R/nosleep
I got my first job at a corporate coffee chain at sixteen years old. During the application process I was a smooth talker, even through the nerves of my first interview, and they told me I would be a perfect fit. Over the sounds of the steaming milk frothers and the low hanging smell of espresso, I shook the hand of my manager and accepted the extended offer to be a barista. My training was brief and after a few shifts, I fell right into place. The high energy of my coworkers and the many benefits of the job made me fall in love with the fast paced thrum of the cafe, even through the insane morning rushes. Over time, I got used to many things. The low hum of the ice maker that churned and thumped. The repetitively smooth coffee shop jazz that pumped gently through the speakers at all hours. The snippy customers that would rather yell their orders at me and start a fight if I didn’t hand them a straw quick enough. Even the smell of the coffee became so familiar that once my shifts ended, I stopped noticing it on my clothes.
There was only one thing that, even after two years, I still haven’t gotten used to.
The first time it happened, I was caught off guard. My first day after my training was complete, I was working on the drive through window taking payments and handing out drinks. My first customer of the day was an older lady, clipped in her small talk, seemingly annoyed and ready to speed off as soon as I could hand her her tea. Remembering my training to connect with every customer, I then asked. “How are you?”
At first, she rolled her eyes as she stuffed her change in her purse. Then she turned to look at me. As soon as we made eye contact, tears began to well in her eyes. “I… My husband died three months ago. I miss him. I can’t stop thinking about him. I can’t sleep without him. It’s been hell. I have no-one to talk to. I put our dog down because I couldn’t stand the sight of her waiting at the door for him when he will never come home.”
The entire time she spoke she stared into my eyes as if in a trance. Tears trickled down her cheeks as if a faucet had been turned on. Her voice wavered and cracked. I had no idea what to say. In my dumbfounded silence, my coworker tapped me on the shoulder and handed me the green iced tea the older lady had ordered. I broke our eye contact to grab the drink, and as soon as I did, the crying stopped.
I turned back and she had wiped the tears from her face, staring into the distance, cheeks flared red in embarrassment. “I don’t know why I told you that.” Her voice was grave and her downturned gaze flickered to the road as she grabbed her drink and sped away.
I didn’t know what to do. It was my first day. I tried to write it off immediately, thinking she must be mentally unstable or that perhaps some customers needed to unload on their morning coffee slingers. I shook off the odd experience as the next car pulled up.
“I’ve got you down for $8.74!”
A curt nod as the older man handed me his card. I slid it in my machine and turned back to him. “How are you?”
Once again, the man met my eyes and the tears began to flow. I was startled and hardly had time to pull his card out of the reader before he began to speak. Slow and even, as if he were asleep, he spoke. “I had an affair with one of my students. I can’t look my wife in the eyes. She just had our second child. Our first is the same age as the girl I cheated with. I feel dirty. I don’t know what to-“
I could hardly breathe. I looked away as quickly as I could once I realized what he was confessing. As soon as he did, he stopped speaking. Without even getting his coffee, he rolled up his window and sped off. At this point, I knew something was off. I came over the headset and relayed the stories to my coworkers, the odd behavior, two tearful customers in a row, but they just laughed. “First day luck! Welcome to customer service!” I tried my best to laugh along with them.
For the next three hours, I asked again and again. I had never had this sort of experience before. The sickly feeling in my stomach turned to morbid curiosity. Countless customers, one after another, cried while staring deeply into my eyes and telling me horrific tales of their innermost struggles. A woman recovering from an abortion. A man who just survived a suicide attempt. A teen girl who’s boyfriend slept with her sister. An elderly gentleman who buried his youngest daughter. Car after car, every time I made eye contact and said those three simple words, each person cried.
Some had passengers in the car that looked on in horror and second hand embarrassment, shaking the arms of the drivers and even trying to pull their faces away. But throughout the day I learned that they wouldn’t stop talking, they wouldn’t look away, unless I broke eye contact first. By the end of my five hour shift I had stopped asking. My curiosity had been effectively drowned and my heart felt heavy with the weight of the confessions. I knew that whatever odd effect I had on people, I didn’t want to exploit it any longer.
Weeks turned into months and I hadn’t asked anyone how they were again, save a few times the question slipped out by force of habit. At work, I avoided eye contact and kept any customer connections short, to the annoyance of my managers. I even did my best to avoid working the window all together, becoming the fastest drink maker so I would be positioned on bar and away from the prying eyes of the costumers. At home and at school, my appetite for small talk shriveled and I carefully chose my words around it. My horrifically terrible first day faded into my memory.
But this week, everything changed. We got a new shift manager, one who didn’t care for the barista’s personal preference. Without a second word, on the first day, she positioned me at the window. I didn’t want to make a fuss so I didn’t so much as argue, just took up my residence by the register and trained my eyes on the counter. After a few customers, my boredom got the best of me. I hadn’t been tasked with such a simple job in two years, and the memory of my awful interactions had faded. Surely, it must have been a coincidence, I thought. Just to test it, I decided that the next car to come through, I would ask.
The white Honda Civic pulled around the corner and stopped at the window. A freckled blonde girl, who must have been at least a year younger than me, held out a twenty dollar bill and beamed a smile at me. So far, so good. “Hi! How are you today?”
Her arm dropped against the car, the bill still clutched in her hand. Tears began to fill her crystal blue eyes. Her mouth dropped open. “They told me I have cancer today. They told me I will probably survive it but I don’t want to. My family can’t afford the treatments. I plan to kill myself before they-“
I looked down. I felt like I may pass out. Or throw up. Maybe both. As the others did, her stream of word vomit ceased as soon as I looked away. I couldn’t hear anything but her jagged breathing and the jazz notes hovering in the background. I took her payment and handed her her coffee. She took it without a word. As soon as she drove off, I slumped against the wall. I hadn’t been imagining it.
The next car, a black Prius, came and I was still buzzing from the shock. Before I could stop myself, I asked the man, “How are you?” and held his gaze in anticipation.
He was still for the briefest of moments, eyes wide like a deer in the headlights, and then he smiled. He cocked an eyebrow and handed me his card. “That’s one hell of a trick darling.”
My breath stopped cold. I shook my head as I swiped it, clearing my throat.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He took his credit card back from my outstretched hand, his fingertips brushing against my knuckles. He didn’t say anything more, just stared at my face as if trying to memorize it. Without another word, he rolled up his window and drove off.
I shook off the jitters from my spine. Not only had my little ‘trick’ worked once again after two years, it DIDN’T work. Someone I had never seen before had failed to fall under my spell as everyone else did so easily. I finished my shift on the espresso bar, before starting my closing tasks. I tried my best not to think of the man or his comment.
That night, I was hauling out the trash to the dumpster when I had the eeriest feeling that I was being watched. I scanned the cars in the back lot, the ramshackle assortment usually belonging to the construction crew across the street. Nothing looked out of place. I chalked it up to my own anxiety and went back inside.
The next day, my shift passed with no issues. I was working the ovens and was as far from the windows as possible. One of my coworkers must have put in a complaint During close, I was taking out the trash again when the same feeling crept over me. Once again, I swept the lot with my eyes, searching out the source of the primal fear creating a pit in my stomach. This time, my eyes locked with a man inside a black Prius parked in the middle parking lot.
The same man who had made that odd remark to me the day before. He was staring straight at me, unflinchingly, and didn’t even acknowledge that I had seen him. I moved as quickly as I could and practically ran back into the building, shoving the trashcan back into the corner. I leaned against the wall to catch my breath. My shift manager paused while putting away dishes, casted me an odd look, before asking me to check and make sure the bathrooms were clean. I nodded and moved down the hall to the first door.
Locked.
Locked? My mind swam. I could have sworn that I replaced the toilet paper right after we closed for the night and the door was open. Could I have accidentally locked it from the inside? I tried to retrace my steps in my head to no avail. I knocked incredulously at the door, thinking a customer might have snuck in before we locked the front doors. No response.
Right as I stopped, a breeze picked up a stray piece of hair around my shoulders and blew it across my face. My breath caught in my throat. Slowly, I turned to look at the back door. It was standing wide open, still propped by the bag of sand I had kicked in front of it earlier. Even worse, I could see from where I stood that the black Prius was empty.
My worst experiences with customers were the ones who were being abused. More than once I had to call the police for a welfare check, giving them only the license plate number. I never saw those customers twice. After my third anonymous tip to the nonemergency line, I vowed to stop asking people how they were. Not at work, not at home, not out on errands, never. I don’t know what made me change my mind that day. I don’t know what made me forget how horrible that felt.
I cursed myself then, staring at that locked bathroom door, willing there to be nothing behind it. Why had I been so stupid? Why was the man in the black Prius stalking me? How did he know something about me that perplexes even me?
I raised my fist to knock, but before I could, I heard heavy breathing on the other side of the door. I took a step back, looking under the door and seeing the shadow of two feet under the threshold. I clapped my hand over my mouth. He was standing up against the door the entire time.
I slowly backed away, making my footsteps as quiet as possible. When I finally made it to the back, I was confronted with the staticky sound of running water. The loud hum of the icemaker. I rounded the corner and saw the dishwasher standing open, pure white steam billowing into the air. And nothing else.
“Megan?? You still here??” I called. My heart rate increased tenfold. My manager wouldn’t leave me here, would she? I pushed the door open to the front of the store, scanning the bar, the registers, the ovens. No sign of anyone. “Megan??”
She was just standing in the back minutes earlier. The dishwasher was hot, she must have just opened it. I tried to calm down and rationalize the situation. Maybe she stepped out for a smoke? Maybe she had another trash bag to toss? I ran back through the store to the back door, nearly slipping on old mop water.
Closed. The back door was shut firmly, the keys gone from the lock. I knew that was certainly not how I left it. Eyeing the bathroom door, I made my way to the front door. The black of the night was thick beyond our window panes covering the front wall of the cafe. Even the streetlights were out. My mind swam. The sun had just started setting when I had come back inside. That couldn’t have been more than 5 minutes ago.
I tried to push the front door open and found it locked. Fuck. I let out a whimper. Filled with desperation, I swung behind the bar and tried the drive through window. Locked. It wouldn’t budge. I started crying hot tears. I wiped them with the back of my hand and reached for my phone out of my back pocket.
In thick white bubbles, my phone read 3:00 am. And absolutely no bars.
That is when I lost it. I screamed like a trapped animal, still crying out hoarsely for my manager, clawing myself into the corner by the window.
“Are you going to calm down?”
I looked up and made eye contact with him. He was smirking, one hand on his watch, the other posed on the counter. The man from the Prius. I stopped screaming, clutching my phone and eyeing the scissor draw by the front register.
“We all have our tricks, Jamie. Some of us can manipulate time with just a snap of our fingers. Some of us can manipulate animals to do our bidding…” His eyes traced my body and he laughed crudely. “Some of us can force strangers to tell us their darkest secrets. It was just a matter of time before we found you.”
He leaned over the counter, following my flickering gaze to the draw below the register. “You won’t get a chance to touch those, Jamie. We are going to leave quietly.”
My eyes widened. “I am not going anywhere with you! I don’t know you! Where is Megan??”
He laughed again, a gravely sound from deep in his chest. “Don’t you want to go make sure the bathrooms are clean before we go? I will wait here.”
My heart sunk into my stomach. I took sluggish steps towards the hall. When he looked out towards the parking lot I ran. The door to the second bathroom was standing open, the hazy yellow light polluting the hallway. I couldn’t stop to catch my breath. Despite every cell in my body screaming for me to turn around, I peeked in the doorway.
And threw up on the floor. The room was covered in broad strokes of red, the mirror was shattered, and laying on the floor was a figure wearing a torn green apron. Megan. I stumbled backwards, avoiding my vomit on the floor, crashing into the wall. That fucking psychopath killed Megan and he was going to kill me too.
In between my heaves, a gloved hand clapped over my mouth and everything went dark.