1
Tanner
“You’re a big dumb ugly poo-poo head!”
I peered through the eyeholes of my costume at the angry urchin who’d flung this insult at me. He appeared to be about six or seven, and his round cheeks were as red as pomegranates as he worked himself into a temper tantrum worthy of Veruca Salt.
Glancing around, I attempted to identify the parental figure he belonged to. Unfortunately, none of the nearby adults seemed inclined to claim him. Not that I could blame them. If he was my kid, I’d probably pretend not to know him too.
“I want ice creeeeeeaaaaaaaaaam!” he screamed at the top of his lungs as he stamped his feet on the pavement. “Give me some ice cream RIGHT NOW!”
Grudgingly, I was forced to respect his commitment to his goals, although I dearly wished he’d find someone else to focus his impressively loud displeasure at.
People were staring now, and I scanned the vicinity for an amusement park employee to come to my aid and escort this miniature ball of rage to the security office. Or anywhere, really, that was far away from me. I’d have done it myself, but I wasn’t allowed to speak while in costume in front of the public. It was one of a long list of rules you were expected to follow when assuming the role of Sheriff Scoopy, the official mascot of the King’s Creamery ice cream company.
I felt like I’d stepped into a television sitcom. This was the part at the beginning of the episode where you’d hear a record scratch sound as the image freeze-framed on me in my absurd predicament with a voiceover of me saying, “Yup, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I got into this situation…” At which point the episode would jump to a flashback explaining how a grown man with a college education had ended up dressed as a giant ice cream cone while being verbally assaulted by a child.
A week ago, I’d had a management job at the King’s Creamery corporate headquarters. I’d worn dress shirts and slacks to work every day instead of a puffy ice cream cone costume with a comically large cowboy hat and clown-sized boots. I’d had a desk, for god’s sake, and a computer.
I missed my desk.
As much as I’d hated that sales management job—and I’d hated it a lot—I hadn’t appreciated how lucky I was to have it until I’d been demoted into my current one. My last job might have felt like purgatory, but this one was literal hell.
Which was the lesson my dad had intended to instill when he’d demoted me to my current position. Yes, I worked for my father. Actually, until today I’d worked for my half-brother Nate, who was the vice president of sales at the ice cream company our great-granddad had founded. Nate reported directly to our father, who was the company’s current CEO and chairman of the board.
Over the last ten years, I’d worked my way up in the family business from an entry-level merchandiser position, restocking our ice cream in grocery store freezer cases, to regional account manager for the southwest division. Unfortunately, the higher I rose and the more responsibility I was given, the more obvious it became that I was not cut out for sales.
To put it plainly, I was not a good schmoozer. I did not enjoy chewing the fat or shooting the breeze or any other such thing. All of which made me uniquely bad at my job. So bad that my division’s sales numbers had been on a steady decline since I stepped into the position. My father and brother had repeatedly expressed their dissatisfaction with my performance, but the final nail in my coffin had been the latest batch of quarterly sales numbers. After my brother had finished tearing me a new asshole in front of the entire corporate sales staff, my father had called me into his office and informed me he was transferring me to another part of the company.
Silly me, I’d actually been relieved. Little had I known what punishment my father had devised to teach me a lesson. He’d assigned me to the theme park, where I was now being paid minimum wage to gambol through the crowds of guests in ninety-degree heat wearing ten pounds of synthetic padding.
So that was my record-scratch moment. Pretty dull, as abject professional failures went. It wasn’t particularly television worthy, even if my present circumstances might be entertaining the growing crowd of onlookers.
As the angry child at my feet unleashed a fresh string of insults featuring an impressive variety of euphemisms for excrement, I was relieved to see one of the nearby amusement park patrons look up from her phone with a world-weary expression that could only belong to this brat’s progenitor.
She made her reluctant way toward us, halting a full ten paces distant as she put her hands on her hips and shouted, “Sagacious Braeden Tingle, you stop that right now!”
Sagacious? Why on god’s green earth would anyone do that to a defenseless child? It was the most unfortunate name I’d ever heard, and in my brief tenure at the park I’d already encountered a Katniss, a Parsleigh, and a kid named Senator. If he hadn’t spent the last several minutes screaming insults at me, I would have felt sorry for the poor kid who’d been condemned to go through life with the name Sagacious Tingle.
“NO!” Sagacious screamed at the woman, who appeared more bored than alarmed by his appalling behavior. “I want ICE CREAM!”
“I told you, you’ve had enough ice cream for one day.”
This unsatisfactory answer caused the child-sized hooligan to convulse with a fresh surge of rage. “No no no no NO! Ice creeeeeeaaaaaaaaaam!”
I wasn’t going to say it—or anything, because I wasn’t allowed to talk—but this was what you got for naming a baby Sagacious.
“Come on now.” His mother let out a long-suffering sigh. “Cut it out and apologize to Sheriff Scoopy.”
“I HATE Sheriff Scoopy!” Sagacious rounded on me, red-faced and snotty, his beady eyes burning with such furious intensity it made me recoil. If I believed in the devil, I would surely think this child was his kin. “I hate you I hate you I hate you! You SUCK!”
Then the little shit reared back and headbutted me square in the dick.
Motherfuuuu—
I bit down on my lip to keep from cursing out loud as white-hot pain radiated up through my stomach. Breaking Sheriff Scoopy’s code of silence to cuss out a child in the middle of the family-owned amusement park would probably get me not just fired but disowned.
You’d think the padded ice cream suit would have absorbed the blow, but no. This fucking thing wasn’t even good for that much.
“Sagacious!” the mother snapped, but I heard a note of laughter in her voice. Apparently she found it amusing when her evil offspring assaulted beloved children’s characters in the genitals.
Adding insult to injury, as the stars in my vision cleared, I glimpsed a familiar head of blonde hair heading my way.
Lucy.
Of fucking course. Because why not? The universe was clearly conspiring with my dad to punish me, so now was the perfect moment for my ex-girlfriend to show up.
Unfortunately for me, she worked in the marketing department of my family’s company, which was probably why she happened to be wandering the park with an expensive camera in her hand.
Perfect. Let’s absolutely memorialize my lowest moment in high-definition pixel data.
Six months ago, I’d told Lucy Dillard I loved her, and she’d responded by dumping me like a used condom. My declaration of love had been so repugnant she hadn’t even put her shoes on before fleeing my house. The way the blood had drained from her face, you’d have thought I’d said I wanted to eat her liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.