My coworker kept screaming in my ear every single shift, even after I begged him to stop. So I gave him ten heart-stopping minutes that changed his entire attitude. He thinks the funniest thing a person can do is walk up behind someone who is concentrating and scream directly into their ear at full volume. I am eighteen.
He is thirty-seven. His name is Mitch, and he has worked at the shop for eleven years—a number he brought up so often I heard it in my sleep. He did it to me two or three times a shift, not occasionally, not once. Two or three times every single day I was scheduled with him for five weeks.
The first time I asked him to stop, he laughed at me. The second time, he told me I needed to lighten up. The third time, he told me I was too easy to scare, and that was what made it fun. That third answer is the one I kept coming back to later, because it was honest.
He wasn’t doing it because he thought it was funny. He was doing it because it worked on me and didn’t work on anyone else. I want to explain what it actually does to a person, because I don’t think he ever understood that part—and I don’t think he wanted to. It isn’t the noise.
The noise lasts a second. It’s the rest of the shift around the noise. I’d be at the front counter with a line of six people, counting change into someone’s hand, and part of my brain would be counting while part of my brain would be listening for footsteps on the tile behind me. I dropped a full tray of drinks in my second week because a delivery driver came in through the back and let the door slam shut.
I started standing with my back against the shelving whenever I had a choice, so there was nothing behind me to come out of. I stopped eating in the break room. My hands would shake for ten or fifteen minutes afterward, and I couldn’t sign a delivery sheet without pressing my wrist flat on the counter to steady it. I was tired in a way that sleep didn’t touch.
My mother asked me twice whether I was ill. I told her the shifts were long. That was true, and it wasn’t the answer, and I didn’t give her the answer because I could already hear how it would sound out loud. A grown man shouts at me, and I can’t hold a pen.
There is no version of that sentence that doesn’t sound like something you should be able to get over. My father is a heart patient. His name is Dennis, and he has been on medication since I was nine. I’ve watched him sit down on a curb in a carpark because his chest was doing something he didn’t like.
I told Mitch that. I told him in the stockroom with the door open, in a normal voice, no drama, because I thought a normal voice would work best on him. I said my father had a heart condition and that this kind of thing wasn’t a joke in my family. He said, “That’s your dad though, not you.
”
I said that being related to someone means you learn what it looks like when it goes wrong, and that I didn’t want to spend my shifts finding out how my own body handled it. He shrugged. He said it wasn’t really his concern. I told Dennis about it on the phone that weekend, sitting in my car outside the shop, because I didn’t want to have the conversation in the house.
My father is not a loud man. He listens, and he thinks, and then he says one thing. He said, “Has anyone written any of it down? ”
I said, “No.
”
He said, “Then it didn’t happen as far as they’re concerned. ”
I told him I had told my manager. He said, “Telling isn’t writing. ”
I didn’t understand what he meant at the time.
I thought he was being difficult. He wasn’t being difficult. He had spent thirty years in a warehouse, and he knew exactly how a building decides what is real. Two days later, I tried the only thing I had left.
I told Mitch I was a heart patient myself. It wasn’t true. I need to be clear about that, because it matters for what happened afterward. I don’t have a heart condition.
I made it up on the spot at the end of a shift, because I had run out of ways to say the same sentence, and I thought a diagnosis might land where a request hadn’t. He looked at me for about two seconds and said, “You’re eighteen. ”
I said that had nothing to do with it. He said it kind of did, and he walked out to his car.
The next afternoon, he came up behind me at the prep counter and did it again. So I went to my manager. His name is Caspian, he is somewhere in his forties, and he is not a cruel man—which I think is the part that made it worse. I sat in his office and told him everything in order.
He listened. He wrote nothing down. Then he called Mitch in, and I stood at the counter and watched the two of them through the window in the office door. I watched Mitch nod.
He nodded the entire time. He nodded like a man agreeing with the weather. He came out, walked past me without looking at me, and thirty-one minutes later—because I checked the clock both times—he came up behind me while I was breaking down a box and screamed into my ear so hard that the woman waiting at the till put her hand on her chest. I went back to Caspian the same evening.
He said he had already spoken to Mitch and that sometimes these things took time. I asked him what that meant. He said Mitch had been there for eleven years and that he didn’t believe Mitch meant any harm by it. I said harm and intent are two different things, and that I was only asking him to deal with the first one.
He said he would have one more conversation. He did. Nothing changed. That was the second week.
By the third week, it had stopped being a thing that happened to me and started being a bit. Mitch would catch someone’s eye across the floor before he did it, so they’d be watching. He started announcing it afterward. He would do it and then step back with his arms out, like he had landed something, and two or three people would laugh, because it is hard not to laugh when a man is standing there waiting for you to.
He did it once while I was on the phone with a supplier. I had to call them back and apologize and say the line had cut out. He did it once while I was carrying a full crate of glass bottles down the ramp at the back. I didn’t drop it, and afterward I sat on the bottom step for a while and thought about what would have happened if I had.
A regular customer, an older man who comes in most mornings for the same two things, stopped at the counter one day and asked me quietly if I was all right, and said he had seen it happen twice and that it wasn’t right. I said, “Thank you. ” I didn’t say anything else. I remember thinking that a stranger had noticed in two visits what my manager hadn’t noticed in two conversations.
Zenobia never laughed. Zenobia works the register beside mine, she is about my age, and she started doing this thing where she would say my name loudly when she saw him coming. Just my name, no explanation. So I would have four seconds.
Four seconds doesn’t sound like much. Four seconds was the difference between flinching and falling. She did it maybe forty times over three weeks, and she never once made a thing of it. One evening, while we were cashing up, she said to me, “You know it isn’t you, right?
”
I asked her what she meant. She said, “He doesn’t do it to me. He doesn’t do it to the lad on nights. He does it to you.
”
I said I knew that. She said, “Then stop trying to be less scared. That’s not the problem that needs solving. ”
I have thought about that sentence more times than I can count.
Brinley never laughed either. Brinley is a coworker who covers the back half of most shifts. She’s older than me, quiet in a way that people mistake for not paying attention. She talks maybe twenty words a shift.
She restocks, she counts the safe, she goes home. I had barely spoken to her. I didn’t know she was watching anything. I found out in week four.
I was refilling cups, and she came and stood next to me and said, without looking up, “How many times today? ”
I said, “Three. ”
She said, “Same as I have. ”
And she took out a small notebook, the kind with the wire spiral at the top, and showed me a page.
There were dates down the left side. There were times next to them. There was a column with a letter W in it, which she said meant she saw it happen herself, and a column where she had written what I said afterward, if I said anything. She said she had started on the ninth of the month, because she had heard me ask him to stop in front of her and then watched him do it again the same hour.
And she said she didn’t know what she was going to do with it, only that somebody in the building ought to be writing it down. There was a second letter next to some of them, an A, which she said she would explain another time. She turned the page, and there was another full page, and then most of a third. I stood there with a stack of cups in my hands and read down the times.
Some of them I remembered. Some of them I didn’t, which frightened me more, because it meant there had been enough of them that they had started to blur into one long noise. I asked her why she hadn’t told me. She said, “You had enough going on.
”
That is the whole of what Brinley said about it. That is Brinley. So I sat in the break room after close on a Thursday and thought about it properly, start to finish, for the first time. Caspian had spoken to him twice.
Twice was the number he was proud of. Asking hadn’t worked. Explaining hadn’t worked. My father hadn’t worked.
A made-up diagnosis hadn’t worked. And the manager hadn’t worked. I kept coming back to what Dennis said about writing it down. Sitting in that break room, I finally understood what he meant.
Because Brinley had done the writing, and it hadn’t changed anything either. And that was when I worked out why. A page of dates only matters if somebody is standing in front of it who cannot walk away. Nobody had ever put Mitch in front of it.
Nobody had ever put Caspian in front of it either. There was one thing left that I had never tried: letting Mitch find out what the inside of it feels like. Not the noise. The ten minutes afterward, when your body is doing something and you can’t make it stop.
I told my coworkers before the Friday shift. I got there twenty minutes early, and I told them in the stockroom, all five of them, exactly what I was going to do and exactly what I needed from each of them. And I told them they could say no. Nobody said no.
Zenobia would be the one who came and sat with me and held my hand and told me to stay with her. Another would say out loud that the hospital had already been called, so that no one actually rang anyone. Another would say, when asked, that yes, I had mentioned my heart multiple times, and that she had personally heard me tell Mitch directly. That last one was the only line I scripted word for word, because that was the line that had to land.
Zenobia asked me what we did if he actually called an ambulance. I said we let him, and then we told them the truth the second up, and I would take whatever came of that. She said that was a stupid plan, and that she would keep her own phone in her hand the whole time and make a real call the second it stopped being a game. Somebody asked how long we were going to run it for.
I said ten minutes. I picked that number because ten minutes was how long my hands used to shake afterward. And it seemed fair to me that he should get the same allowance I got. Brinley said she would keep the notebook in her apron and stay near the counter.
Then I went out front and worked and waited. That is the part I wasn’t prepared for. The waiting. I knew it was coming.
I didn’t know when. And knowing it was coming made every set of footsteps behind me feel like the one. It took him twenty-two minutes. I was at the counter sorting the afternoon order sheets, and I heard the specific sound of him—the way he goes quiet in the last few steps.
And I had just enough time to set the sheets down flat so they wouldn’t scatter. He screamed. I went down immediately. Both knees on the tile, both hands flat on my chest, head dropped forward.
I made a sound like I couldn’t get air in. And then I made it smaller. And then I asked, barely above a whisper, if someone could get the aspirin out of my bag. There was no aspirin in my bag.
There was nothing in my bag that would help anyone with anything. But he didn’t know that. He stood behind me for about four seconds, deciding whether I was messing with him. I didn’t move.
I kept my breathing shallow, and I kept my eyes on the floor, and I didn’t look up at him, because I knew that the second I looked at him, he would read my face and it would be over. Then it started. He crouched down and said my name. I didn’t answer.
He said it again, louder, and then he went for my bag. I could hear him pulling things out of it, faster and faster. The sound of a pen case hitting the tile. He was saying, “Where is it?
Where’s the aspirin? ” to nobody. He didn’t find anything, because there was nothing to find. He stood up and went to the door and called out for help in a voice I had never heard him use.
My coworkers came in looking devastated. Zenobia sat down on the floor, took my hand with one of hers, and kept her phone lit in the other, and did her part exactly the way she said she would. Somebody said clearly that the hospital had already been contacted and was on the way. Mitch stood in the middle of the floor and didn’t know where to put himself.
He kept saying my name like the name was going to do something. He crouched down again and stood back up. He went to the door and looked out at the carpark, like help was going to walk itself across the tarmac. He came back in and stood over me and rubbed his hands together over and over.
Zenobia told him to stay calm, and he said, “I’m calm,” in a voice that was not calm. He asked whether there was a first aid box in the building. Somebody told him, “You’re not supposed to move her. ” He put both hands on top of his head and stood there like that.
He asked if anyone knew whether I had eaten. He asked if the front door was propped so they could get a trolley in. He asked twice, “How long’s it been? ” and both times somebody told him a number that was smaller than he wanted it to be.
He crouched a third time, and this time he didn’t say my name. He just looked at my hands, which were on the tile in front of me, and I let him look at them, because they were shaking. I didn’t have to fake that part. They were shaking because I was on the floor of my workplace running a lie in front of a man who had no idea, and I wasn’t certain I would get to the end of it.
And then, about seven minutes in, he asked the question I had been waiting five weeks for somebody to ask. He said, “Did she ever say anything about her heart to anyone? ”
And my coworker said, “Yes, multiple times. I heard her tell you directly.
”
He didn’t say anything after that, not for the rest of it. He just stood there and looked at the floor, and I could hear him breathing. Caspian came out of the office at minute eight and stopped in the doorway. Zenobia told him what had happened, and Caspian said the word ambulance, and Brinley said from the counter, “Don’t.
Give it a second. ” Caspian didn’t go back into the office. He came out onto the floor and stood at the till and stayed there. At ten minutes, I sat up.
Zenobia let go of my hand and turned her phone face down. I didn’t gasp or stagger. I sat up the way you sit up out of a chair. I looked at Mitch, and I said, “This one was not real.
I told you to stop, and you didn’t stop. That’s what the next ten minutes feel like from where I stand, except mine are real every time. ”
He stared at me. Somebody behind him laughed, and then more of them did, and I watched him turn around and look at every face in the room and work out that not one person there had been surprised.
He said he couldn’t believe I had done that. He said he had been panicking for ten minutes. He said I had deliberately caused him distress, that it wasn’t funny and it wasn’t okay, and that he expected an apology. That word did something to my chest that the tile floor hadn’t.
I said, “I did it once. How many times have you done it to me? ”
He said he had no idea, and that it wasn’t the same. I asked him why it wasn’t the same.
He said because I had planned mine. I said that was the only difference between us that he had got right all day, because I had needed a plan and he had never needed anything. He had just needed me to be standing with my back to a room. And that is when Brinley walked over from the counter and put the notebook down flat on the till in front of Caspian and opened it.
She said, “Twenty-three. ”
Nobody said anything. She said, “Twenty-three times in eleven shifts. I only wrote down the ones I saw with my own eyes, so the real number is higher.
”
And then she read them out. She read the date and the time of each one in order, in the same flat voice she uses to read off a stock count. The ninth at 2:15. The ninth at 4:40.
The tenth at 11:05. She got about nine entries in before Mitch said, “All right. ”
She kept going. He said it again, louder, and Caspian put her hand up without looking at him, and she kept going through that too.
It is a strange thing to stand in a shop you work in and listen to somebody read out a list of the worst minutes of your last month in the voice of a stock take. Nobody moved. A customer came in halfway through, looked at all of us, and went back out. She read the ones with the letter A next to them, which she explained was for the times I had asked him to stop within the same hour—and there were six of those.
She read the entry from the day I told him about my father, and the entry from ninety minutes after it. She read the entry from thirty-one minutes after he came out of Caspian’s office. When she got to the end, she closed the notebook and said, “He has been told to stop eleven times in this notebook. Nine of them were by her.
”
And Caspian just stood there. I watched him read the two entries that had his own office in them, and I watched his jaw go tight, because they weren’t entries about Mitch. They were entries about him. He said quietly, “Why did nobody bring this to me?
”
And Brinley said, “She did, twice. ”
That was the whole reversal. There was no shouting. There was a spiral notebook on a till and a woman reading dates out loud, and by the time she finished, everything Mitch had spent five weeks calling a personality had a number attached to it, and numbers don’t lighten up, and numbers can’t take a joke.
Mitch said, “It was a joke. ”
I said, “A joke is when both people laugh. You were the only one laughing, twenty-three times. ”
He opened his mouth and closed it.
Caspian took the notebook and asked Brinley if he could photocopy the pages. She said he could keep them. She had already written the whole thing out a second time at home. Mitch said, “You’re going to write me up over a laugh?
”
Caspian said, “I’m going to write you up over twenty-three of them. ”
And Mitch looked at me properly for the first time in five weeks, and I could see him doing the thing I had been waiting the whole time for him to do: working out that there had never been a version of this where the number stayed small. Mitch was in that office for forty minutes. He came out with a final written warning, a shift pattern that no longer overlapped with mine, and an instruction that he was to announce himself out loud before approaching any member of staff from behind—a sentence I never expected to hear a grown man be given at work.
Caspian came and found me at the counter afterward and said he should have handled it the first time, and that he was sorry. I said I had needed that sentence three weeks ago. He didn’t argue. He said, “I know.
” Then he said, “I kept thinking it was a personality thing between the two of you. ”
I said, “It wasn’t between the two of us. I asked and he didn’t stop. That’s not a personality.
That’s a decision. ”
He stood there for a second with the notebook still in his hand, and then he said, “There’s a form for this. I should have opened one in week one. ”
I said that there had been a form the entire time, and that it had been in Brinley’s apron, and that the only thing missing was somebody willing to read it out loud in a room he couldn’t leave.
It took ten minutes. Ten heart-stopping minutes on a tile floor. They changed his entire attitude when five weeks of asking him nicely had changed nothing at all. And I’m still angry that those were the ten minutes that worked.
Mitch hasn’t screamed in my ear since. He hasn’t screamed in anyone’s ear since. He says my name from about ten feet away now every time before he comes any closer, and he waits for me to turn around. And there is something in his face when he does it that I don’t think is regret.
I think it is arithmetic. I think he is counting the way I used to count. He has eleven years here. I have five weeks, and I worked out something in five weeks that he never got to in eleven: when a person tells you to stop, you don’t get to decide for them how much it costs.
There is a mirror bolted to the stockroom door now. I put it up myself with a drill I borrowed. I can see the whole floor behind me.
