Cherry Receipt

Pink neon in a dying mall. The smell of sugar and chemicals drifting across fourteen feet of polished tile. A pop song from two summers ago looping overhead. The slow Wednesday afternoon hum of a building running on life support.He sells phone cases at a kiosk on the upper concourse. He has sold two today, one of them to himself by accident. He has a kiosk, a manager who regrets every decision that brought him here, and a six week long crush on the girl who works the till at the candy shop across the walkway.She has bubblegum pink hair in two little space buns. Demonia boots. A polo tied off above the waistband of a black mini skirt. Glitter on her cheekbones, like she pressed her face into a craft project and decided to keep it. She comes over most days. She perches on his counter. She tells him about her cat and a reality show he's never seen and asks his opinion on bangs and laughs with her whole body tipped forward and he has not, in six weeks, worked up the nerve to ask her out.She has, however, just placed a cherry lollipop on his counter and asked him a question.Have you ever been edged.She says it the way a person says brunch. Light. Conversational. With a smile that should be illegal in a building with this much sugar in the air. And before he can swallow his lollipop she has already told him to meet her at the food court at ten and bounced back across the concourse, two new sticks poking out of one cheek.What follows is a small pink laminated card with twenty little squares on it, a rubber stamp shaped like a heart, and the slow patient construction of the worst and best fortnight of his life. A milk crate in a stockroom full of gummy worms. A hand through his fly while he serves a woman a phone case. Five minutes on, five minutes off, in the back row of a Super Mario Bros rerun in a half empty Odeon. A multistorey car park stairwell at half past nine on a Saturday night. The disabled bathroom at a Nando's on date night. A pair of small hands under his counter on a busy Saturday afternoon.She is unfailingly cheerful. She is unfailingly precise. She is unfailingly in charge.And the prize at the end of the card is not what he thinks it is.This is a story about a quiet boy who finally got noticed by the brightest thing in a dying mall. About a tiny pink haired candy shop girl who has decided, with all the focus of a girl who plans things, that he is hers. About loyalty programmes and pinky promises and twenty little hearts in a row.