Chapter 1:

I don’t like coffee. I never have and probably never will. The taste always seemed so bitter to me and then it would leave that horrible aftertaste. I couldn’t understand why people enjoyed it so much. I did like the smell though. That rich, powerful aroma that would fill your head every time you breathed it in. That’s why I work at the coffee shop. So I could be surrounded by the scent for four hours a day, five days a week. An odd reason to some, a perfect one for me.

Everyday after school I would cycle the three miles to the shop with my school bag and a change of clothes strapped to my back. Once there, I would stand behind my counter, poised and ready, and I would stick a pencil behind my ear purely because I thought it looked cool. Then came the difficult task of trying to remember the confusing orders that the customers gave me. As I said before, I was in it for the smell aspect, half the time, well, okay, all of the time, I didn’t have a clue what these crazy, coffee maniacs were trying to get across to me. I could have sworn they made it up as they went along simply to confuse me. As if they knew that I wasn’t part of their secret coffee world. I didn’t know drinks could have so many syllables. Nevertheless, I learned them and then listed them off to Marietta, the old Italian woman who ran the shop, and who, to my immense amazement, was able to distinguish between the different cups of brown liquid that I doled out.

On slow days (which were most days), I would lean on my counter and play idly with a piece of stray hair that, no matter what the shampoo bottle promised, had managed to come undone from my bun during the day. This would continue for around ten minutes before a sharp glance and the occasional poke from Marietta would awaken me from my stupor. I would then stand straight and alert for a few minutes before slumping back down on the counter again, waiting for the process to repeat itself, all the while breathing in the coffee smell that drifted around the shop.

Of course sometimes even that wasn’t enough to keep me occupied and my thoughts would begin to drift as boredness crept in. I soon turned to the customers for my entertainment. I would make up stories, creating lives for them. With some of the people, I found myself going into such detail that I almost believed them myself. Almost.

There was Joseph, who everyday day after working at the construction site down the road would come in and order something on his way home. Each day before he left he would glance at a photo hanging opposite the entrance. It was black and white, a silhouette of a woman standing beside the ocean. His lost love, I decided, a beautiful woman who died under tragic circumstances. A drowning? She seemed to like the water. I amused myself with their last conversation but it just got too melodramatic. I soon gave up on Joseph and left him to wallow in his misery. I still give sympathetic glances when he comes in though. I can’t help it. He just smiles at me awkwardly and leaves.

I imagine he’s in denial.

I’m not always so depressing though when I’m in an adventurous mood. There’s Pete the Pirate. An old man with a limp who orders a strong black coffee everyday before sitting down in the back corner with a yellow-paged notebook, a logbook, where he keeps all his swashbuckling tales,.

There was Cassie the assassin, always dressed in black, who would come in near closing time after a hard days killing. There was Margo, the crazy cat person who named each of her feline companions after a fifties movie star. Or maybe Jimmy, the one with the lazy eye, who was really part of the mafia but was on the run from the police, so was now pretending to be a banker who really enjoyed his mocha.

The one who took up the chief of my thoughts however, was Mr. B. I called him this because I could never find a story to fit him. I changed my mind daily. Sometimes he was Pierre, an ex soldier of WW2, an old member of the French resistance. Other times he was Jacob, who ran an ostrich farm in his backyard. (I quickly discarded this idea; he didn’t seem like the ostrich type.) For a while, he was the leader of an underground crime ring but right now, he was just Mr. Blank. The quiet man who would sit and stare out the window everyday from the hour of six to seven. Never speaking, a slight nod would be the response to any question asked. I don’t think it was even a response-more of an acknowledgement that he had heard the words. I didn’t know if I would every find a story to fit him, but I continued to try. This was what I was doing when Marietta tapped me on the shoulder, indicating that I should begin to close up, which I did as she ushered the last of the customers out.

It was still bright as I cycled home. It was hard to believe it was May already, the sun was just beginning to set. I was so familiar with the route I allowed my mind once again to wander over my little tales as I turned onto my street. All too soon I was interrupted from my thoughts as I stood in front of my porch, my bike propped against my hip as I tried to complete the whole key-in-lock concept. Something I still have not mastered. After several frustrating tries, I managed to unlock the door and hurriedly did the alarm, my stomach growling in protests at its lack of food. Marietta doesn’t believe in food breaks.

The house was empty as usual. My parents had split up when I was eight and for the past nine years, I had lived with my mother. We were complete opposites of each other. She had had me in her early twenties and insisted on keeping ‘young’. Of course, to her this means changing her job monthly and not cleaning up after herself. At the moment, she was working as a beautician in town while working on a crime novel in her spare time. When I took a look at the pages of her so called ‘book’ all I could find were anagrams of her name and lyrics to some eighties boy band. She was, nevertheless, my mother and our DNA matched so we loved each other in our own strange, little ways. We needed to if we spend fifty weeks of the year together. For the other two weeks I visited my Dad in Scotland, where he moved to when he got divorced. I dreaded these trips. Not because I didn’t get along with my father, we probably had more in common than my mother and I. It’s just that somehow his idea of fun is hiking up the mountains in the rain at ungodly hours of the morning. This unnecessary torture continued until I was twelve when I put my foot down. After that we did things that didn’t need a four am wake up call.

I examined myself in the mirror of our one and only bathroom. I looked like my father. We had the same brown hair, the same green eyes. Our faces were like open books and you could always know what we were thinking whether we wanted you to or not. I had my mother’s smile and sadly, her coordination, or lack there of.

I poked my tongue out at myself in the mirror and went upstairs to change and do my homework. Homework on a Friday night, I thought to myself, well aren’t you little miss sociable. I didn’t mind though, I didn’t want excitement, at least that’s what I told myself as I started my maths.

Two hours and one pot of instant noodles later car headlights illuminated my closed blind. I continued to work as the front door slammed and my mothers voice drifted up the stairs.

“Cal, is that you?”

Who else? I thought dryly and was tempted to shout for a negative but went for:

“Yeah Mom, I’m in my room,” instead.

“How was school?” she continued to ask.

“Fine” I yelled in a monotone.

This automatic conversation went on for several more seconds until my mother felt that we had bonded enough and flitted into the kitchen to make her dinner. I glanced out the window. The clouds had banded together and rain had started to drizzle from the sky. I sighed and lay back on my bed waiting for it to be an acceptable time for me to go to sleep. I loved to sleep; it was my favourite part of the day. Ironic that my favourite part was the part I was unconscious for. But hell, I chose my jobs for the smell factor, I knew I was weird. I was content for a few moments choosing Pete the Pirates Parrot’s name before slowly Mr B’s face floated into my mind and I felt a frustration line appear on my brow. I racked my brain, skipping over endless possibilities, but none of them fit. It was extremely annoying. I opened my eyes, glaring at the ceiling in the hope that inspiration would fall from it. It didn’t work.

A shrill ring shattered my glowering and I groaned as I groped blindly at my bedside table before locating the source, my phone. It was Marietta, asking, or rather informing me, that I was to come in tomorrow to work as her other employee who usually did the weekends had called in sick. I agreed, knowing I could do with the extra money and snapped the phone shut. My eyes once again returned to the ceiling but my concentration was broken. I sighed and glanced at my watch.

Coming to the conclusion that no one would know if I went to sleep now or not, I changed quickly, flinging the covers over me before curling up on my side. The rain became heavier, hammering on my window and I fell asleep, coffee names haunting my thoughts.

(A/N Slow, but stick with it. Chapter will get longer, thanks for reading!)