I looked at the cash the man handed me and groaned. $34.15 exactly. Enough for his pizza, but not enough of a tip. In fact, there was no tip at all. The largest government agency in the United States, the staff of the white house, wouldn’t tip the delivery guy. I lingered in the doorway of the vast entrance before digging my heels into the concrete and returning to the company van. The door rattled the vehicle as I slammed it, settling only after I sat down.
“No tip?” Eric said from the passenger seat while I shoved the change into the bag that went directly to our boss’ pocket. We’d worked together for three years, and had known each other for years before that, so my miffed attitude wasn’t anything new to him.
“No tip. Did they know I served on jury duty? Twice? I’ve done much more for them than they ever have for me.” I zipped the bag shut and tossed it into the backseat.
He shrugged. “Let’s just call it a night. We’ve done our rounds, we can go home, and you can get it tomorrow–”
“I can’t wait that long!” My hands pounded the dash with intense fervor. “A twenty percent tip—which is common courtesy, especially from those rich government junkies—is six dollars and eighty-three cents. I need five dollars and eighty-three cents to pay off my car. That would’ve been perfect.”
“No, it wouldn’t have. That’s a dollar off.”
“I was saving the rest to get a candy bar from the gas station. I had it all planned: pay off my car, get the candy bar, eat it in my own truck bed, and just bathe in that success. You know how long I’ve been saving my tips for this.”
“Since the first day we worked here.” He groaned, placing his head in his hands. “Just… go home. You can get it tomorrow. And fix your hat.”
“Maybe… no. No, you know what? I deserve my tip.” I stood and left the van against Eric’s blaring protests, walking up the stairs and adjusting the cap on my head as I knocked again. Not one security guard looked my way. Was I this worthless? Even the highest level of protection couldn’t spare one thought for us. If we were lucky, this would be the last time they were our patrons.
Silence. I rattled the wood again, and the door opened. Some man in a suit stood, arms crossed—I had no idea if it was the same one that had bested me minutes earlier, but even if it wasn’t, I fully planned on letting whoever this was become informed about their mutual wronging.
He looked unfazed by the emotion staining my cheeks. “Yes, sir?”
I managed one deep breath. “I believe you forgot a tip on your order.”
He stared at me. “A what?”
“A tip.”
“Oh. I didn’t know you needed that.”
“You people run the economy… you are the one person who should know that.”
His eyes scanned my rigid stance, then my red uniform. “Are you Eric?”
“No. I’m Chris.” I paused. “You’re on a first name basis with Eric?”
The man’s face whitened as soon as the words had left my mouth. “I see. You need a tip, then.”
“Yes. I’ve been saying this. At least 20%, please—you know, to be courteous.” Finally. Who knew it would take so long for the government to give up a few bucks? It wasn’t like I was asking for more student loans.
The man gripped my collar and leaned in close. “Alright, listen. 784-5931. Be wary in that delivery truck, and may the Lord protect you, son.” He quickly looked both ways and shut the door.
I never thought that I would have to specify to a federal official what type of tip I’d wanted, but here I was. Standing in front of the White House, with a random number combination instead of my six bucks. I pulled out my grease-stained order sheet and quickly scribbled it down. What did that number mean?
As the car door shut behind me, my mind drifted away from the tip and towards the tip. “Eric, do you know–” I turned to look at him, but he was gone. All that remained was a note on the car seat: Going home. U took 2 long. Uber was $15.
Like hell I would ever pay for his Uber bill. My eyes rolled as I instead focused on the number I’d scribbled.
“Hey!” I called out to the security guard, my paper flapping in the wind as the window squeaked and rolled down. “What’s this number mean?”
He approached, examining it. “Oh, the tip. Aren’t you the pizza guy? You know what to do with it.”
“Are we known around here, or something?” I stuffed the paper into my pocket and sighed. “The other worker mentioned for me to be safe in this van. Does this number connect to that? Am I being paranoid, or is there a problem?”
“Hell if I know. Did you check the car’s manual?”
“This van’s an automatic, not a manual. Damn it.” Curses flew out from under my breath. The thoughts started to spiral: No, Chris. You won’t be able to get that monetary tip today and pay off your car. No, you’ll have to work another day tomorrow. That’s what you get for not driving a stick shift. Isn’t that great? Thanks, government.
“What about the glove box?”
“There’s just a pizza pan.” I moved it aside, and under the spare crumbs, a keycard and a gate number laid at the bottom of the vehicle. “Oh, wow.” Honestly, given the size of the pan, I should’ve assumed that something could fit under it. But who would hide this?
He moved back to his post, and I caught a glimpse of white hanging off his belt—the same type of keycard I had. People must not question me or Eric because, somehow, we were given access to high-profile, top-secret government grounds. No way our customer service was that good.
I grabbed the keycard and scanned it at the door. It didn’t open. I scanned it again, to no avail, and then relented and knocked, humbled by these doors for a third time. A different man appeared, and I held up the card to him.
“No need for the card. I could recognize that franchise logo anywhere. And that sizzling aroma.” He winked at me and held the door wide open. “Come on in.”
The hospitality was surprising considering their lack of gratuity, but I shrugged it off and stepped inside. The paper crinkled in my hands, confusing numbers driving my knuckles white. “I need to see… Gate 21.”
“I already know where you guys go. No worries, follow me.”
The man led me down flight after flight of stairs, and with each step, my unsettlement grew. Why had I never known about our parlor’s secret connection to the United States government? What was the purpose of all this?
We didn’t stop walking until we reached the very bottom. Concrete scratched at my shoes, shooting cold air up my spine as I stepped into the dimly lit hall. Rooms stretched downwards like cells, like time trapped in ominous silence. Yet the man (or I guess guard) didn’t hesitate walking through the hall, and, worried I’d be caught as definitely not the intended worker to be here, I followed.
The numbers ascended until, soon enough, we’d hit the number 21. I checked the guard, expecting him to let me in, but he simply stood and waited with another unnerving wink. My hand slid into my pocket, retrieving the keycard—sleek blue and white, a red star in the corner, not a spot of grease on it. I pushed it against the handle, then tried to open it. Nothing.
“Try swiping it.”
“The White House doesn’t have tap? Really?” A beat. “Okay.” One swipe later and the door swung open, leaving me facing a room no bigger than the company van. A concrete desk and two computer screens sat atop it, each emitting a strong blue light. I pulled at the lamp string above, but it failed to glow. The urge to curse out my luck quickly faded once the guard stepped in and I realized that I was just a random pizza delivery driver. In comparison to my apartment, this place was as elegant as I thought the White House was.
The man grinned. “The mission is almost complete.” The screens flickered again, and he reached behind to tweak some old dials. “I still don’t know how one of you guys managed to convince the president to set this up. I think he knew one of your parents and owed them a favor, but they only tell me so much about this project. He fit everything into the personal luxuries budget—it’s so high, no one would notice a few thousand more put onto it.”
“Thousands of dollars? Why is he spending thousands on…” I leaned in. My eyes squinted, then popped open like they’d been lit on fire. On the left screen stood a bomb icon, a timer, and a building.
My apartment.
The screen next to it was flickering with lines of green lettering. It read,
ORDER TWO PEPPERONI AND RICOTTA PIZZAS, AND A SIDE OF GARLIC KNOTS. DON’T TIP. WE NEED THE TARGET HOME BY 22:00.
“What the hell?” I swung against the screen and it crackled, then appeared clearer than ever. There was my apartment’s overgrown grass, broken shutters, leaf-filled gutters—okay, maybe I shouldn’t have hit the screen so hard—contained by the flashing icon of a bomb. Something shifted in the air, because in the next moment, my throat clogged up and I couldn’t seem to breathe. “We need to turn it off! How…”
Shaking, my hands rummaged through the singular drawer and picked up a device filled with numbers. I found the crumpled code in my pocket and began to type it in: 784-5931. Nothing.
“Oh.” The guard plucked the device from my hands. “That’s what we use to order pizza. And nothing is turning off that bomb, I’m afraid. Another employee took the on and off remote. Once the target’s house is bombed, our work is done, and we’re clearing out this room.”
“Wouldn’t you have to set it off here?” Our eyes met, and even though I kept my stare straight, he could see my anxiety through the way my hands adjusted my hat more.
“There is one other place with these computers set up, if you know where to look.” He pointed at my chest.
“I can find it and shut it off with my own strength. Wow.” A wave of confidence settled in me. He believed in me–
“No, you can’t. Look.”
The screen flickered off, and I faced it. In the reflection, it appeared: the logo of the pizza parlor.
#
The van screeched to a halt and I ran inside without taking out the keys. Vomit and dread was building up inside me; it was nine-fifty, and in ten minutes, my life would explode—literally. The register in front of me buzzed to life, and I went to the settings, desperate to find something that could relate to a bombing. There was only a long, long help center describing all the ways to order a pizza. I quickly closed the screen and wiped the sweat off my face. Soon, it would be over. My apartment, gone. My truck in the garage, gone. All of my hard work would be blown to bits.
I stared at the menu, then slumped in bittersweet nostalgia. The pizzas that built everything I owned. The garlic knots that shaped my wardrobe, my life. All of what I had earned was from years of delivering pizzas from here. All my favorite items even had little stars beside them, as if they knew how important they were to me.
A minute ticked by before, in a gasp, I pulled out my keycard. White, light blue, with a red star in the corner. The same red star as on the menu! The note, decomposed from my sweaty hands, glistened in the fluorescent parlor lights.
784-5931. I had to type in the menu items in a certain order!
From pizza to meatball to fry, I added each item to my cart as they were placed, then hit the button to check out. But the option to pay never appeared on the screen. Instead, all of the lights began to flicker, and the empty floor rose, revealing a secret room. It had two screens, a remote with two buttons, and a worker.
Eric.
His eyes were narrowed at me. “You really should’ve gone home.” He spat.
My heart was pounding against my thorax, making my words splat and stutter. “I can’t believe this.”
“Of course you can’t. You can’t think of anything other than yourself.” Eric stood. “Over the last year, when have you ever split our tips? Just once? Or cover our bill if we go out to eat? Or get drinks?” He scoffed. “You haven’t. You’ve kept every cent for yourself so you can dig yourself out of house and car payments, while I’m stuck at this dead-end pizza job with minimum wage.”
“Let me get this straight,” Now, I was yelling. “You’re bombing my house because I didn’t share my tips?”
“Our tips!” His fist slammed into the second computer, shattering the screen. “If you weren’t so greedy, I’d almost regret destroying everything you built. But some people never change.” He picked up the remote.
“Stop!” I ran around the counter, but it was too late. He’d smashed it. The ‘Off’ button flickered in useless silence.
“It’s gone in a minute. Everything you care about.” Eric whispered. Slowly, he left the store. I paraded after him.
“You haven’t won. It’s just a house and a car. I can make all that back.”
“It’s funny,” He opened the door to the van and sat down, turning on the ignition. “That everyone thinks I’d place the bomb in your house. Even now, you still won’t use your head correctly.”
Something in his tone made me pause. Then, our conversation from earlier rushed back to me:
Fix your hat.
The clock on the wall said it was ten seconds to 10:00 PM. I ripped the hat off my head and chucked it towards the store, running into the van behind Eric before he could lock it. We both braced as the hat twitched, then exploded in a wave of blistering heat. The heavy smell of soot and burnt pizza dough filled my nose as I coughed into the back of the driver’s seat.
Eric was coughing, too, but quickly turned around. “You could’ve just shared!”
“Why would I, when I do all the work? All you ever did was sit in the passengers seat while I ran my ass off delivering pizzas!”
He grabbed me by the neck. “Because that’s how the tip system works when you share a shift.”
“Then maybe help out once in a while.” Weakly, my hand found the glovebox. I smiled. “You get what you put in at a job like this.”
My hand swung and hit Eric with the pizza pan, smashing his head against the smoky window and knocking him out. I stepped out of the car, dragging him out behind me, right to the front of the burning rubble. “I’m not getting written up for this. You can explain it yourself.” I spat.
In the distance, faint murmurs of an ambulance grew. But it didn’t matter—this job wasn’t mine anymore. I fished through his pocket and found what I’d been looking for: a crisp ten-dollar bill.
“Thanks for the tip.” I called back to him as I left the scene and started home. As it turned out, I’d still be sitting in my truck bed the next day, and it would be just as satisfying as I’d hoped.