Kickflip | bxb

three: the job

Quinn stood in front of the narrow almost-full-length mirror and studied himself carefully. Straight, pale blond hair hung asymmetrical across his face and was spiked expertly in the back; makeup was perfectly applied; jeans were unripped and t-shirt had no offensive words on it. He had opted to wear only one belt and no bracelets and had clipped his wallet chain to the front left belt loop so that it glittered silver against his hip when he moved.

"Are you really going to work dressed like that?" his sister Jessica asked skeptically from her bed.

Quinn smirked at her. "Is there something wrong with what I'm wearing?"

Jessica wrinkled her nose at him. She was stretched out on her stomach on her twin bed, a Seventeen magazine open in front of her to a page with the eager headline Star style for less! On her half of the room, pink and ruffly was mixed in with rhinestone-glitter skulls, shimmery black nail polish on the dresser and a pair of powder blue Happy Bunny arm warmers dangling precariously from the corner.

A line of masking tape down the middle of the worn carpet separated the room into halves. On his side, Quinn had decorated with moody band posters and an assortment of his own art. Mix CD's he had burned himself were piled up on his bedside table and dresser, their paper covers decorated with his drawings in ink and marker, tracks and artists listed in precise cursive.

The mirror Quinn stood at now was hung precisely in the middle, above the Berlin Wall of tape; the demilitarized zone of their shared bedroom.

"You just don't look very professional," Jessica pointed out, studying Quinn's t-shirt.

"Jess," Quinn said patiently, reaching up to ruffle the spiked back of his hair a little bit, wax sticky on his fingers. "It's a skateboard shop. It's not exactly a professional setting. What do you know about it, anyways? You're thirteen."

Jessica rolled over onto her back, her grey Paul Frank t-shirt wrinkling around her soft belly. She had nearly died of happiness when she had found the shirt, with the skull painted over the monkey's face, on the rack in the thrift store. Lifting the magazine up above her head in a pointedly conversation-ending move, Jess said in a bored tone, "Whatever. Go get your soul sucked out by the corporations. What do I care if my brother turns into a money-hungry zombie?"

"Yeah, you'd probably love it. Then you'd have a room to yourself."

"Yeah, I would," Jessica said smugly. "Do it, Quinn. Be the corporate undead. I'm rooting for you."

Quinn rolled his eyes at her as he left.

"You left the straightener on," Jess called after him.

"Turn it off, then," he shouted back. "Or let the house burn down, see if I care."

Her incoherent grumbling followed him down the narrow hallway. From the kitchen, his older sister Andrea called, "If you burn the house down, Quinn, I'm gonna kick your ass so hard you'll wish you didn't have an ass."

"He doesn't have an ass," Jess yelled back from the bedroom.

"That's true," Andrea agreed. "It's a miracle he can walk without one."

"Stop talking about my ass!" Quinn shouted, before slamming the front door on his sisters' giggles.

Quinn walked to the store instead of skating there. He was worried his nerves might make him careless, and he didn't want to show up injured to his first day of work. When he had told Matteo that he really needed this job, he hadn't been messing around.

There were a bunch of kids hanging out in the parking lot of the strip mall, outside the shabby arcade on the corner. They wore heavy boots and long, shaggy hair and t-shirts with metal bands on them. One of them exhaled a big cloud of smoke as Quinn approached, and he could smell the skunky stench of marijuana. Avoiding eye contact, Quinn walked wide around the group. They didn't even look at him, which was a relief.