End of Shift

Jake wasn’t terribly good at his job.

This was his own personal view, but he was pretty sure that management would agree with his assessment. It wasn’t that he was completely incompetent; he could perform the basic duties required of his position, though he thought the same could be said for a reasonably intelligent monkey given the same training.

The Pizza Palace was supposed to have been a high school gig for Jake. Something he could use to help save up for college and have a little extra money to go out on the weekend. It didn’t really register with him that his grades weren’t good enough to get into any colleges, not even the two state schools he’d applied to. He thought simply graduating would be enough. That was how it had been laid out for him; you went from one thing to the next. At some point during his junior year both his parents and his guidance counselor warned him that he needed to drastically improve his grades, but it seemed too late to him to suddenly start trying.

A curl of black smoke came drifting in from the front of the store and Jake smelled burning cheese.