Kyle

Kyle worked at a toll booth on the Ohio Turnpike in the far outskirts of Toledo. Most other kids did toll work as a summer job, older high school kids or college kids home for the summer. Kyle worked all year though, and since he really had no other major commitments, they liked to put him on the night shift, which wasn't really so bad except that he didn't get much time to see Megan, his girlfriend. She worked down the road at the Cinnabon in the service station, usually weekend shifts, as she was also going to school for nursing at the University of Toldeo. Kyle had decided not to go to college. He had done fine in high school, played on the hockey team, had a weekly column in the school paper, his counselors considered him a promising case. Something about the idea of college didn't suit Kyle, though. He was more content than most people thought to just sit alone all night, taking tolls, making jokes on the walkie-talkie to the other toll takers and writing stories.
Kyle was in the middle of one of these stories, around 2:15 in the morning, when Megan called. Strictly speaking, he wasn't supposed to spend a lot of time on the phone when he was on the job, but the liklihood of the authorities checking up on him at this hour was slim, and either way, he had mastered the art of swiveling his chair away from the security camera to make it look like he was just resting his hand on his temple and muttering to himself. Kyle turned away and answered the phone.
"Hiiiiiii, baaaby," Megan said loudly.
"Are you drunk or something?" Kyle said teasingly.
"Wellllll," she said, "Maybe a little. But I just wanted to call and see how you are, y'know....I love you sweeeeeetie! What are you up to?"
Kyle twiddled his pen thoughtfully. "Just writing a love poem for--"
"OhmyGod, Jessie! Sorry, my friend Jessie just showed up, hang on one second--okay, sorry, what?" Megan said absentmindedly.
"Just writing a love poem for you. Hey, I think someone is coming up the road, so I'm going to let you go. Take care babe, I'll call you tomorrow."
Kyle turned back toward the window. He hadn't been lying, a car was coming. After two years of toll booth work, Kyle could start to recognize some types of people driving out from Toledo in the middle of the night. The car revealed itself to be a Fiat driven by a frazzled-looking woman in a navy power suit. She rolled down the window.
"Hi...how much is the toll again?" she asked, her eyes darting around for the fare poster.
"Three dollars, ma'am," he said before she could find it.
"Oh, right. I see now." She fumbled in her pocketbook for singles. “Do you have change for a five?”
Kyle handed two dollars through the window in exchange for her five, and she drove off again.
Kyle decided she couldn’t have been a native Ohioan, or she would have known the toll. But she was in a power suit, so she was there for business. He couldn’t make himself curious enough to wonder more, so he turned back to the page he was writing.
He had been lying about the love poem, however. The story he was writing now had love in it, it was true, but the handsome lead was a Colombian drug lord who was usually more concerned about whose heads were flying in his backyard than about the dainty flamenco dancer who begged for his cold heart. Kyle knew it was ridiculous. He had spent the first year writing careful observations and drawing meaningful conclusions from the drivers who passed robotically along his window. He had a whole wealth of notes and dialogues and poems about the crying girl in the scarf, the teenagers with pot smoke rolling out their open windows, the man with the american flag tattoo and the rottweiler in the passenger seat, and the woman playing sexy in designer sunglasses. He’d seen so many, and now he knew that they could only be caricatures, no matter how important their lives seemed to them. So he tucked away his thoughts and notebooks and starting writing lurid, awful stories about characters who knew they were characters and stories where everybody dies for love.
Kyle’s walkie talkie fuzzed on and he heard Fiona’s voice from the one other open toll booth.
“Some lady just asked to borrow my chapstick. Do you think that’s weird?” she asked.
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess that’s kind of weird,” Kyle replied after a pause. “Did you let her?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah. Kind of weird,” Kyle said. “I’d throw it out if I were you.”
Fiona sighed. “You’re probably right. Damn.” The walkie talkie clicked off.
Fiona was all right, Kyle thought, as another car pulled up, an old gray Volvo in need of a new muffler. The driver cranked down the window by hand and extended a handful of coins and one dollar bill.
As Kyle counted out the coins, the man in the car smoothed back a head of grizzled, greasy hair.
“I bet you see a lot of strange people driving through here around this time, huh?” he said, chuckling.
“Sometimes, yeah,” Kyle said, as though he hadn’t heard it before.
“If I had your job, I bet I could write a book about all the characters you must run in to. Must be fascinating work,” he mused.
“It’s alright.”
The man seemed put off by Kyle’s lack of enthusiasm for the subject and started cranking his window back up, but stopped midway for one last comment.
“You know, you’re young though. You still have time to go and make something of yourself. You should think about going back to school.”
Kyle clenched his teeth briefly, then relaxed.
“Actually, I think I’m fine. Thanks though.”
The man drove off, and Kyle picked up his walkie talkie.
“Hey Fiona, some guy just told me I should make something of myself.”
“Fuckin’ asshole,” said Fiona.
“Yeah. Damn.”