Kiss Me Again by Rachel Vail Page B

room to, whatever, steal all the coffee filters.
    “Hey!” I yelled in my toughest voice, shoving my once-again-buzzing phone into my pocket. “Hey, you, not-Tony! You can’t go back there! Hello?”
    It was up to me, apparently, to stop him and save Cuppa from disaster. Awesome. I took a deep breath and charged across Cuppa, without a plan other than maybe to deck him.
    I got bounced back to the counter when we slammed into each other. He was emerging from the storage room not with arms full of stolen merchandise but instead tying a Cuppa apron around his waist.
    “You want a decaf, maybe?” he asked me. The skates were gone, replaced by TOMS. How was he so fast?
    “No.” I sucked on my knuckle, which had bumped against the counter.
    “Oh, great!” Anya said, coming from the milk station near the bathroom. “You’ve met. Toby, this is Charlie, the new kid.”
    “I had a feeling,” Toby said, nodding slowly, his eyes half-closed. “Cool.”
    “Can you give Charlie a manual and an orientation?”
    Toby turned around and went to the back room. As Penelope emerged from under the counter and began her listless dance among the machines, which hissed and burbled under her care, Anya kept up a happy little chat with the elderly couple waiting for their drinks. I took up space.
    Toby came back. He handed me a crisp Cuppa apron and a manual about seventy pages long.
    “You gotta memorize that,” he said. “Quizzes every single shift.”
    “You are frigging kidding me.”
    “Yes,” he said. “Very few quizzes, for real.”
    I flipped through. There were pages and pages of precise measurements for every type of beverage; brew times; how many pumps of syrup flavoring go in which size cup; definitions—I was getting sleepy just skimming the headings. Expectations for what baristas and expeditors must do, say, and wear. “No tattoos,” I read aloud.
    “No visible tattoos,” Toby corrected.
    “Oh?” I looked. He was right. I tried not to wonder if he had any invisible tattoos.
    He smiled. “Put it down for now. First rule of Cuppa is …”
    “Don’t talk about Cuppa?” I asked.
    He smiled. “Yeah. Only other rule is, chill.”
    “Chill?”
    “It’s not pulling babies from a burning building, you know?”
    “Yeah, but—”
    “People are here to spend more on a cup of coffee than a Guatemalan guy makes picking coffee beans in a week.”
    “That’s depressing.”
    He shook his head. “Everybody’s day is what it is. May as well enjoy the one you’re having, yeah?”
    “Um, okay,” I said.
    “So you just give them some kindness with their cuppa. Even the ones who start their order with the dread word ‘Gimmea.’”
    “Gimmea?”
    “Yeah. ‘Gimmea tall, skinny latte?’”
    “Oh,” I said. “I hate that!”
    “Right. Those people don’t tip, either. Still.”
    “Be kind. Okay.” I put the manual down on the one stool behind the counter. “So where do we start?”
    Toby picked up the manual and handed it to me. “Senior person on the shift gets the stool. There’s lots of rules. Most important one, though, is …”
    “Chill,” I said.
    “And beware the evil frother.”
    “I will beware,” I said.
    Over the next hour I managed to mess up approximately everything Toby attempted to teach me. When I pulled out the brewer, which I thought I was supposed to do, the grinds and hot water splashed out with tidal force and then stuck like molten tar to my hands, all the way up my wrists. I was talking, at the time, to a supernice and patient woman, who kept telling me not to worry.
    Penelope, meanwhile, stood beside me, behind me, ultimately in front of me, fixing the stuff I messed up, which was, well, everything I laid my hands on. After I shredded yet another garbage bag with a long line of customers waiting, Penelope suggested I haul the garbage out back to the Dumpster and take my allotted ten-minute break.
    “But Toby’s not back from his,” I started to object.
    “It’s okay.