Parakeet Princess



  Parakeet Princess

  By Jandy Branch

  Copyright © 2012 Jandy Branch

  All rights reserved. No part of this electronic book may be reproduced for any reason or by any means without permission in writing from the author.

  Cover Design: Stephanie Van Orman

  Cover Image: Dreamstime.com

  Branch, Jandy 1973-

  Parakeet Princess

  Parakeet Princess Series: Volume 1

  Issued also in print

  Canada

  2012

  ISBN-13: 978-1479338146

  For Stephanie

  ***

  "Here there be dragons.”

  It’s a phrase I’ve seen printed along the edges of antique maps in history books – maps made when the earth was still flat and full of scaly monsters. Back then, map-makers would draw all the bends and turns of the world they knew and then leave the rest to the dragons.

  Warnings on crusty, yellowed maps used to seem quaint to me – kind of funny. But that was before I fell over edge of the flat earth I’d known for the first sixteen years of my life. I know. It’s not like I actually got onto a wooden ship and sailed out into the ocean or anything. Still, that didn’t make the year my family and I moved house and headed out into the unknown any less scary.

  The first dragon I found out in the new, uncharted world was a full-fledged fire-breathing one. Actually, she wasn’t so much a reptile as she was a middle-aged lady sitting behind a desk that stood crammed between stacks of Styrofoam take-out boxes and a greasy, gray filing cabinet. I tried not to wince as she flicked her lighter and set fire to the cigarette pinched between her lips. She sucked in slowly before she clamped her mouth shut and blew white smoke out both her nostrils at once. I could almost see the nicotine flooding into her bloodstream as she lowered her eyelids and leaned into her chair. Only then could she look down at my application for a job as part of her staff at a shabby little restaurant called TacoTown.

  “So you’ve got some work experience serving food at Sub-a-rama,” she read aloud, as if it was a question.

  “Yeah, it’s a sandwich restaurant chain on the east coast,” I explained through my stiffest, most painful, job interview smile.

  The lady vented the next jet of white smoke out of just one corner of her mouth, aiming it at the ceiling, away from my perfect, pink lungs. “That’s a bit too far away to phone for a reference check,” she mused aloud.

  Do not panic, I told myself. Hold up the corners of your mouth – higher, brighter – hold them up just a little bit longer. No matter what kinds of dragons I found here, I really needed this job. It wasn’t just for me. It was for my whole family.

  “I can’t believe the stack of applications we got since we put the ‘Help Wanted’ sign in the window this time,” the smoking lady said. She fanned the corners of a mucky pile of papers with her thumb. “Things must be getting pretty bad out there.”

  Was this talk about all the other applicants her way of letting me down easily – already? Or was this comment on the nastiness of the economy at the tail end of the 1980s just meant to drag out the length of my job interview to the length of time it would take her to finish her cigarette? I didn’t know anything about smoking so I couldn’t tell how much more time I might have left to convince the TacoTown manager to hire me. Even though she was clearly not a wealthy woman, I wondered if she really understood how hard the latest financial downturn was on families like mine.

  With nothing but the threat of bankruptcy left for my parents in our home thousands of miles away on the east coast, we’d sold our house, our business, and almost everything we owned and moved away. Finally, we’d landed in my grandparents' house, here on the prairies just east of the Rocky Mountains and just north of the American border. My grandparents were on a humanitarian service mission in Chile so we were going to be able to borrow their house while they were gone. It was one of those coincidences we recognized as a blessing.

  Now, at age forty, my dad was starting his career all over again. We had avoided bankruptcy but things were still extremely lean in our family finances. If we were going to be able to sustain ourselves until Dad got back on his feet again, both my older brother and I needed to find jobs. There was no way our parents could support all seven of their children without someone’s help. It made sense to my brother and me that the best people to act as helpers were the both of us.

  The TacoTown manager balanced her smouldering cigarette on the edge of a black, plastic ashtray. “So you’re not actually living in the city,” she said. “You’re living out in Upton?”

  I laughed – a little embarrassed – and nervously fingered the big, silver locket I wore around my neck. There were only about four thousand people living in the town of Upton even when all the farmers and ranchers in the “half-town” were counted. It was like nowhere I’d ever lived before.

  “Yeah, I’m living in Upton,” I admitted. “But it’s just a sixteen minute drive from here to there, really. There are places here in the city that you can’t drive to TacoTown from in just sixteen minutes – I guess.

  “Upton,” she repeated from inside a cloud of smoke. “Isn’t that a – a Mormon town?”

  I was not embarrassed any more. “Yes, I suppose you could say that.”

  “But you yourself aren’t...”

  “A Mormon?” I finished. “Yes, I am. That’s not a problem, is it?”

  “Oh, no, no,” the lady said quickly, a little defensively as if she was trying to prove she wasn’t prejudiced. “We’ve just never had a Mormon working here before. I don’t know why. I was starting to wonder if maybe Mormon kids weren’t allowed to have jobs, or something.”

  “Well, no,” I said, finding my plastic smile again. “And some of us actually really need to work.”

  “Sure, of course,” she muttered, looking down to read my application again. With her eyes averted, I risked looking closely at her TacoTown uniform. Thanks to the horrendous uniforms, this restaurant had been the last place I had submitted a job application. The eighties were just ending: the decade when no one wore brown at all let alone three shades of it at once. And then there were the uniform’s flare cut pants and the floppy knit shirts trimmed with all that dark brown piping. Under normal circumstances, it would have been a wardrobe nightmare. But I was no longer proud and I had never been very vain. I was, however, desperate.

  “Look,” I began. “We both know by now that I’m terrible at job interviews. But I’m great at jobs. And even more than that, I’m willing to work three shifts for you for free if you’ll just give me a chance to prove myself. If you don’t like my work by the end of the free trial, then I promise I’ll go away and I won’t bother you anymore.”

  She drew in a huge breath through her lit cigarette. “You’d do that?” she asked. “You’d give us a free trial – what’s your name – Heather?”

  “I totally would,” I assured her. “This job isn’t for my own pocket change. It’s for groceries for my little sisters. My dad’s between jobs right now and –”

  She laughed out a plume of smoke. “Enough already, Heather-the-Mormon. You’re breaking my heart,” she cackled. Then she waved her cigarette at a shelf behind me. “See if you can find a uniform that fits you somewhere back there. And come in on Tuesday at 4:45.”

  I bounced to my feet. “Seriously? Thanks!”

  “I’m Sandy,” she finally introduced herself. “And you can forget about the free trial. Just consider yourself probationary staff with full starting wages.”

  I choked out a happy little cheer. “Thank you so much!”

  She motioned to the shelf of uniforms again and I turned to dig thro
ugh the pile. I folded a dark brown pant-leg over, deciding how I’d stitch it so the cut of the pants would look more like 1989 and less like 1976. With a little work, it wouldn’t be so bad. I bundled the heavy, brown fabrics in my arms.

  Government health department regulations said Sandy wasn’t allowed to bring a lit cigarette through the food preparation area so I walked out of her office and into the unfamiliar kitchen alone. I couldn’t quite remember the way out to the front of the restaurant so I wandered around, almost on tiptoe, wary of more dragons and sea monsters, looking for an exit.

  The place was already vibrating with the beginnings of the suppertime rush. All the evening shift workers – my new coworkers – were standing at their stations with their heads down, their eyes fixed on their work. They looked young, as if none of them was old enough to be out of high school yet. I didn’t want to disturb any of them. Frankly, they were a little scary to me, like anything unknown.

  Instead of bothering them, I decided to quietly slip out a backdoor. From there, I’d walk around the outside of the building to the parking lot where I’d find my brother, Jeff, waiting for me in our family’s only car. It was the same car we’d used to drive for five days across the country, sleeping squashed against each other, constantly watching the little kids for early signs of carsickness.

  Still inside the taco restaurant, I pushed against a large steel door on the back wall of the kitchen. It didn’t budge but the handle clanged like a car crash as I heaved against it with all my weight, once and then again.

  “Who’s trying to get out the backdoor?”

  It was another dragon, one in the form of a boy about my age. His voice was calling through the window over the deep fryer, looking into the back kitchen from the front counter area of the restaurant. I turned away from the locked door and saw his face, along with another boy’s, gaping at me through the indoor window. One of the boys was tall and pale and the other one – the noisy one – was shorter and dark.

  The tall one said something to the shorter one. I couldn’t hear him from where I stood but when the shorter one answered I distinctly heard every word. Everyone in the whole restaurant heard him.

  “How should I know?” he questioned the tall boy in return. “It looks like she’s got a uniform in her arms so she must be a new hire.” He rolled his eyes and shook his head even though he knew I was looking right at him. “Nice one, Sandy,” he apostrophized.

  The tall boy spoke again, just as indistinctly as before.

  “Go then,” the shorter one replied, sounding like smoke was about to start fuming out of his face even though he wasn’t anywhere near a cigarette. “Go let her out. But hurry up. We don’t have time for this right now.”

  The tall boy’s face disappeared from the window and an instant later he was clipping toward where I stood feeling foolish at the back door. He was dressed in a TacoTown uniform instead of clothes he chose himself. That made it hard for me to use any of my usual teenager cues to form a proper first impression of him. All I could tell was that he was taller than most grown men and had one of those pointy Adam’s apples sticking out of his throat in a way that always made me want to reach up and cover my own neck.

  “Sorry to bug you,” I said, unconsciously rubbing my throat as he approached.

  “We always keep this door locked so no one sneaks in from the alley,” he said, reaching high over my head to throw back the heavy, aluminum dead-bolt mounted at the top of the door, near the ceiling.

  “Sorry,” I said again. “I don’t know anything. I’m new.”

  “And I’m Darren.”

  The shorter boy was calling through the window again. “Darren, get her out of here.”

  Darren was pushing the newly unlocked door open for me. “So we’ll see you later then?”

  “Yeah, thanks,” I answered, stepping out onto the gravel in the alley behind the restaurant. I stood and blinked for a moment in the bright September light as the door banged to a close behind me. The sun was so fierce here on the plains, as if we were living on the roof of the world with nothing at all between us and the sky. I wondered if I’d ever get used to it.

  My feet crunched their way around the building to the parking lot. There was Jeff, reading a newspaper, listening to music on his headphones, waiting for me in the big, green station wagon.

  I opened the fake-wood panelled door and fell onto the passenger seat, clasping the brown bundle of clothing.

  Jeff plucked his headphones out of his ears. “You got the job.”

  “Yay,” I cheered in return.

  Jeff wasn’t my twin brother but we weren’t even a full year apart in age. Tomorrow morning, he would start his last year in high school while I would begin the eleventh grade. We’d been spending a lot of time together since the move – trapped in the car for days and days, torn away from our old friends outside the family, and left to rely on each other for companionship and comfort. It’s a good thing we were already friends before our social lives were completely obliterated.

  “So did you use my ‘free trial’ strategy?” he asked.

  “I sure did,” I said, twisting into my seat belt. “It’s genius. You’re the best.”

  Jeff grunted back at me in a way that I understood to be somehow gracious. “You smell like French fries already,” he told me. “And – tobacco smoke.”

  I sniffed hard, pulling a handful of my thick, blonde hair toward my nose. He was right. It reeked of the dragon lady.

  “And you smell like pepperoni,” I countered. His new visor from Pizza Paradise sat on the seat between us and I tossed it at him.

  He got his hand up in time to deflect it and it fell onto the seat. “That’s what I smell like, all right,” Jeff crowed, throwing his arm along the back of the seat as he reversed into the driving lane. “It’s the smell of money.”