At this, I punched the red enter key and untied the royal blue apron from around my waist, glimpsing the crimson store logo stamped across the front panel as I brought the strings up & over my head.

I was barely 16 - and fully filled out, so the uniform I wore underneath clung tight against my skin – white button-up collared shirt barely closing at the front, tucked into khakis I negotiated around my hips that morning. These professional, respectable clothes threatened to make a contradiction out of me every single shift.

What might be surprising was that this was a grocery store – staffed evenly by the other kids from the surrounding schools and older men looking for an easy day. Unsupervised, the store became my second high school after my classes ended at 2 pm. Friendships, cliques, rumors and relationships mushroomed in every dark corner and at every spare moment, between 8 pm isles and lulls in the traffic of customers. We passed the time talking loudly to each other across the registers and leaning over the counters to exchange cheap gossip from all the celebrity magazines.

I was having fun.

And nobody had ever been this friendly to me – especially boys. My body type was unwelcomed both by my khakis and by the blonde boys in my private school. So when I went back to my neighborhood across town, I reveled in the disparity, picking up more shifts, and becoming more alive with each new friend I made.

I returned every favor of hello with a big smile and every attempted joke with a thick laugh and every brush up against my backside or hand on my waist with a polite look the other way. Men loomed in the booth beside me and boys ran to bag groceries for me. But then I started noticing a pattern with the customers too – the same faces, day-after-day, coming through the line and learning my name by staring at the tag pinned to my chest. And then they started to offer me things, like a warm ride home in a truck on a cold night, or a massage after a long day at work. Nightclub invitations passed across my counter, accompanied with a finger pointing to the naked girl as a voice over me said, She looks like you. I got mix tapes and candy bars and more hugs than I thought we both needed.

And then I got promoted, to the lottery ticket counter & concessions, removed from the main lines in its own little booth, which I lorded over.

I was the queen of high-priced goods stacked on the shelves behind me, doling out cigarettes and shiny silver scratch-offs to anyone looking to satisfy their vices. Surrounded by all things lock & key, I was always asking and presenting customers with a gesture and a Can I get you anything else? And cashing out the winners of the big tickets, drawing money from the stacks and counting it deftly with a polished nail for the lucky guy that day. I sat in the booth, sometimes eating gummy bears, sometimes skirting around whichever masculine force aimed to keep me company in there.

I shouldn't have been surprised by Brian's comment, except that I never actually did anything but watch them lick their lips at me, and be told when my red name tag turned yellow at 18, I was fair game in these streets.

I guess it didn't help that I let some of the boys date me, feeling rude if any sweet compliment turned sour in my mouth. Maybe it was 3 or 4 or 5 of them, but nothing more than sharing playlists by the digital light of their dashboard dials, or a dry hump against a car door. But it mattered less what I did and more what was said and then one day I was called over to the front desk by the two women supervising the shift. I made my way across the sunny store in between the throngs of people and stood at attention in front of them both. They laughed and so I did too, which made them stop. I navigated the illegal piece of Blue 5 bubblegum to the bottom of my cheek with my tongue, in case that's what I was getting written up for. I stood quiet, blinking.

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