The warm smell of coffee permeated the small shop

The warm smell of coffee permeated the small shop. It permeated everything. Her apron smelled like coffee, the cushions of the sofa were permanently stained with the smell—hell, the air was so full of the smell kids could get high off the caffeine just by coming in. God, it was all coffee, all the time. But it made her life that much easier.

She was young, in her early thirties. She had a college degree, graduated from one of the most renowned private schools in the nation, and she was working at a coffee shop. Her parents, of course, never failed to make sure she knew just how much of their money, time, and effort had been wasted on her. After all her brother wasn’t working at a coffee shop… he was a prestigious lawyer with a well-known law firm. But she, the daydreaming, young, potential moneymaker of the family was working at a subservient job for about ten dollars an hour.

Now most people in this situation would be totally ashamed of themselves and want to crawl in a corner and die, but she rather enjoyed working there. It’s not like it was Starbucks or anything, she wasn’t working on the job non-stop for hours at a time, it was a relatively calm shop, kind-of out of the way with extraordinary coffee. She still drank it, even though she worked there, which was saying something in itself. Normally, when she worked at anywhere for any amount of time she grew absolutely revolted with whatever was served. Once she worked at a restaurant called Toby’s Diner…she would never eat there again, unless, of course, she was dying of hunger. So it is easily deduced that the coffee there must have had magical properties.

Now she realized this on several occasions, for example one of her best friends Miranda, she met at the coffee shop. She was a high-end businesswoman that was rather eccentric but had many redeeming qualities. For one she was an amazing mother, not that she had any children, it was more like the fact that she helped you through things. She was there, thick and thin to lend a hand and pick you up. She is that good friend sitting next to you in history class telling you that everything is going to be okay after you just had the worst day. There were times when she was rather spastic, she had hyper moments (like REALLY REALLY hyper moments), not to mention that she dances ridiculously where everyone can see her. She has a presence that baffles and, well, blows your mind.

Not to say that she was a terrible businesswoman—she was actually quite persuasive, not to mention she could speak several different languages fluently (even though she prefers Japanese because it was her first language along with English) and it drives her crazy when Miranda says things to other people that she can’t understand, mostly because she felt stupid for not taking any language classes, okay, I lied, she took English anyway.

Oh! I haven’t told you who she is yet. She is in fact Elizabeth Josie Chaffin…but everyone calls her Josie. In fact she hated the name Elizabeth with a passion. Well…maybe not hate, more like had an extraordinarily dislike for it.

Regardless Elizabeth—err Josie, works at a coffee shop for ten dollars an hour. Right now would be the time to throw away any notions that working in a coffee shop is boring, because (well in this shop’s case) it is anything but. The shop sold coffee (obviously), had live performances, and occasionally held those poetry performances (at night of course), where kids on crack come and talk about how terrible their lives are with amazing English and a lot of rhymes. Everyone snaps at those shows. It was kind of a mess afterward and Josie hated (more than her name anyway) having the last shift where she had to stay (or come back) at like one o’clock in the morning and clean up after a bunch of kids on pot or crack, some sort of shit that made them turn from human beings to shit-heads that leave messes like they are horses or some other barn animal. Now these kids may have grown up in rich fancy ass homes but they sure as hell left a fucking mess for her to clean up, one time she had to stay for two bloody hours cleaning up after those bastards. She had not been happy after that and avoided the last shift every time she could.

Now while that may have seemed gross and disgusting, the live performances were actually quite interesting. They happened every Monday and Wednesday when some aspiring artist that hadn’t quite made it big yet came to the shop to perform for a couple of hours. Now these people weren’t head-bashing, nose-smashing, punk rockers that scream like they are on fire. These people were acoustic guitars players and actual singers. Josie had no idea how the owner of the store managed to find these people as they tend to be wallflowers that you don’t notice but she rather enjoyed their performances. She had especially made friends with a regular singer called Allyson. That was what she called herself too. Allyson, not Aly or some other nickname, it was Allyson. She hated posers, messy places, food that smells weird, and other people that had her name. See, she like to think of herself as a unique individual, which of course she was, but she wasn’t so unique that she was the only one with the name Allyson, after there are about a million billion people in the world, someone had to have named their kid Allyson. Regardless of whether this fact was presented to her she still hated people with the name Allyson, and it didn’t matter if the spelling was different, she would still hate them.

Allyson was actually a very good singer despite initial appearances. She had black hair and was of Japanese ancestry and she was very proud of that, in fact she took the Japanese language through high school and well into college (therefore she could, in fact, talk to Miranda and they often teased Josie because she wasn’t able to). She was a good singer but she was a crappy writer, her vocabulary is elementary, her word choice is that of a three year old’s, and she actually failed freshman English (much to her embarrassment). But she was still a damn good singer.

And it was Allyson and Miranda that were with her when he first walked through the door.