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He holds up two fingers. “There were two motorbikes registered at the local DMV that year.”
“Yeah.” I nod. “One of them was mine.”
“Right. And you never registered one again, thus proving the theory of Jovie’s negative influence on the community.”
My eye twitches as I push out of my chair to stand near the front. “Mr. Trin!”
He looks up at me as people shift around in the chairs. “Yeah?”
“Jovie works for you,” I say. “How’s that going?”
“Well, she ain’t too great at counting back change,” he says. “But she keeps a little calculator by the register for when she needs it.”
“Okay...” I hesitate. “Something to work on. What else?”
“Her hair is long and flowy and she smells nice.”
I exhale. “Okay, that’s not really what I’m looking for. Has she done anything at all, in relation to her employment, that is cause for concern for the community-at-large?”
“No,” he answers, scratching his chin. “Jovie is, and always has been, a stellar employee. She arranges the dinosaur figures alphabetically by species. Very educational.”
“Right. Thank you, Mr. Trin.” I address the rest of them again. “See, guys? Nothing to worry about. You’re blowing all of this way out of proportion!”
“I would hardly call that nothing, Will,” Lucky says. “First, it’s dinosaurs. Then, it’s how to hide weed in the spines of their school textbooks.”
I blink. “This is a joke, right?”
“No,”Coach says. “You’re not being punk’d, William.”
I cringe. “Literally no one says that anymore.”
Mrs. Clark pops out of her chair in the front row. “I, for one, find it utterly offensive that she works in a toy store where children play.” She visibly shivers. “Who knows what she’s doing to influence them to crime or drugs or worse?”
My mouth sags. “Are you kidding me? Can you people not hear yourselves?”
“And she always wears those jeans!”
“What jeans?” I ask, following the new voice across the room.
Vice Principal Sanders shakes his head from the far corner. “The ones with rips on the knees,” he says. “You buy a pair of jeans because they last. What’s the point of buying them pre-torn?”
“It’s a popular style,” I argue.
“Not in Clover.” He scoffs. “Maybe in the big cities where she’s obviously been shacking up with weirdos for the last few years, but here in Clover, we keep our jeans hole-less and wrinkle-free!”
I roll my eyes at the wave of agreeing voices. “That’s ridiculous. Who irons their jeans?” Several hands shoot up into the air and I sigh. “That was rhetorical but okay...”
Coach points to his presentation again. “William, you should be more concerned about Jovie being back than anybody.”
“Why?”
“Your happiness index.”
I pause. “My what?”
He navigates to another slideshow, this one labeled ‘WMyers’ on his flash drive. “Overall happiness is a ten-point scale. Ten being full happiness and one being full unhappiness.”
A new slide fills the screen. Another line graph dating back to the early 2000s with a photograph of my face in the top right corner.
