Page 56 of The Design of Goodbye
As soon as he got in my car, his backpack making a loud clunk as he tossed it into the backseat, I peeled out of the driveway. I coasted through a stop sign, and he gripped the grab handle while fumbling to buckle his seatbelt.
“I don’t know how to ask this nicely,” he started after I’d swerved to avoid a pothole. “Did you actually pass your driver’s test?”
“I have a license!” I felt his eyes on me and admitted, shamefully, “The driving portion of the test may have taken me three times, but that’s irrelevant.”
“It all makes sense now...”
“Hey!” I exclaimed. “I drove you to work last night, and you arrived in one piece!”
“Last night seems to have been a rare occurrence.” He finally buckled his seatbelt and relaxed. Okay, he wasn’t exactly relaxed, but he’d at least let go of the grab handle. “It was late. You were probably tired.”
Speaking of tired...“What time did you get home last night?”
“Around four.”
“That’ssolate.” The frequent dark bags under his eyes made sense now. “You don’t get much sleep, do you?”
“No,” he said. “But I don’t sleep well anyway, so it’s not a big deal.”
“Why not?” I asked as I turned out of my neighborhood.
“I wake up a lot.”
When he didn’t explain any further, I asked, “What did you want to talk about?”
“Can you not tell anyone I work at Gary’s?”
I remembered his hesitancy at accepting a ride last night, which I’d thought was strange. But now, it was starting to make sense.
“Why not?” I came to a sudden stop at a red light. Liam gripped the grab handle again.
“I already work the max hours I’m allowed through the state at the grocery store. I’m legally not allowed to work at Gary’s.”
I adjusted the thermostat because my car was not warming up fast enough. “There’s a maximum number of hours you can work in a week?”
“Ever heard of child labor laws?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But I don’t know what any of them are.”
“We can only work twenty-five hours a week because we’re still in school.”
“Oh.” I tried to calculate how many hours I worked at Invisible Thread every week, but attempting mental math at nine in the morning was proving difficult.
“The light’s green.”
“Oops,” I said sheepishly. “So, you work at the auto shop illegally?”
“Yeah, everything’s done under the table. Gary pays me cash. He and my dad are paranoid someone will find out. It’s why I mostly work nights, which is also illegal.”
“What do you do there?”
“I clean,” he said. “Sometimes, I do basic servicing to cars, like oil changes. I work a lot of inventory.”
“Like ordering products and stuff?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you only work Saturday nights?” I asked.
