Pirates of the Retail Wasteland Read Online Free PDF Page B

lights going that I probably couldn’t have told if the thing was glowing. Maybe that’s the idea behind having gas stations well lit.
    The night air was thick with the smell of French fries and dirty snow. Near the door, somebody had written the word “SHIT” on one of the bricks with Wite-Out, presumably protesting something or other.
    After a few minutes, we started heading back in the general direction of the high school, since we’d have to get back in enough time to warm back up. If my dad picked me up and I looked like I’d been out in the cold all night, I’d be in big trouble.
    Once we got past the Burger Box, on Seventy-first and Venture, the green sign for Wackfords Coffee came into view, and Brian called out “Wackfords!” and socked me in the arm. I would have been pissed off if I weren’t well familiar with the rules of the Wackfords game—when you see a Wackfords, you shout “Wackfords!” and whack the person next to you in the arm. You can really get hurt playing it in the city, where there’s one on every corner.
    We were about the last town in the state to get a Wackfords, and Edie, naturally, was pissed that they had come to town at all. The only person I knew who’d actually been inside was Dustin, who’d gone there once to try to arrange a poetry reading and had been told that they never did things like that. They tried to act like a cool coffee shop, like Sip, but for all I could tell, they were really just another fast-food joint. They made the employees wear uniforms and everything.
    Edie stood in front of the Wackfords sign when we got closer to it. It looked like she was having a staring contest with it. The green light covered her entire body and made her look sort of like an alien in a bad sci-fi movie from the 1950s.
    “You suck!” she screamed at the sign. Anna and I couldn’t help laughing at her.
    “Yeah, man!” said Brian.
    “It’s not even a coffee shop,” said Edie. “It’s just an office!”
    “Yeah,” said Brian. “An office!”
    Edie pulled the slice of American cheese out of her pocket, tore it in half, and threw one of the halves directly at the sign. It hit it square on the “R,” stuck there for a second, then fell to the ground.
    Suddenly, a head poked out from the door. It was a young, curly-headed guy in a Wackfords apron.
    “Aw, be nice,” he said. He shut the door and disappeared back into the store just as Edie was throwing the other half of her cheese at him. It fell well short of the door, and I was glad she hadn’t hit him. I doubted you could actually be arrested for assault with half a slice of American cheese, but it’s best not to take your chances with things like that. Especially in towns where cops are expected to be busy chasing gangbangers but don’t really have much to do.
    We stood there in the parking lot for a minute, surrounded by signs that towered over us like giants. A few of the gas-station logos were reflected in Anna’s glasses. I thought that maybe, someday in the future, another, newer downtown would pop up a mile or two north, and all these places would be empty shells of stores just like the ones that were starting to fill up Venture Street and the mall. All the signs would be like gravestones. I’d go up there with a can of spray paint and write “Here lies” above the names of the stores, if I was still in town, which I prayed I wouldn’t be.
    That night, after I got home, I stood at my window, looking at all of the different-colored lights in the sky. I could see a bunch of rooftops from the Flowers’ Grove neighborhood a couple of blocks past mine, and, back behind those, quite a few of the lights from the signs on Cedar Avenue. Red from the Quickway. Yellow from the Burger Box. I couldn’t see any of the blue Mega Mart sign, except for maybe a bit of a hazy blue glow, but right between two rooftops a few blocks back, through some bare branches of the January trees, I could see just a little bit of the