From the Vault: Chapter 21.5
Juicy, Fruity, Spicy + Surprise Employee Appreciation Pizza Party
continuity: Set directly between chapters 21 and 22, this deleted chapter contains two scenes, “Juicy, Fruity, Spicy” and “Surprise Employee Appreciation Pizza Party.”
content warnings: none
“Anyone have a 20 on Eli?”
Stanley’s walkie talkie warbles halfway through his first tour. He’s in the middle of one his favorite anecdotes about how the episode “The Compartment” was reportedly inspired by the time Victor Kane and Sam Schatz went missing on set for an hour only for some hapless second AD to find the two had somehow accidentally locked themselves in a maintenance closet.
Stanley yanks the walkie from its holster beside his water flask and hands it to me as he continues regaling the crowd.
I step into a quieter corner, away from the laughter. “Go for Eli.”
“What’s her 20?” The background noise on the other side obscures the speaker’s identity. The same must be true here, given that they’re talking about me in third person. “Never mind, just send her to ticketing.”
It’s a scorching Saturday in late July; I was warned I might be recalled if things got too busy, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the barn as busy as this. The ticketing line coils around itself and snakes outside, and the scene in gift shop looks like Black Friday-chaotic. I’m risking crowd crush as I elbow my way to the ticketing counter. Guests clamoring, track lights glaring, bodies radiating heat and acrid sweat—it’s an express track to overwhelm.
But I have to keep it together. This is my job.
“There you are,” Ford seethes after he finishes giving a truncated spiel to a family of five. “You were supposed to start covering 51s ten minutes ago.”
I want to protest. Break coverage is on the schedule every day. Today, the schedule says that both fully-staffed counters will cover their own breaks while I shadow Stanley’s tours. Now Ford’s yelling at me as if I’m supposed to have just known—
A glance at my schedule confirms I’m right, but I won’t win this argument. I just go stand behind Jaime until he finishes his transaction because he’s scheduled for the first break. I try to lose myself in the familiar rhythm of ticketing, but speed-ticketing is a whole other game. I’m going hoarse, shouting like a carnival barker just to be heard over the riotous noise of other guests on all sides. I don’t pitch memberships or solicit donations. I don’t check student or military IDs before giving the discounts. I don’t breathe between transactions.
When Jaime comes back a few minutes late, I take over TJ’s till. When they come back twenty minutes later, I circle back to Ford, who chastises me for the delays before going on his own break. He returns ten minutes later with military precision, but then already noon.
I start my morning break just as Lola leave the gift shop for lunch. One look at the her face, and I know better than to ask how she’s doing. In the break room, she flops down on the ragged couch in the corner and throws her forearm over her eyes. Divya, Miles, and the weekend A/V guy look just as haggard. The groaning box fan speaks for everyone.
Quietly, I fetch two vintage NSX mugs from the cabinet and fill them from the blissfully frigid water cooler. I sink into a bean bag that’s probably spilled some beans in its day and hand Lola a mug.
“Want me to grab your lunch?” I ask quietly.
She shakes her head. “Just need a minute. Talk to me. Tell me something juicy.”
“Juicy?”
“Fruity, spicy—I’ll take what I can get.” Lola opens one eye. “What’s going on with you and Ef?”
“What? I don’t know—”
“I’d say you could cut the sexual tension with a knife, but that’s been true for a while now.”
“What are you talking about? Did he say—”
“That bicker-banter thing you do. It’s always intense, but lately… you have inside jokes now? He wants to make buttons for you.”
I blush furiously; I hope I can blame it on the heat. “They’re for you, too.”
Lola sits up, rocks her neck from side to side, cracking out the kinks. “Eli, please.”
“He seriously didn’t say anything to you?”
Lola shrugs. “He doesn’t talk about that kind of thing with me. I didn’t know he was with Thérèse until she came up and kissed him after some rally speech, and I found out they broke up three weeks later when she threw a tomato at him at the next rally. Or maybe that was a farmer’s market.”
“A tomato?”
“Heirloom.”
“But you two are best friends. Why wouldn’t he—”
“Because that’s how it works. Ever since kindergarten. He’s my ride-or-die moral compass, and I’m his getaway driver. I show up when and where he tells me, but I don’t want to get in the weeds with him unless the when and where is the community garden. And he listens to me talk about all the guys, girls, and alternatively-gendered babes I date, but he doesn’t ask me why—” Lola gets this far-off, distant look that goes beyond a morning of retail fatigue. “We don’t ask for more than the other gives.”
Laid out so clinically, it almost sounds… sad. I’ve always envied their friendship, but now I worry about… everything. Who’s this mystery girl Efraín dated? Is he over her? Is there really any room in his heart for anything other than the Cause?
I also worry whether anyone ever asks Lola the whys behind her chisme, but I’m certainly not the right person to start.
“He’s definitely into you, if that’s what you’re worried about. He doesn’t need to tell me. Pretty sure they can spot his cartoon heart eyes from the International Space Station.”
“You mean the steam coming out his ears?”
“Both.”
“What about me?” Right now, I can visualize that cartoon image of my heart bouncing in and out of my chest.
“You need me to tell you how you feel?” Lola asks, laughter in her voice.
“Maybe?” I’m not shy about being neurodivergent, but there’s something mortifying about talking about my emotional illiteracy. “It’s an alexithymia thing. I have trouble interpreting my own emotions, let alone other people’s. Usually, it’s manageable. I can pass the class without doing the reading. That’s what Cliff Notes and film adaptations are for. But Efraín…”
Efraín is a test I can’t cheat, and never have I ever been so sure I’m failing.
“Do you like him?”
“You mean, do I like like him?”
Lola rolls her eyes. “Sure, that.”
“Is it possible to like like someone without actually liking them because, honestly—”
Lola swats me with a particularly sad couch pillow. “Lemme stop you there. I can’t tell you how a crush is supposed to feel. They don’t all feel the same for me, so how am I supposed to know if yours would feel the same as any of mine? But I can tell you that you always seem to care about his opinion more than anyone else’s. You’ve always cared what he thinks of you, and you... You never care what anyone thinks of you.”
That’s categorically false, but my throat’s gone dry, as has my water mug. This is the part where I’m supposed to reassure her that I cared about what she thought of me when we were fourteen, even if I did a shitty job of showing it.
“I think my break’s over,” I mutter.
“But lunch just started.”
“Yours, yeah. This was my break.”
“Fuck.”
My feelings precisely.
After the longest, most grueling day in my customer service career,
all I want is to go home, drink a six-pack of off-brand sparkling water, and collapse on my bed with Sputnik while I binge literally anything other than Nuclear Seasons.
But work has no regard for what I want.
Every time I’ve been in the break room today, it’s looked like a triage tent in a war movie, floor staff convalescing in exhausted silence before soldiering back to the front. That’s what I’m expecting when I clock out, my own muscles stiff, a tension headache ricocheting around my skull.
What I find is a different kind of warzone entirely.
If the break room looks like an under-served public school kindergarten classroom at the best of times, now it looks like the cafeteria had a food fight in said classroom.
Stanley, who’s heading up at the same time as me, lets out a low whistle. “It’s been a long time since we had a seep.”
“A seep? Like a leak?”
“No, no. S-E-A-P-P. Surprise Employee Appreciation Pizza Party.” He shrugs. “That’s what I call them, anyway.”
On the counter, there are two leaning towers of pizza boxes from Viva la Pizza—notoriously the cheapest pizza joint in town—and bulk store-brand soda.
“Hey!” Lola waves us over with a folded slice of pizza, far perkier than she was five hours ago. “Don’t clock out yet!”
“Anya said it was okay to stay clocked in as long as we stayed an extra half hour,” Naomi says without looking up. She’s carefully blotting grease off with a single-ply napkin.
“But we can’t stay. We have—” No established code name for our covert guerrilla union. Lola’s “baby socialist fight club” lacks subtlety. “Don’t we have somewhere to be?”
“No, that was rescheduled.”
“We’ll head to my place when this is done,” Lola explains. “Don’t worry, I’ll drop you off at home or Lou’s first.”
I nod, ignoring the guilt lancing down my spine. No one questioned me when I said I didn’t want to be the face of the pronoun button actions. No one I demanded I explain my reasoning, that, after all my official griping, it would be too easy for management to identify me as employee zero. Everyone seemed to take my emotional exhaustion at face value, offering that damn escape hatch without me asking. Efraín asked for my input on design because he wanted to get it right, but everyone’s taken it as a given that I won’t be participating in today’s after-work—post-SEAPP—button-making party. I have to keep reminding myself it’s a good thing. They’re not asking for more than I have to give, even if I feel like I should be giving more.
I clear my throat. “So do we have any idea why they’re paying us to eat the worst pizza in town?”
“I wouldn’t call it the worst,” Naomi says.
“You sure about that?”
“I’m sure it’s free pizza,” Lola replies before taking a bite.
“No, it’s really not,” Efraín says, coming up out of nowhere.
“It’s not pizza, or it’s not free? Because it tastes like pizza. Well, it tastes like cheesy cardboard, but—”
“It’s not free because this isn’t a staff appreciation party.” Efraín drops his voice, but it’s pointless when the entirety of the Guest Services and Security teams are here, talking amongst themselves. “It’s a captive audience meeting.”
“A what now?” Lola nearly drops her pizza.
“Classic union-busting tactic. They ply us with free food and pair it with a lecture about how we’re all such valued members of the team, so why don’t we act like one? Just you wait.”
“Well,” Stanley says, “I’m going to pop some Lactaid and grab a few slices of cheesy pepperoni cardboard. What about you guys?”
Efraín pulls a pack of vending machine Oreos out of his pocket and takes a seat next to Lola.
“Not hungry,” I say as I take the seat next to him. It’s not a lie. I’m physically too tired to eat. “Do they realize that sixty-five percent of the population is lactose intolerant?”
“Of course not,” Efraín snorts, “because that’s the global population. Only—what, fifteen percent?—of white people are lactose intolerant.”
“See, if you tried to tell them that, they’d probably just say that’s evidence that race is biological rather than a construct.”
“No, it’s—”
“Hey,” I say. “I’m on your side. While I may not be strictly lactose intolerant, I’m an Ashkenazi Jew of erratic digestion. They should really have options other than pizza. Options that accommodate a wide variety of dietary needs and restrictions.”
Efraín gives me a particularly inscrutable look, then offers me an Oreo. I take it for his sake. If there is one thing I know about Efraín, it’s that he needs to feel needed.
Stanley returns with his pizza and TJ in tow. Our little group makes easy conversation. At some point, Efraín surreptitiously scoots his chair closer to mine, and if I sag against his shoulder, surely that’s not suspicious. If gals can be pals, this is just boys being besties. Just fellow workers being comrades, and yeah, no, he would definitely never kiss me again if I tried that joke out loud.
Everyone’s run out of pizza by the time Dagny and Anya join the party. Anya’s shrill whistle shatters any illusion that this was ever a party.
Then Dagny takes the proverbial stage at the front of the room. There in her pearls, crisp linen blazer, California sundress business casual. She waves that pageant-royalty wave. “I won’t take up too much of your night, but after a hectic day like today—the busiest this summer, per preliminary ticket sales numbers—I just want to thank all of you for your hard work, every day, out there on the floor with our guests. Especially as we head into the busiest weeks of the season, all leading up to this year’s very special, VIP anniversary party, it’s important to take some time to reflect on what a privilege it is to work here.
“I want to thank you for being part of the Nuclear Seasons Experience family—because this has always been a family business. My family’s ranch, where I was born and raised, where this show we all love was made. My father’s life’s work and legacy. This is so much more than a museum; this is my life’s work and my family’s legacy—my whole heart.
“It goes without saying, doesn’t it, that everyone in this room—everyone who puts in the work here, day in, day out—is family. We look out for our guests, and we look out for each other. Because that’s what families do; they take care of each other.
“So let today be a reminder. I will always look out for and look after my family. I know I speak for Anya, Billy, and our whole leadership team when I say: We’re here for you. We care about you. And we want you to know that if you ever have a problem, if you need help, if you’re concerned about something here in our workplace—our home—then we urge you to please bring your concerns to your supervisor so we can help. Please. Help us help you, and we’ll all keep being one big happy family.
“Thank you, everyone, and have a nice night. Don’t forget to clock out as soon as you’ve finished your pizza!”