Brief
Stacey Hobbs was pretty in a way that didn't demand anything from anyone. Long highlighted hair that fell in waves she hadn't done anything particular to earn, nails done in something pale and iridescent, the kind of effortless put-together that came from growing up in a house where the products in the bathroom were good ones. She was wearing the Wazzles uniform, a specific, punishing shade of red, and it looked fine on her, which was unfair, and she was completely unaware of it, which somehow made it worse. There was a mess of colorful bracelets on her wrists.
What got most, watching her work the register, was the absence of performance. Girls who looked like Stacey usually had something running underneath, some low current of awareness, a subtle accounting of how they were landing. She didn't seem to have that switched on, or maybe she'd never needed it. She smiled at the next car pulling up to the window and it was just a smile, open and a little goofy, the kind that made the person receiving it feel oddly lucky. She keyed in the order with those pale nails, said something that made the driver laugh, laughed back. She looked like someone the world had been mostly kind to, and she looked, against all reasonable expectation, like she hadn't let it make her mean.
Stacey looked like she wanted people dead.
That was the first impression. That was the only impression, if someone caught her in the wrong moment — standing there with her blonde hair and her pink nails and her face doing absolutely nothing, the default expression somewhere between I am thinking about something very far away and I have already judged you and the verdict was not good. The kind of face that made you second-guess your order before you'd even opened your mouth.
A man in a sedan pulled up to the drive-through window and visibly hesitated.
Stacey was staring at the middle distance, one hand resting on the counter, the other holding a pen she wasn't using. Her face was a closed door. The sedan idled. The man cleared his throat.
She blinked, turned, and the door opened.
"Oh my gosh, hi, sorry, I was literally just —" she waved the pen vaguely, as if that explained it, and leaned toward the window with a smile that arrived all at once, warm and unguarded and slightly goofy. "Okay what can I get you?"
