Starbucks Birthday
by Valentino Di Pietro Hernandez
She comes in every day and orders the birthday drink.
The first time she did it I was working at the cash register and she was holding a single book. I hawk at her that I need proof of ID if you want your free birthday drink girl. She shrinks and I soften my tone. A complimentary birthday cheer is also included, but she tells me it isn’t her birthday and she would like to pay for it like any other drink. Okay. Money’s money. Everyone working gets confused and sings her happy birthday anyway. She repays them by pointing her red cheeks downwards before she crouches, defeated, into a corner and starts reading her book.
Next day comes around and she orders the same thing again. A little weird but all the girls that get Starbucks religiously are and once her name’s called it's back into that dark corner to read. No one could remember her name, was it Grace? Irina? Jezebel? Oh no it couldn’t have been the last one, too memorable. Soon everyone starts theorizing a shifting name but who was she? She could have been a rich girl, she had the money and the free time, she could have been a stressed college student taking a few days off, she could have been an alien the way she was avoiding people maybe even a secret agent but in the end it didn’t really matter who she was, but more so, what she was: a coward hiding away in dreams.
Now she brings a backpack full of blue books, red books, gray books, dead books, as she stays in that gloomy corner reading all day. By then she’s ordered the birthday drink so many times that everyone starts joking on how fast she’s growing. Yesterday she was 16, today she’s 17, and tomorrow she’s going to be 18. A few tears comically shed on how fast they grow up and soon she’ll be able to drink unless she chooses not to come in but I know she’ll show up because she doesn’t have anything else to do. At 21 I notice how silky her hair has become. She seems just a little bigger, fuller, but I know she’s filling herself with the wrong ideas.
I don’t know if she realizes she’s aging.
She must have noticed when she turned 34. Asking herself when her hair started to fade, getting nervous at the thought of time moving forward. Oh honey. Bringing in more books won’t get you any more answers. She piles them up reading reading reading that's all she does. Waiting and waiting for something to happen and I know what she’s waiting for, searching for life inside those books with a disturbed smile digging and plowing through the pages frantically. She doesn’t understand what books are for, they are fantasy, a fake reality of an experience captured in dead words printed on dead trees read by a dead audience tucked away safely from the rattle of life.
At 45 she can’t lie to herself anymore. She’s aging. It's not paranoia or superstition or hallucination. She’s aging. And she’s scared because she hasn’t found the moment yet even though she brings in a suitcase of books searching forever. She could have had an experience last tuesday. A man came in that day and asked if Jerry was working here and as it turns out our Jerry sold him some fake airpods, somehow this man figured out where Jerry worked but before he could get to Jerry, he busted out the back and a chase ensued. Jerry only made it to the end of the parking lot before they both put their fists up. The whole time she didn’t even notice what was happening, didn't hear the excited gossip and the laughing and the worried hushes, didn’t hear the police sirens, didn’t hear the yelling and the crunching of bones. She just sat in that dark corner and kept reading without a worry in the world.
She's 76 and the look in her eyes is sharper. Colder and exhausted, my coworkers stop joking about her because they know it’ll end badly for her. I overhear Jerry say how happy he is not working the cash register when she orders because it's such a tragedy to see someone wither away like that. She still nods at me when she orders her way of a thank you before heading back to her poorly lit corner to obsess over her useless books. I can’t make out the titles but I know it doesn’t matter, she won’t find what she’s looking for in those books.
We are getting scared because she hit the 100 range and today she doesn’t have a cartload of books with her, no, there is no book smell tarnishing the Starbucks. She must have realized the end is approaching so now is the right time to try something new. Now. Not when her legs weren't chalk white and her eyes weren’t bloodshot and it didn’t tire her to smile, not that she ever smiled, it would be too much action. That's why I’m here. To tell a story she herself couldn’t tell. And today’s the day she finally ordered something different: a glass of water. I tell her I’ll give her whatever she wants on the house but it sure as hell won’t be a damn glass of free water. I wish I didn’t ask so annoyed because she turns back into her insecure-teenage-girl self that she should have outgrown centuries ago. Experience loss. She orders the birthday shake and everyone sighs, some cry softly as she sits back into that cursed corner before she starts sobbing because she knew leaving all of her books at home was a bad idea.
She’s pushing the limits at 104 any day now she’s going to die and I know, I just know, it’s going to be here. We’ll be closing down the shop and she’ll still be sitting there in the shadows holding a book with eyes that haven’t blinked in an hour. Ambulance called, Starbucks shut down, then fired, and scarred for life. Or maybe she’ll fall down on the sidewalk, can’t lift her legs properly over the curve and she just hits the cement too hard and BANG! Lights out and off to heaven where when God asks you about your sins you have none to confess. Then God asks you about all the good you’ve done for the world and you’ll ask, insecure, if making Starbucks richer counts. Reading. I don’t like it, she does, and a part of me wants to burn the books on her old back as she brings them in with her baby carrier,
polluting the air with heaps of dead paper. She’ll never climb that mountain even if she was 50 years younger.
Whilst she’s waiting in line she holds onto a boy, smiling and talking with him as he listens to the magnificent stories. She tells the story of how in the middle of the night when her stomach started hurting during pregnancy she would get up and put on makeup and nice clothes so she didn’t look like a mess going to the ER and so on. He gasps. She tells the story
of how she once killed a dog that was standing too close by a street corner by taking the turn too sharp with her car and so on. He laughs. She tells the story of a maiden who died in the tower waiting for her prince. He cries. I hate her because those are not her stories to tell. She’s trying to create a moment but her smile is forced, her stories whilst fantastical and full of life are told with a dead memorized voice that gives it all away, if the boy had some more years on him he wouldn’t have believed every word she told him.
She orders and goes back into her corner. The boy wants to sit with her and listen to her stories and she tells him politely she's tired (from doing nothing) and she’ll need some rest but that she’ll be here again tomorrow to tell him some more stories. Pinky promises, her first one, also the first promise she breaks.
She doesn't come in tomorrow. The boy waits and I tell him that she comes here every day by this time sharp so something must have happened. He asks like what? and my coworkers stay silent, they don’t want to think about it and the boy also feels it but he smiles and just says that he’ll be back tomorrow. Two weeks pass and the birthday shake girl becomes a local legend at our Starbucks so much so that all of us are scared of free birthday food. We hide our years so we can hold on to them longer. Tick Tock. I look at her corner empty and realize it doesn’t matter if she’s dead or alive, nothing changed anyway. That's the legacy she left behind.