He’s here more often than I am, and the people here like him less than the freebie skater boy. Sure he’s only a kid, but there’s something about him that just doesn’t sit right with the people around him.
His height is basically non-existent. He is, at best, four-foot-something. Shaved head, big teeth, and he’s always “dancing”. I’m sure to him it looks like he’s the next Justin Timberlake or Michael Jackson or some other smooth pop-star, but in his outward appearance he looks awkward and corny. Of course there’s nothing wrong with awkward and corny — I myself was an utterly terrible mixture of those two when I was his age. The difference, however, is that I wasn’t so outwardly and inexplicably rude to the people around me.
He comes in every night with a man that appears to be his grandfather — though it could be his dad, I won’t pretend to know. They don’t really talk to one another even when they leave the store and sit for a couple of hours at a table outside. The man he comes in with orders a tall coffee, as plain and bold and black as tar. He used to order the kid a cup of water but has since stopped that because they started charging for it. While the older man waits for his drink, the kid runs or walks or dances around the store as if it were his home. He bumps into people and doesn’t say “excuse me” or apologize, he’ll — no, look, one time he came up to me and stared at my laptop screen for a solid minute before looking at me and saying “‘Sup?”
‘Sup? ‘Sup? Who the hell does this shortstack think he is?
Like the freebie boy, this one has a reputation as well. Where the other kid asks for free stuff, this one is known for his rudeness and inability to stop doing things when people ask him to stop. He’s known for his sense of entitlement.
“Is he in school?” asks one of the baristas.
“No, I don’t think so,” starts another, “I asked him if he was and he told me he wasn’t allowed to go to school.”
They laugh in disbelief. Not allowed to go to school? That’s crazy talk.
“One time I caught him with his hand in the tip jar!” says an employee.
“Oh my god! What did you do?”
“I yelled at him! I told him to get his hand out of it and told him to leave before I called the cops!”
“That’s crazy. He’s so rude!”
They laugh again, this time in agreement. They discuss a time when he purposely knocked over a container of half & half and ran out before they could get to him. Why they even let him back inside is beyond me, why they haven’t talked to the man that brings the boy in is even further beyond me.
Behind me sits another man on a MacBook, and through the sounds of spitting espresso machines and laughing baristas I hear four simple words roll off his tongue…
What a little shit.
The People Watcher 