Author’s Note:
Please note that all characters are over eighteen. This is a work of fiction, of my own making, and all resemblances to real people or situations are purely circumstantial.
I hope you enjoy Lyric’s Tale and your first trip to Maple Ferry.
— The Antipodean
Lyric felt the cold slowly creep through his black jeans and up to his thighs as he sat holding his knees to his chest, back bowed slightly, underneath the cedar hedge that separated his back yard from Evelyn's. Evelyn had moved in five years ago, when Lyric had just been starting high school, and he had never shaken that puppy-dog stupor that teen boys get when an attractive woman steps into their world. Evelyn wasn't supermodel hot, but she was certainly Maple Ferry hot. Meaning that in the pool of accessible, engaging, and single women that lived in Maple Ferry, Evelyn was not the hardest on the eyes.
The spot where Lyric now sat, hidden amongst the evergreen branches, had been a favourite retreat of his since well before Evelyn arrived. Over the years, starting as a small boy, Lyric had created his own little hideaway in the hedge, a place where he could avoid his chores, read comic books in peace, and sit quietly with his ear pods in to escape people. It was only after Evelyn had moved in, and Lyric had become a little older, that his hiding spot began to offer certain other advantages.
Lyric struggled with relating to other people at the best of times. At school he had been a loner, the tall skinny kid who wore clothes that were too baggy, shoes that were too worn and torn, and whose hair was too long to be tidy but too short to be edgy. It wasn't that he was disliked or bullied or hated on, Maple Ferry was too small a town for that kind of behaviour to go on without there being noise in the community. But, perhaps, worst of all was that at school, Lyric was just disregarded. He was one of the silent ones, the kids who came to school, did okay, stayed heads-down and then left.
So, with not much direction from his parents and zero support or even interest from the school's guidance department, he was lucky to have limped out of his senior year with a solid B average and no chance at local colleges or universities until he'd finished at least one semester, if not a full year, at Maple Ferry Community College. Leaving him in the situation where, while his cousins Trevor and Stacey were comparing their dorm assignments and class schedules for their freshman year at the big State university, Lyric was looking to move to full time hours at the local cafe, and scanning the MFCC class listings to see what he could take that might be remotely interesting enough to get him to focus, so he could transfer out to State in the Spring of the following year.
Head still resting on his knees, Lyric looked up at the dark, quiet house. Through the evergreen boughs he could see the reflection of his hedge in the blackened windows of Evelyn's lounge, the sliding doors that entered her kitchen from the backyard, and the bedroom window straight ahead of him. She wasn't home. The house was too dark, the building too quiet. Lyric's mind wandered back through tonight's events. His last shift at the cafe had ended in disaster.
While not the most popular barista in the cafe, not by a longshot, Lyric was inarguably the best skilled. Lyric cared about the drinks he made, he made sure the equipment on the bar in the cafe was gleaming at the end of his shift and put just as much effort into fine-tuning the grinders and espresso machine when he walked onto the bar. The customers of The Sugarshack had taken note of Lyric's savant-like approach to drink creation, and so had the management. Tips on Lyric's shifts were 20% higher than any other shift in the cafe, no matter what time of day he was working, and sales shifted staggeringly from brewed coffee to espresso beverages when he was working the bar. In short, Lyric was a cash cow for the shop, and the staff who worked along-side him.
Which made it so much more difficult for Lyric to process what had happened after closing the cafe.
At 10:55pm, as was the standard practice of the cafe closers, Chelsea, his closing partner, had put the "Closed" sign up in the window as she began sweeping and mopping the front of house.
Lyric was putting the final buff and polish on the chrome of the espresso machine, having cleaned the grinders, group-heads and porta-filters a few minutes prior.
The last of the clientele, noticing the shift in energy and earnestness in the staff, had downed their drinks or asked to have them put in paper cups to go. At 11:01 the last customer stepped into the darkness beyond the brightly lit section of sidewalk in front of the Shack.
Lyric turned the deadbolt and locked the front door, before turning up the lights in the cafe and switching the music from plastic Latin-dance-world-beat that the Shack's owners liked to the plastic 80s stuff that he knew Chelsea enjoyed.
The sound of a car turning the corner onto Lyric's street interrupted his mental replay of the night's events.
Was it?
It sounded like it.
The car was slowing down at the right place aaaaand, there it was.
The sound of the tires moving off the street and onto the driveway giving a satisfying thunk before the engine was silenced and was replaced by the bing bing bing of an alarm telling the driver that her key was still in the ignition when she opened her door.
Soon, that sound was also gone. Replaced by the solid kathunk of the driver’s side door being shut firmly, only to be followed by the sound of a monstrous key chain being rattled while a key was fitted into a lock.
Lyric began to count down in his head, "3, 2, 1, and," the light from Evelyn's foyer spilled out the sliding doors from the kitchen into her backyard.
The hallway light illuminating her bedroom slightly, allowing Lyric to see into the house and clearly see the hallway.
Any minute now Evelyn was going to step into the bedroom and, "Fuck." Lyric swore to himself as he watched the mass of brown hair, turtleneck and jeans, move hastily past the open bedroom door and straight into the room at the end of the hallway. The room which Lyric knew was the bathroom. This could be a while.
Lyric put his head back down on his knees and went back to rerunning the events of earlier in the evening through his head.
He had just made it back behind the counter and was about to open and cash out the registers when he heard a sharp rapping on the glass of the front door. Keeping his hands down, and leaving the registers in place, Lyric looked up and out the front door.
He hated this part of the evening, the lights of The Sugarshack made the cafe feel more like a fishbowl after dark. Anyone outside the cafe could clearly see into the shop, exactly who was working, where they were, and what they were doing. The only thing in the shop that wasn't visible from the sidewalk, or the street, was the cash registers.
Staring back at Lyric from behind the locked front door was the goofy grin of Eric, Chelsea's boyfriend.
Eric pointed at the lock on the front door and made an opening movement with his hand. Lyric looked around the cafe for Chelsea, but she wasn't in the front of the shop. She must be in the back cleaning bathrooms or getting ready to restock the bar, Lyric thought in the moment.
Lyric looked at Eric and shook his head, indicating the lock.
Lyric held up his hands showing all ten fingers, "Ten minutes." Lyric mouthed, clearly.
Eric's face went from goofy to pissed off in seconds. He then said, loudly, "C'mon man! It's freezing!"
Now, it wasn’t freezing. It was unseasonably chilly for late August in lake country, but it was still well above freezing. Lyric noted that Eric was only wearing shorts and a t-shirt, but that was a lifestyle choice and not something Lyric could control.
Darcy, the owner of The Sugarshack had made closing rules absolute. "No one may be allowed into the cafe, after the doors have been locked, and the cash registers have been opened for cash-out."
Darcy was pretty chill, but this was a hard and fast rule.
Lyric just looked at Eric and mouthed, "Sorry," before going back to his job and preparing the deposit from the night's sales and putting it into the drop-safe bolted to the floor behind the counter.
About the time he had finished with the tills, Chelsea sauntered back to the front from the stockroom.
"Wow!" He hadn't meant to say it out loud, but sometimes Lyric's inside voice had a mind of its own.
"Do you approve?" Chelsea asked flirtatiously, as she put a little bounce in her step and rounded the corner of the bar area.
Chelsea had clearly not just been cleaning the bathrooms or prepping for re-stocking. While she always looked good, tonight she looked put together.
Her hair, normally pulled back into a pony for working in the cafe, was now down and dropping auburn waves over her shoulders and down her back.
She had touched up her makeup wearing more than Lyric was used to seeing, which gave her eyes a sultry and playful look.
Gone was the staff-approved collared white button-down shirt, replaced by a scoop necked number under a peach-coloured cardigan, both of which gave Chelsea's breasts the freedom to move that Lyric had until now never seen. It wasn't just her step that was bouncing.
The magic spell of her sudden appearance was shattered by the force of the now pounding on the front door as Eric was clearly unhappy at being left outside in the "cold".
"What's he doing out there?" Chelsea asked.
"You know what Darcy says about having people in the cafe after closing, Chelsea," Lyric answered, "He showed up after I had locked up and I had the tills open."
"Oh yeah, I forgot to tell him about that," she said vapidly, before turning eyes on Eric and walking towards the front door.
As she got closer, her eyes narrowed a little, "I see YOU dressed up for tonight," Chelsea said to Eric pointedly.
