Finding Shiloh: a novel

Chasing Shiloh: Part One

Thursday morning feels like every other day of my life. I wake up, throw my hair into a side ponytail, swipe on some mascara, and head off to work.

I've had exactly two jobs in my lifetime. The first one was working part-time at a local church as an office assistant one summer when I was about 16. I filed papers occasionally and mostly just sat there and entertained the elderly secretary, Delores. When Delores retired at the end of the summer, they hired a new secretary who used her kids as free help, so I was out of a job. I applied at every retail and food place around, and I finally got hired at Sam's Subs.

Sam's Subs is located in a particularly busy strip mall near the more populated part of town. It's right in between a 24-hour pizza place and some old liquor store, so it gets a lot of action on weekends and Friday nights, and basically any time the pizza place is too crowded. But on that Thursday, we have one hell of a lunch rush. Some soccer team on their way to a tournament has stopped in, along with what seems like half the elementary school faculty.

Sam's Subs has about twelve employees total, but only five of us are working today. The owner, Sam, his sixteen-year old son Jeffrey, some annoying girl named Kimberly who goes to the local community college, Wendy, who is around forty-five and basically functions as everyone's mom, and Claire, a really quiet girl who goes to school with me, but she's a year younger.

I'm on the assembly line with Claire and Jeffrey, making sandwiches for customers. Kimberly is on the register trying to flirt with married men, and Wendy and Sam are in the back room cutting up more tomatoes. Tomatoes are wildly popular today, for whatever reason.

"I'll have some lettuce, too," says the chubby soccer mom on the other side of the condiment window. "And, hmmm....is that American cheese or Cheddar?"

"Cheddar," I reply in my perky customer voice.

"Yeah, I'll have some of that."

I nod and artfully placed a few slices on her sandwich, which is already piled high with ham, sliced onions and a few handfuls of lettuce. "Anything else, ma'am?"

"Just some pickles and I'll be all set."

"Do you want this toasted?"

"That would be great. Connor, you need to hurry up. There are other people behind you." She turns to address her son, who looks to be about eight and is too busy picking his nose to listen to his mom. Claire is hovering patiently near the lettuce, waiting for him to make up his mind.

I head over to the toaster and slide the sandwich inside. Wendy comes out of the back room just then, balancing a tray of freshly cut tomatoes. Sam only lets me and Wendy do any sort of extensive cutting, because Claire and Jeffrey are only sixteen and Kimberly has proven several times that she can't be trusted to handle knives safely.

We slowly get through the lunch rush, even though we run out of tomatoes again, the toaster burns three sandwiches, and Kimberly drops an entire jar of pickles on the ground and gets glass everywhere. Once all the sandwiches have been successfully distributed, Sam sends Kimberly and me into back to re-stock the condiments.

"Grab more lettuce and re-fill the mustard. And get more clean tongs," he calls as we head to the back fridges. Sam looks and sounds like a mix of Jim Carrey and Steve Martin, so sometimes it's hard to take him seriously. Nevertheless, he's a good guy who doesn't discriminate against hiring inexperienced teenagers to staff his restaurant.

We get to work re-filling containers. Kimberly starts talking about something dumb she and her drunk friends had done the night before, and I'm only half listening. My mind has wandered to Shiloh. I haven't heard from her since she left my house the previous night to go to Blackout Wednesday. That isn't unusual. Shiloh was one to pull an all-nighter for no reason and then sleep for the next day and a half. I make a mental note to call her after my shift and ask her about Colton, and if he'd been as amazing as Shiloh had made him out to be.