The Other Side of the Street

by Nicole Thorn

  Jay’s eyes narrowed. “Sam’s not here.” His tone came out harsher than I felt the subject warranted, so I gave Jay some side-eye. It probably just annoyed him that Sam only showed up to help us when he got bored. Classic Sam, but for someone who hadn’t gotten used to his behavior, I could see how that could be annoying.

  “No, but he’s coming by this afternoon. He stayed up late last night trying to finish a videogame, so he wanted to sleep in today. But he’ll help us sell, don’t worry.”

  “Uh huh,” Jay said.

  Ignoring his bad attitude, I got up and started gathering everything to set up for the day.

  Jay followed me after a moment, looking embarrassed. He cleared his throat. “So, um, what kind of sandwiches do you have?”

  “Ham and turkey mostly,” I said, gesturing to the cooler full of packaged sandwiches. I worried that they wouldn’t look too appetizing, considering we didn’t have fancy paper bowls or plastic containers. I’d just wrapped them in paper that my father had brought home when I told him my plan.

  Jay frowned at said paper. “What is that?”

  I cleared my throat, trying not to get embarrassed. “My dad uses it to wrap food up at the butcher’s shop. It’s perfectly safe for the sandwiches, obviously.”

  Jay picked up one piece of paper and looked from it to me. “Why is there a large ham on it, holding the hand of a smaller ham?”

  I didn’t blush, but it felt like a near thing. I rubbed the back of my neck. “Well… That’s sort of my father’s logo for the shop. He, uh, changed it around the time that I was born.”

  Jay couldn’t contain his smile. “So, this tiny ham is you?”

  “Shut up.”

  “You’re a baby ham.”

  “I’ll hurt you.”

  “It would be so worth it if you came at me right now. You’re a tiny baby ham. Are there any pictures of you dressed as a ham when you were little?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I’m texting your father.”

  I lunged at Jay, who hadn’t been expecting the move, but who had grown up with three siblings. He easily dodged, jumping onto the couch in the RV and holding his phone way up. “Don’t try and stop me. I will see those photos if it’s the last thing that I do!”

  “It will be the last thing,” I said, and yanked his legs out from under him, so that he fell sideways on the couch. He landed with a gentle thump, but he still wouldn’t give up the phone. I scrambled around, trying to grab the phone from him—until I realized that I was pretty much on top of Jay and one wrong movement would create an awkward situation neither of us wanted to deal with.

  All of the sudden, I felt very hot, like my clothes would suffocate me. I pushed away from Jay, glaring at him. “Fine, get the pictures. I don’t care.”

  He grinned and started typing on his phone. “I will get the pictures.”

  I figured that having him see pictures of me as a toddler dressed in a spiral ham outfit couldn’t be more embarrassing than getting hard for a guy that hated me. In front of that guy. While he could feel it.

  While he typed furiously, I grabbed the folding table and shoved it through the door to the RV. The idiots across the street still hadn’t arrived, which meant that I could at least set up in peace. I’d gotten the table and several jars of honey set up before Jay came down the front steps to help me. He started work on the honey, ignoring it when I took one jar and pushed a ten into his till. Then I started to get the jerky set up, and finally brought out the sign for sandwiches.

  Jay sighed at them, poking it with his finger. “No one is going to buy those.”

  “It can’t hurt to try,” I said, sitting down in one of the folding chairs and resting my head against the back of it.

  Jay lowered himself down as well, frowning at the empty street. We had gotten there quite early, to be honest, because I wanted to claim this spot before the idiots showed up. They had taken it from Jay, and even though I’d done the same thing, I felt the need to reclaim the area for him.

  We didn’t say anything for almost the first hour, which should have felt uncomfortable, but didn’t. Mostly because I thought Jay wanted to fall asleep in his chair, while I tried to decide if this had been a horrible idea while also trying to figure out how much money I could make working in a butcher’s shop.

  No one stopped for that first hour. It felt like a bad omen.

  Then—

  “Honey boy!” a girl shouted as an SUV drove by. I blinked as the SUV made a U-Turn in the middle of the street, an illegal one at that, and came to stop right behind the RV. A girl and her father got out of the car. The girl couldn’t have been more than ten and her father looked weary, like he had been dealing with this for a while.

  “You came back!” the girl called, rushing over to Jay, who looked surprised.

  “Er, yeah.”

  “Daddy!” the girl said, staring at her father seriously.

  Her father sighed and pulled out his wallet. “How much for that jar?” He pointed to one of the medium sized jars, and Jay gave him a price. The man paid, still looking annoyed with his daughter. Then he glanced at my jerky, raised an eyebrow, and bought a whole package.

  “Bye!” the girl screamed, getting into the SUV again.

  As they drove off, I snickered. “I didn’t realize that I was sharing a table with a local celebrity.”

  “Shut up,” Jay said.

  “Honey boy,” I responded, looking at him.

  “I will come at you.”

  “Will you now?” I asked. “Honey boy?”

  His eyes narrowed and he crossed his arms over his chest. “I don’t see why everyone is so quick to gang up on me when I have thousands of bees at my disposal. I can make it look like an accident.”

  I just continued to smirk. “I think that girl had a crush on you. She’d be so disappointed to know that you’re gay.”

  He groaned, staring up at the blue, blue sky. “I will give you their money if you stop talking now.”

  I continued to laugh, but I stopped teasing him at the same time. I would have thought that he’d like that, but he just got grouchier as the day went on. We started selling really well after the father and daughter had left, as people started driving home after they dropped their kids off for school.

  Jay looked surprised when the first woman bought a sandwich as well. I tried not to show my relief as she walked back to her car with a small bag.

  We got the second lull just before ten in the morning. I went into the RV to get a second cooler full of jerky and brought it out. Jay sat at the table, chugging a bottle of water like he would die if he didn’t finish it. I wondered if he had gotten anything to drink earlier in the day, then decided he had to have. He’d be an idiot not to keep hydrated, even in the early morning.

  “Well, your sandwiches might actually sell,” Jay said.

  “Our sandwiches,” I responded, setting the cooler down. “My father let me roast the meat in the oven, but I used some of your honey to flavor it.”

  Jay blinked at me. “You did?”

  I nodded, sitting back down. “Whatever we make from them, we’re splitting. So, you should start hocking the hell out of them.” At this rate, we’d be full blown partners before much longer. Except that I knew Jay wouldn’t want to pay Sam, which meant that I’d have to pay him from my half.

  “You did all the work,” Jay said.

  “Well, next time, I’ll have you cutting bread in half while I’m slicing meat, and we’ll be even.”

  Jay shifted around, but he didn’t protest. Good, because I didn’t feel like getting into another fight with him just before the lunch rush. I knew that the food truck would be showing up soon, which meant that we had to sell as much of our stuff before they appeared as we possibly could.

  Hungry people around lunchtime would go to the food truck. Neither of us were dumb enough to think otherwise.

  As if hearing my thoughts, A Little Taste of Heavaii showed up a few minutes later
. I saw the look on Helen and Stanley’s faces when they saw that we had parked where they wanted to be. I couldn’t help the smirk that touched my mouth.

  Jay sat up, glaring at the food truck. “Remind me why I can’t slash their tires.”

  “Because it’s illegal.”

  He didn’t look convinced.

  “Because then the food truck will sit there until someone gets it towed, and we’ll have to deal with it for perhaps days.”

  “Good point,” Jay said, sitting back again. He glared at the truck as it pulled into the spot that my RV used to occupy. They shut the engine off, but neither of them came out for almost five minutes. Helen had that pleasant smile on her face when she approached, but I didn’t buy it anymore.

  “Hello,” I called, lifting my hand.

  “Hey, boys!” she shouted, putting a slight emphasis on the second word. Ooh, looked like we would be playing some fun head games. “I haven’t seen you two for a while. I certainly hope everything’s fine?”

  “Of course,” I said, talking before Jay could do something that would get us into trouble. “We just took a little vacation. We can’t work all the time, you know.”

  Helen laughed. “You must be making so much money then! I gotta say, Stanley and I never get the chance for a break. We just love our jobs, but we have to pay those bills too, you know.”

  “Do I.” Jay spoke in the flattest voice possible. He radiated go-away vibes from his every pore. Funny, when I had first shown up, he hadn’t been that hostile toward me.

  I cleared my throat before Helen could focus too much on Jay. When she turned those empty eyes toward me, I offered her a smile and said, “How have you two been doing?”

  “Wonderful!” she cheered, her voice squeaking ever so slightly. “I don’t want to jinx anything, but we’ve really been selling well. Wait until you see the lunch rush. It’s wonderful.”

  She used wonderful twice, and that bothered me for reasons that I couldn’t quite figure out.

  Helen left after that, and I breathed out, sitting back against my chair. “Well, as far as antagonism goes, that wasn’t so bad,” I said.

  Jay continued to glare until I threw an elbow into his side. He blinked at me, clearly confused. “You wanna cool it with the death stares?” I asked. “They’ll eventually start to take it personally.”

  “I’m already taking it personally,” Jay said. “They swoop in like they have the right and try to boot me out of my own spot, and then they act like it’s inconvenient for me to be here?”

  “Technically, they do have the right,” I said. “We didn’t pay for this plot of land any more than they did. If we want to keep this spot and our source of income, then we have to do this the old-fashioned way.”

  “Murder?” Jay asked.

  “As attractive as the brutal violence is, no,” I said, glowering at Jay. “We have to make this a competition. We have to make our wares so much more appealing than theirs, that they might as well leave.”

  “Murdering them would be easier.”

  I laughed, because I couldn’t help it. He said it in such a way that I knew he was joking, but that a casual bystander wouldn’t. “All right,” I said. “If we haven’t ousted them by the end of fall, we can kill them. My father owns a butcher’s shop. I think it’d be easy to get rid of the bodies.”

  Jay cocked his head in thought. “If you’d rather that, I suppose. But again, I have all those bees, and I could make it look like an accident.”

  “You seem keen on using your only source of income to commit appalling and atrocious acts. It’s quite attractive.”

  “Thanks,” Jay said. “I try.”

  And then the lunch rush hit, and we didn’t actually have time to talk. Most people, as expected, went to the food truck… but less than when A Little Taste of Heavaii had first showed up. Several of them didn’t want to wait in line, so they came to buy sandwiches from us. A few of them bought jerky and honey too. Within an hour, we had sold out of all the sandwiches, but people still wandered over to buy our other goods.

  “Thanks,” our last sandwich customer said. “To be honest, I tried the food truck a few days ago, and everything they had tasted like pineapple.” She shuddered as she walked away.

  Jay smiled, looking genuinely amused by that. Then he turned to me. “How much did we make?”

  “A good chunk,” I said, showing him the till. “I don’t think it’s enough to compete with the cultural appropriation over there, but we’re doing better than we were before.”

  “Good,” Jay said, breathing out. I didn’t imagine the relief that flooded his eyes.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Jay

  “Your mission—if you choose to accept it—is to make a jerky costume,” I said, my voice deadly serious.

  “Or,” Hammy said. “Not.”

  My mother had a grin on her face, rubbing her hands together. I knew my mom, and I knew that the choice had already been made. She wouldn’t give up a challenge.

  “Oh, honey,” she said to Hamilton. “You knew what would happen the second you stepped into this house.”

  Hammy hung his head. “I did.”

  “You sure you have the time for this?” I asked my mom. “I know you’re crazy busy.”

  “Yeah,” Hamilton said. “If you don’t have the time, for sure don’t force yourself to do this. I can just take advantage of your son.” We both stared at him, eyebrows lifted. “Uh, like making him dress up. Not… not in like sexually.”

  “Okay,” Mom said with a nod. “Well, I have the time. I got a couple days off from work and I don’t have anything better to do. I have all that fabric in the garage. You’ll be the best piece of jerky this world has ever seen.”

  Hamilton pinched his brow, looking like he regretted ever stepping into my house. To be fair, that had been his choice. I hadn’t even been expecting him, and that was why he’d seen me in my underwear this morning.

  Dee came into the living room, spotting Hamilton and gasping with joy. She watched him like he was a buck she’d been hunting for a week, and her eyes narrowed at the target. She psyched herself up before breaking into a run.

  “Ah!” Ham exclaimed when Dee leapt onto his back, latching on like a little monkey. She giggled at him, her arm tight around his neck as she leaned in close to his ear.

  “Hammy?” she whispered.

  “Yeah…?”

  “I love you.”

  My mom melted, and Hamilton saw that. To his credit, he gave in, his hands reaching back so he could hold my sister as securely as possible. “I love you too, you little honeycomb.”

  Dee hummed happily, resting her head on Hamilton’s shoulder. It would seem I’d lost my baby sister to my sworn enemy, and he hadn’t even been trying for it.

  “We should get to work,” I sighed.

  Hamilton stared at my legs. “You should maybe put some pants on.”

  I thought my barbeque party boxers would be fine, but since he didn’t agree, I went to my room to get dressed. The temperature had risen hellishly, so I went with a shirt and jeans. I kept away from black so I wouldn’t get baked in the sun.

  Dee remained wrapped around Hamilton when I got back outside, and I wondered to myself if he hated it as much as he thought he did. How could anyone not enjoy a pure-hearted little kid wanting nothing more than to hang out with them.

  We had to get going, and it might have broken Dee’s heart. She only perked up again when Mom asked if she would be her helper with the costume. Hamilton glared at me, but I could only smile. I didn’t see how it could be anything but great.

  Hamilton drove us to the spot while I went through some stuff on my phone. I’d changed my background picture to baby Hammy, and I grinned at it before I started trying to find places to advertise us to the locals. I had no idea where to start, so I just kind of… went for it.

  “Sam’s gonna be here soon,” Hamilton said while we set up our table.

  I made a face, unable to stop it. �
��Awesome. I hope he’s comfortable in his seat while he doesn’t earn money and spends all his time flirting with you.”

  “You don’t have to worry about it. I’m paying him from my half.”

  I stopped, leaning on the table to stare at Hammy. “No.”

  “What?”

  “No. I’m not letting him take your portion. Either he doesn’t get paid at all, or we split it. Ya know, like we’re both taking responsibility for a stray dog we found on the side of the road.”

  Hamilton let out a sigh. “You know he’s my friend, right? Like, I care about him.”

  My face burned. “Yeah, but that doesn’t make him any less of a moocher. I don’t pay Bea when she comes and doesn’t work.”

  “And that’s your choice, but I’m paying Sam.”

  “Then pay him from the whole till. I don’t want you paying on your own.”

  I wanted to end the conversation, so I went back into the RV to get ready for our new push. That involved me in a queen bee suit, and I had to change fast so Hamilton wouldn’t walk in and see me mostly naked. That would have been an awkward exchange, and we’d already had so many in the last few days.

  It had been getting worse, I’d noticed. Since Bea had suggested that maybe there could be something between Hamilton and I, it had been on my mind. Not because I wanted it, but because… I didn’t not want it.

  I hadn’t ever had a real thing for anyone. Crushes, sure, but mostly on people I didn’t know. And when I said mostly, I meant only. There had been those fleeting ones with the odd cute waiter here or there, and one or two at school. They hadn’t been my friends, and for sure not anyone I had a real chance with. Not that I thought I had a chance with Hamilton, but still. It felt different this time and I didn’t know how to navigate it.

  Once I had my costume on, I sat down on the bed in the back of the RV. It was the only thing big enough to fit me, and I wanted another minute or two before I had to go back outside. I’d heard Sam pull up, and I didn’t want to see him and Hamilton together. Something would spark in me and I wouldn’t be able to cling to this distant belief that maybe I didn’t like Hamilton. Nothing good could have come of it.