Leticia’s Debut

Hey everybody! So last week we took another break, from the blog and YouTube. Sorry, it’s kind of busy around here 😅. But we’re back! And because life is so hectic I’ve decided to just go with a serial for the next couple Tuesdays.

Disclaimer: It is NOT the Ashdown Serial… apologies… That’s not ready to meet the world in its entirety yet. FBS (First Book Syndrome).

But! This one does have an official name… and a sort of blurb/cover photo.

Leticia P.

Installment #1: Initial Contracts

For some reason my family believed me in need of a job. Needless to say they were correct. But the trouble of going about and getting one was another matter entirely. 

My mom told me to try the trinket shop down the road that tourists like to stop at… After meandering around for several hours trying to find it with only an old school hand map (How do tourists find such a shop if I can’t?) I gave up, and found myself in front of the Louisville Eatery. 

Terrible name, but I could work with it. 

Now, my town is small, but the Louisville Eatery is massive. Ridiculously so. They’ll always need employees. I thought as I made a fatal decision and strode inside. Welp, never coming back from that optimistic step in the door… The door said push, but of course, I pulled.  

After a long chat with the lady at the front desk about her struggling photography business I was directed to the infamous “West Wing” and told to wait for Gretchen. 

Gretchen?! I stared at myself in the illy placed mirror across the aisle of the table I was seated at. I widened my eyes at myself. Gretchen… What had I gotten myself into?

“Leticia?” 

I sat straight, fully expecting an old tottering woman with crooked yellow teeth and a set of tortuous tools to interview me with. 

Instead, a pleasant middle-aged woman with dark hair, dark eyes, and large glasses that made her look like a natural kind of pretty appeared in the doorway. “Leticia?”

I gave a sheepish laugh as I stood… “That’s me.”

I nearly passed out on my way to the door. (Stood up way too fast.) But I made it to the interview with fully recovered vision and tried to not look terrified of the two people facing me. 

A spindly old man with the longest beard I’d ever seen, and a young man with whitish foggy eyes and no beard at all. 

The kind lady with the big glasses took a seat in the corner with pen and paper.

Apparently the Louisville Eatery doesn’t have enough money to buy a tape recorder and makes the nice lady do it instead. (Gretchen, her name is, but I’d rather call her the nice lady because it sounds a little better.)

The interview went smashingly… *cough* Well, it was kind of a blur. But at the end the owner of the company shook my hand and told me they had a job for me. I can’t remember which of the two men the owner was… probably the older one, but I wasn’t paying attention. He sent me home with an armload of paperwork and said he’d see me the following Monday. So I’m guessing it went “smashingly”… Since being hired was kind of the goal and all. 

But I had no clue how to fill out that paperwork. 

I agonized over it all of Friday… nearly died of self-inflicted hair-loss Saturday, and finally figured it out Sunday. My internet history will never recover because of it. The FBI are going to start wondering if I’m a IRS aspiring, routing account obsessed, slip-resistant shoe nut who happened to search: “best type of working clothes” approximately thirteen times in a row. 

But I finished the paper work. Just in time to turn it all in on Monday. I handed it to the manager who greeted me at the door. Turns out he wasn’t my manager and he was waiting for another new recruit. Whoops. 

The amount of humiliation I unintentionally put myself through is less than desired. 

Oh. And shoes. I needed shoes. Which I’d completely forgotten about until I stepped inside the building and saw the glistening tile floor… about an inch deep in water. 

Slip-resistant shoes to be exact. 

But at that moment I don’t think many people noticed. Several were running around the large kitchen yelling for someone named Fred… never heard of him; and everybody else was trying to sop up the inch deep water with rags. 

Rags.  R a g s.

I refrained from pointing out that it wasn’t going to work… considering this was my first day and all. I strode, unnoticed, into the ladies restroom… which was really ⅓ bathroom, 99% lockers and hair-nets. 

It took me five minutes to find my locker. Labeled “Leticia P.” They couldn’t even spell my last name… they couldn’t spell Poppins? What kind of big macho business can’t spell Poppins? Everyone else has a last name… How come I don’t get one?

It took me a moment to look around and realize everyone else had locks on their lockers too. I looked down at mine… The door was half-way off its hinges. I nudged it like a scared adolescent nudges a toddler to get them to stop crying. 

The door didn’t acquiesce. No valuables in the locker it is. I nodded and set my hands on my hips, feeling confident about my decision. And then turned around to see myself dressed for dishwashing… Mom jeans and all… and realized I had no clue where my manager was. Or what I was supposed to do. Darn it.

There you have it! The first installment! I’ve never written in that style before, except for a short story I wrote ages ago (it seems) for my grandparents. Do you like the style? Did it make you laugh? (I hope so, since I was aiming for coming-of-age comedy 😉). I’ve never written with a premise like that before either, to my younger writer self those kind of stories were boring… But who knows… It may go somewhere, someday. 😀

And with that, I wish you the best! (Thanks for sticking with us! See you next Tuesday Lord-willing with the second installment!) ~Louise