely not a schoolgirl wallet. It didn't appear to have any cash in it, though, just a driver's license, an ATM cards, a couple membership cards Charlie didn't recognize.

Miriam opened it all the way to demonstrate, then put it down on the ground and unzipped the bag, which she then upended. After a moment's afterthought she turned out her pockets. When it came to "good faith" she really wasn't fooling around. Two textbooks came tumbling out -- Basics of Trigonometry, and European Civilization From 1500 To The Present -- and along with them, a blue-and-white folded set of clothes. She was a Crystal girl? A girl from Crystal was working the engraving machine at Things Recollected? What in the world for? She didn't seem likely to answer this question, though; when she deemed him satisfied by her good faith, she set about repacking her backpack. The clothes were tidied and folded into a rectangle; the books came after them, the larger one before the smaller one.

"I think that's all," she said with a studious look at her belongings. "If you're so insulted by the prospect of having to turn out your things, you can wait until we've exhausted our other options." She fixed him with a look of intense scrutiny. She seemed well-disposed to those. "How strong is the lock on the register?"  

[Shazari]

His pockets were already sticking out at the sides, so he flapped open his wallet for her like a sockpuppet's mouth. It had five dollars, his license, his YMCA membership card, and several grocery store coupons. It didn't have any stolen money in it, and as she'd seen earlier, he'd packed a sandwich for dinner in a brown paper sack. It had found its way into the trash when he'd finished. "Vindicated?" he asked.

He looked backwards at the door, as though he could see through it with X-ray vision to the register beyond. "I'm pretty sure register drawers are meant to be secure, but I can go mess with it?"  

[codalion]

"Go on," said Miriam with a brisk wave of her hand. "You aren't stupid, you're not going to break it." While Charlie fumbled with the stockroom door she knelt down by the safe again, apparently not content with the number of times they'd looked in it already. Charlie didn't see why. If some unknown thief had raided their register, it didn't seem likely they'd have been so kind as to stash the money in the safe. If Charlie had somehow taken the money out earlier by accident, it seemed very unlikely that he would have somehow opened the safe and then entirely forgotten about it. Either way it seemed like she wasn't trusting his intelligence somehow. After all, it didn't seem likely she wasn't trusting her own.

She was soon after him, though, and as he fiddled with the register she took a quick walk around the store, presumably to see if anything else had been taken. After a moment she shook her head in frustration to herself and turned her back to Charlie. (What, would she prefer they'd been robbed?)

"Seventy dollars?" she said to him with her back still turned. "In what denominations of bills?"  

[Shazari]

Charlie wiggled the register drawer. He shook it vigorously. He hip-checked it like he might a snack machine with a bag of chips that had gotten stuck. He tried prying it open with his fingers and with a pen. None of this had any effect on it -- it stayed locked and in place just as it was.

He scanned a product, typed some numbers into the register, and pushed enter -- and then the drawer popped open. But only with a satisfyingly loud noise, an old-fashioned cha-ching! Charlie didn't think there was any way for him not to have heard that from wherever he was standing in the store.

"A ten, three fives, and thirteen ones," he finally gave up. "All the rest in rolls of coins." It was two rolls each of quarters, dimes, and nickels, and six rolls of pennies, but he didn't think Miriam really cared about that information.

Charlie guessed the missing money would come out of his paycheck, then wondered again if he'd still have a paycheck. He'd needed this job. Not really for the money, though he didn't have much of that, but for the cover it provided. If he was working an after-school job, his parents weren't questioning where he went at night. They just assumed he worked more nights, and longer hours, than he actually did. It was a good way to cover up for senshi patrols -- or that had been the plan, anyway. Now he probably needed a new plan.  

[codalion]

"All right," said Miriam, having silently counted what Charlie enumerated in bills on her fingers. She set her mouth into a very firm line and looked quite annoyed. It still came as a surprise to Charlie that a Crystal girl was working at Things Recollected. Maybe she was a scholarship student. Or maybe she had some -- snobby extra credit project that required her to interact among the peons for however much time. Based on Miriam's behavior, Charlie wouldn't have found that particularly implausible. She certainly wasn't acting like a normal person holding down a normal job. Whatever her deal was, she probably wasn't going to tell him about it anyway -- and who cared?! The money was missing from the register. Both of them were about to get fired, if they were unlucky. No. Probably Charlie. Miriam, in all the fundamental injustice of the universe, had not been in charge of the register, and might get off scot free.

"Wait here," Miriam declared inexplicably, holding up a hand in the universal signal for I'm here to save the day. For some reason. "I'm going to go to an ATM, and then I'm going to go to the bank. You want to go with me, or does the fort need holding down?"