Cornflake Girl
The most incredible things happen on Tuesdays.
I’m not sure, but I kinda feel like they used to release new albums exclusively on Tuesdays. Then some record exec decided that they could release albums early, and we would see new music on a Friday instead. I’m not sure when it stopped. I kinda think it was after September 11th. Like it felt disrespectful to those poor souls in the planes and towers to continue to let Tuesdays matter. Then digital music became a thing and no one gave a shit what day it came out.
I was working at Linens -N- Things when the world changed. I was on the phone with someone at the corporate office in Paramus, NJ. She was the first one to tell me a plane had hit the world trade center. I assumed she meant a Cessna or one of those little commuter planes that gave tours and let you flash bad pictures out the window while you flew over Central Park. She never got a chance to tell me it wasn’t that. All she said was “Oh my God, there’s another one.”
Then the phone went dead.
News reports started trickling in. The store manager, Scott, was an absolute worst kind of ass-hole. Everyone wanted to go watch the news, to find out what the fuck was going on. But Scott was too worried about earning payroll to pay for the team he had brought in to get ready for inventory to send anyone home. There weren’t many customers that day. Scott was a fucking idiot. You can tell him I said so.
I was cleaning the pillow bins when a woman approached me. Linens -N- Things customers consisted of two groups. People who wanted to shop there because they were bougie, and men who didn’t want anything to do with the place because it was where their wives shopped.
She was shorter than me. Brown hair. Green eyes. Pretty in a way that she probably didn’t think was pretty at all. She wore a t-shirt that just said Cornflake in large, slanted block letters. Her jeans were probably worth more than a week’s pay for me. She wore no shoes.
“Help you find anything today?” It was my go-to line. It felt more natural than asking if I could answer any questions. I probably could, but didn’t want to. It was way easier if they told me what they were looking for and I could point them in the right direction.
