The hours were bad. The tips were worse, and the majority of my coworkers definitely left something to be desired, but c’est la vie, que sera sera, insert foreign language cliché of your choice here. It was a summer job, and that kept Nonna off my back. It also prevented my various aunts, uncles, and kitchen-sink cousins from feeling like they had to offer me temporary employment in their restaurant/butcher shop/legal practice/boutique. Given the size of my father’s very large, very extended (and very Italian) family, the possibilities were endless, but it was always a variation on the same theme.
My dad lived half a world away. My mother was missing, presumed dead.
I was everyone’s problem and nobody’s.
Teenager, presumed troubled. “Order up!”
With practiced ease, I grabbed a plate of pancakes (side of bacon) with my left hand and a two-handed breakfast burrito (jalapeños on the side) with my right. If the SATs didn’t go well in the fall, I had a real future ahead of me in the crappy diner industry.
“Pancakes with a side of bacon. Breakfast burrito, jalapeños on the side.” I slid the plates onto the table. “Anything else I can get for you gentlemen?”
Before either of them opened their mouths, I knew exactly what these two were going to say. The guy on the left was going to ask for extra butter. And the guy on the right? He was going to need another glass of water before he could even think about those jalapeños.
Ten-to-one odds, he didn’t even like them.
Guys who actually liked jalapeños didn’t order them on the side. Mr.
Breakfast Burrito just didn’t want people to think he was a wuss—only the word he would have used wasn’t wuss.
Whoa there, Cassie, I told myself sternly. Let’s keep it PG.
As a general rule, I didn’t curse much, but I had a bad habit of picking up on other people’s quirks. Put me in a room with a bunch of English people, and I’d walk out with a British accent. It wasn’t intentional—I’d just spent a lot of time over the years getting inside other people’s heads.
Occupational hazard. Not mine. My mother’s.
“Could I get a few more of these butter packets?” the guy on the left asked. I nodded—and waited.
“More water,” the guy on the right grunted. He puffed out his chest and ogled my boobs.
I forced a smile. “I’ll be right back with that water.” I managed to keep
from adding pervert to the end of that sentence, but only just.
I was still holding out hope that a guy in his late twenties who pretended to like spicy food and made a point of staring at his teenage waitress’s chest like he was training for the Ogling Olympics might be equally showy when it came to leaving tips.
Then again, I thought as I went for refills, he might turn out to be the kind of guy who stiffs the little bitty waitress just to prove he can.
Absentmindedly, I turned the details of the situation over in my mind: the way that Mr. Breakfast Burrito was dressed; his likely occupation; the fact that his friend, who’d ordered the pancakes, was wearing a much more expensive watch.
He’ll fight to grab the check, then tip like crap.
I hoped I was wrong—but was fairly certain that I wasn’t.
Other kids spent their preschool years singing their way through the ABCs. I grew up learning a different alphabet. Behavior, personality, environment— my mother called them the BPEs, and they were the tricks of her trade.
Thinking that way wasn’t the kind of thing you could just turn off—not even once you were old enough to understand that when your mother told people she was psychic, she was lying, and when she took their money, it was fraud.
Even now that she was gone, I couldn’t keep from figuring people out, any more than I could give up breathing, blinking, or counting down the days until I turned eighteen.
“Table for one?” A low, amused voice jostled me back into reality. The voice’s owner looked like the type of boy who would have been more at home in a country club than a diner. His skin was perfect, his hair artfully mussed.
Even though he phrased his words like they were a question, they weren’t— not really.
“Sure,” I said, grabbing a menu. “Right this way.”
A closer observation told me that Country Club was about my age. A smirk played across his perfect features, and he walked with the swagger of high school nobility. Just looking at him made me feel like a serf.
“This okay?” I asked, leading him to a table near the window.
“This is fine,” he said, slipping into the chair. Casually, he surveyed the room with bulletproof confidence. “You get a lot of traffic in here on weekends?”
“Sure,” I replied. I was starting to wonder if I’d lost the ability to speak in complex sentences. From the look on the boy’s face, he probably was, too. “I’ll give you a minute to look over the menu.”
He didn’t respond, and I spent my minute bringing Pancakes and Breakfast Burrito their checks, plural. I figured that if I split it in half, I might end up with half a decent tip.
“I’ll be your cashier whenever you’re ready,” I said, fake smile firmly in
place.
I turned back toward the kitchen and caught the boy by the window watching me. It wasn’t an I’m ready to order stare. I wasn’t sure what it was, actually—but every bone in my body told me it was something. The niggling sensation that there was a key detail that I was missing about this whole situation—about him—wouldn’t go away. Boys like that didn’t usually eat in places like this.
They didn’t stare at girls like me.
Self-conscious and wary, I crossed the room.
“Did you decide what you’d like?” I asked. There was no getting out of taking his order, so I let my hair fall in my face, obscuring his view of it.
“Three eggs,” he said, hazel eyes fixed on what he could see of mine. “Side of pancakes. Side of ham.”
I didn’t need to write the order down, but I suddenly found myself wishing for a pen, just so I’d have something to hold on to. “What kind of eggs?” I asked.
“You tell me.” The boy’s words caught me off guard. “Excuse me?”
“Guess,” he said.
I stared at him through the wisps of hair still covering my face. “You want me to guess how you want your eggs cooked?”
He smiled. “Why not?”
And just like that, the gauntlet was thrown.
“Not scrambled,” I said, thinking out loud. Scrambled eggs were too average, too common, and this was a guy who liked to be a little bit different. Not too different, though, which ruled out poached—at least in a place like this. Sunny-side up would have been too messy for him; over hard wouldn’t be messy enough.
“Over easy.” I was as sure of the conclusion as I was of the color of his eyes. He smiled and closed his menu.
“Are you going to tell me if I was right?” I asked—not because I needed confirmation, but because I wanted to see how he would respond.
The boy shrugged. “Now, where would the fun be in that?”
I wanted to stay there, staring, until I figured him out, but I didn’t. I put his order in. I delivered his food. The lunch rush snuck up on me, and by the time I went back to check on him, the boy by the window was gone. He hadn’t even waited for his check—he’d just left twenty dollars on the table. I had just about decided that he could make me play guessing games to his heart’s content for a twelve-dollar tip when I noticed the bill wasn’t the only thing he’d left.
There was also a business card.
I picked it up. Stark white. Black letters. Evenly spaced. There was a seal
in the upper left-hand corner, but relatively little text: a name, a job title, a phone number. Across the top of the card, there were four words, four little words that knocked the wind out of me as effectively as a jab to the chest.
I pocketed the card—and the tip. I went back to the kitchen. I caught my breath. And then I looked at it again.
Tanner Briggs. The name.
Special Agent. Job title.
Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Four words, but I stared at them so hard that my vision blurred and I could only make out three letters.
What in the world had I done to attract the attention of the FBI?
