That guy.
Again.
Everytime he walked into the rental store, it was sort of similar to having a rockstar suddenly wander in. A nonchalant rockstar, the too-cool-to-even-care kind, except in his case Tommy didn’t think it was a front he needed to put any effort into presenting. There was nothing studied about it. He probably really was just that cool, this guy. He’d probably been this übercool as a newborn baby just out of his momma’s womb.
Yup, as far as Tommy could perceive, he was the very epitome of cool.
And Tommy couldn’t actually perceive all that much from behind his thickish, owlish, horn-rimmed glasses because he was at an absolute loss as to how to react to such an impossibly cool customer. It was bad enough when it was normal folks he was dealing with, Tommy’s timidity.
But in the face of the cool customer, the timidity got truly terrible.
Luckily, the cool customer didn’t even bother saluting him. To somebody like him, Tommy must be some sort of insect not worthy of entering into discussion with, not even worthy of acknowledgement and, truth be told, this business of being ignored by the cool customer was a source of unspeakable relief to Tommy. Finding his own voice would have been beyond him under the circumstances. After the first few nanoseconds of the first time the cool customer was here, Tommy had already got his his head ducked down like some miserable mortal which might be going to be struck down by lightning for their insolence if they dared set eyes on the deity radiating mojo over there. And nevermind that the deity was doing that at the miserable mortal’s very own dvd rental shop’s door.
Inside it.
As he sat there behind the counter, perched upon his idiotically high stool, inextricably entangled within the web of his own incurable shyness, Tommy got this weird feeling that in front of such charisma his own insignificant self might be going to disappear altogether, that he might just be going to be zapped out of the universe because the guy’s mere presence here might just annul his, it ate up so much of space, so naturally, and yeah, that was a little scary.
More than a little.
It was kinda terrifying.
So that first time, the cool customer strolled into his small shop without a pause and started exploring the aisles leisurely, the best Tommy could manage to do to fight the threat posed by his interstellar aura was to rearrange the customer cards in alphabetical order.
Anything to keep his hands and eyes occupied.
Anything.
It seemed like the longest time elapsed as he arranged and rearranged and rerearranged the cards in alphabetical order to begin with, and then Tommy was really just messing them up nervously, wondering what in the hell was wrong with him, well, what in the hell was wronger than usual with him today. It must have been a matter of minutes since the cool customer had entered when he was on his way out already. He breezed wordlessly by the counter without stopping to rent any movie. None must have been good enough to grab his attention, thank God, Tommy thought fervently, his fingers rererearranging the cards, for small favours.
The Zs and the As were in a fine mess of a mingle by then.
But the cool customer was most probably gone forever. |
