Chapter Four
Ezra
“Do you think that grumpy guy is cute?”
Clark swiveled his stool to face me and pushed his glasses back. The turquoise frames stood out against his closely cropped hair and beard. “The guy who was just in here? Who comes in every week? Kind of, I guess. Why? Do you?”
I shrugged and went back to sorting the stack of comics in front of me. “I don’t know. He almost smiled for a second, and I thought he might be cute, but then he went back to frowning at his shoes.”
“Frowny nerds. Not my type.”
I tapped my fingers against the flamingo on my shirt. “Anyway, who has time to flirt with customers? I need to be focusing on my true love.”
“Hot guy from the bar across the street?”
“Brick,” I answered, cooing his name.
Liza stepped out from the back of the store, a cardboard box in her arms. “I don’t care how hot you think he is. As long as he holds up his half of the bargain and keeps an eye on our place, I’m happy.”
Liza was the least bothered by the graffiti out of all of us, but even she got rattled when someone broke the small round window in our front door one evening. We still figured it was nothing more than kids with too much time on their hands and bad self-esteem, but the window breaking seemed more violent than the spray paint had. Hell, they didn’t even have the guts to go for any real stinging words. They just said stuff like “your store sucks” and “Superman isn’t a homo.”
None of us were confused about Superman’s sexuality, duh. Not to mention he was no one’s type. I liked my guys rough and tumble, Clark went for other good-natured nerds, and Liza was gaga for butch ladies, the kind who wore suspenders and stuff. Not only was Superman not a “homo,” he was also not our type.
After the window broke, though, we thought it was a good idea to start taking things seriously. We already walked to our cars with a buddy system when we left late, which felt weird enough, but Clark insisted that there was no reason not to. Instead of sitting around and counting our action figures and collectible playing cards until someone decided to escalate, I came up with the idea of paying the man across the street.
Two birds with one stone, so to speak.
With one brick? Whatever.
“I’m sure he’s going to keep up his half of the bargain. It’s not like it’s a hard deal for him. He’s standing around outside the bar half the night, and we’re right down the block. He just has to look.”
Clark and I crossed over to help Liza with the box. She pulled a utility knife out of the pocket of her blue sundress and used it to slice open the cardboard top. We all fell into our familiar roles, with Liza sorting the comics while she unloaded, then handing them off in small bunches while Clark and I crisscrossed the store to deposit the individual issues on the shelves.
“We know that you think that,” Liza joked. “But what’s to stop this guy from taking fifty bucks from us every week and then turning a blind eye when the vandals show up? You thinking he’s scary-sexy doesn’t exactly convince me he’s trustworthy.”
Clark tidied a row of comics, hollering from the other side of the store. “Let’s be honest, Ezra. You live in a little bit of a fantasy world.”
I held up a new issue ofThe Magnificent Ms. Marvel, shaking it at them. “We all live in a fantasy world! It’s why we got jobs at the comic book shop in the first place!”
Liza sat with her legs crossed in front of the box, making piles of the comics on the floor beside her. “Sure, but youreallylive in a fantasy world, Ezra. Remember when you had a crush on the delivery guy and convinced yourself that he was secretly a spy for the government?”
I grabbed another stack of comics from her. “No one proved he wasn’t.”
“Even if he was a spy,” Clark interjected, “he never swooped you up and took you away on a death-defying and romantic adventure.”
“There was also the mysterious and sexy older man who bought the house across the street from you,” Liza recalled.
“And the summer you spent obsessing about Michael B. Jordan and telling everyone who came into the store that you were going to fall in love one day.”
I threw my hands in the air, letting out an exasperated sigh. “Is there a reason you’re listing all my failed romances?”
“Because they weren’t romances!” Liza exclaimed, jumping back up to her feet. Her red hair was tied up in a messy bun, and it swayed back and forth when she stood. “They were just fantasies you obsessed over endlessly.”
“It’s true,” Clark added, returning to the counter and stroking his beard. “In fact, you haven’t gone on a real date in all the time I’ve known you. You’ve always just found some impossible crush to pine over. When you get bored of that, you move on to the next crush.”
Liza joined him, leaning back against the counter. “That’s why we have trouble trusting that this Brick guy is going to follow through. You got your head in the clouds, Ezra. It’s charming and cute, sure, but it doesn’t exactly make you the best judge of character.”
I frowned, shoving the last couple comics on the shelf. It wasn’t like this was the first time I’d heard that observation. I’d always spent as much time living in my imagination as I did in reality. It was just more fun to escape into fantasy sometimes, especially when the real world could be so drab and boring.
