Work Text:
Working at the mall isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. At least, not for Bill Denbrough, college sophomore extraordinaire and current elf to Santa Claus at the Derry strip mall.
When his best friend Richie told him that he had found them jobs for their winter break from school at the mall, Bill was excited, giddy, even. His thoughts were full of fantasies about the discounts at the Gap, or eating leftover fries in the food court. But alas, the job was not only a temporary position, but a humiliating one at that. They made him wear a hat with ears on it, for Christ’s sake, and leggings! And ever since Richie had been fired for trying to get his boyfriend Eddie to “sit on Santa’s lap” while the real Santa was on lunch break, the only upside came when Bill’s younger brother Georgie visited. He was too old to tell Santa what he wanted for Christmas, but he was just old enough to bring his brother a much needed cup of coffee from the kiosk down the hall and to listen to Bill complain about the hoards of screaming children.
Until now, of course. Now, there’s a boy.
Where the North Pole set up is located in between the two corridors of stores and the food court, Bill has a pretty good view into nearly every storefront in the mall. After Richie was fired, management shifted Bill’s position from Santa’s left-hand man (similar to his right-hand man, but with less speaking) to the front of the sleigh to avoid anymore Richie-related incidents. The front of the sleigh was home to a big bag of warehouse candy that all came in plastic bags that Bill is in charge of handing out, but it was also where the stereo was housed. One of Bill’s new responsibilities was to maintain holiday cheer by queueing up as many classic Christmas tunes as he could. He had full control over what songs played and when, although he was highly encouraged to only pick the ones from the corporate approved list of appropriate artists, meaning Mariah Carey was played more than a few times a day.
When Richie found out about Bill’s great new job, he had practically cried, falling dramatically from his feet to the carpet in Bill’s bedroom with a hand against his forehead.
“How could they do this to me? Don’t they know I would have been the greatest elf DJ in the history of elf DJing? What a waste!”
Bill had just laughed and nudged him with the tip of his shoe, telling Richie to be grateful that he wasn’t, or that he’d probably be banned for life from the mall for scarring some children with Marilyn Manson or something. Bill was probably right.
From his new perch at the front of the sleigh, Bill has a direct view of the store diagonal to Santa’s Workshop, which happened to be one of the most quiet in the entire mall. It was a small corporate run bookstore called The Bookbag, one with a wide selection of fiction and a wall of toys near the front register. Local teens often made it a game to run to the back wall labelled Romance/Erotica and read the dirtiest passage they could find out loud before the cashier could catch them and kick them out.
Bill hates the store for their corporate agenda- there were two of them in Derry alone, let alone dozens across the coast, and they seemed to be pushing to replace libraries and small independent bookstores like the little hole-in-the-wall cafe-slash-bookstore that Bill liked to go downtown to write in. His feelings change quickly and drastically, though, when he notices that the usual cashier, a sweet looking blond boy, is replaced by someone who, even at this distance, Bill recognizes as the single prettiest and most attractive man he had ever seen before.
The Boy was almost severe looking, with narrowed eyes and a sharp jawline. There’s something soft about him, though, in the way that his blond hair curls around his face, framing it in a way that drew attention to his eyes. Bill desperately wants to reach out and run his fingers through his hair. The Boy looks disinterested, flipping errantly through a book, until a customer approaches the counter with an arm full of books to be read and the Boy looks up with a kind smile, the soft sort of smile that melts Bill’s heart and leaves him weak-kneed on the floor.
At first, Bill figures that it’s a fluke, just a friend filling in for the usual cashier’s shift for the night, but as the weekend drags on, the Boy is sitting behind the counter more often than not. Bill ends up staring through the window at him more often than not, as well, eyes darting away as soon as the Boy looks up, cheeks red as he continues to pass out candy canes to eager first graders.
And then, their eyes meet. Bill can’t glance away fast enough and he finds himself making eye contact with the prettiest boy in the mall, who smiles that soft smile at him, and his heart skips a beat. He, of course, immediately embarrases himself when he raises a hand to wave and accidentally throws a handful of candy at the children nearest the sleigh. Bill darts his eyes away too quickly to see the Boy laugh, a hand over his mouth and smile wide as could be. It’s probably for the best, too. Bill’s crush wouldn’t be able to handle seeing that.
“You should ask him out,” Richie says, lying on the floor of Bill’s room (as usual), tossing a hacky sack into the air repeatedly.
“Or at least go into the store and talk to him,” Eddie adds, unhelpful as ever.
Bill buries his face into his pillow and lets out a groan.
“I can’t do that,” he whines when he finally comes back up for air, “He’s hot and he’s seen me wearing a fucking elf hat. Richie, you of all people know how humiliating it is to be seen in that thing.”
“Maybe he’ll think it’s hot! He does look over at you a lot, right? Maybe it’s a kink thing; ask him if he wants to take a ride on Santa’s sleigh.”
“Beep beep, Richie,” Bill scowls and reaches a hand out, catching the bag midair before Richie could.
“Fine,” Richie sighs, exasperated, “But don’t come crying to me when someone snatched that hot nerd out from under you and breaks your heart.”
The holidays approach faster now, especially with his job keeping him busy, and Bill does indeed find his heart broken.
It’s the fifth week of Santa’s Workshop, nearly the week of Christmas, when Bill works up enough courage to go into The Bookbag and finally talk to the Boy. He has a whole plan to smile and wave when they make eye contact, end his shift at six pm as usual, go change out of his stupid elf costume, and then go into the store to introduce himself, sans hat.
Richie tries to tell him to just ask the Boy out again, but just asking for the Boy’s name feels like an insurmountable task as is.
However, all that falls away when Bill arrives at work and looks through the glass only to see that the Boy isn’t behind the counter at all. The only person in the store is a tall, broad-shouldered man rearranging a shelf of novels. He smiles as a customer approaches with a question, and his smile is sweet, but not the same. Bill feels his heart sink.
Still, he manages to drag himself over to the sleigh and pass out candy to ungrateful children, playing Wham! on the stereo loud enough to deafen himself beside the speaker through the entirety of his grueling shift that seemed to drag on forever.
He drags himself to the employees only bathroom in the mall that everyone still uses anyway to pull his hat off, change into jeans, and pull a red flannel on over his ugly striped elf shirt. While that only takes him a minute to do, it takes him much more time to work up the nerve to even leave the bathroom.
Twenty minutes pass by quickly, and Bill finds the courage to shake out his arms, smile in the mirror, and tell himself, “You’ve got th-this.” He makes his way to the bookstore.
Bill still doesn’t see the Boy immediately when he reaches the store, but he doesn’t let that stop him, he spent too much time working up the nerve to get here to turn back now. He approaches the counter where the same boy as earlier leans against the register. Bill briefly wonders how they’re hiring all of the prettiest people out of Derry.
“H-hi,” Bill says, the boy’s attention zeroing in on him.
“Hey there,” Mike, as his nametag proclaims, says, “Anything I can help you with today?”
“Uh, yeah, actually. I’m, uhh…” Bill trails off, losing his courage, “Looking for a book about, uh, birds?”
“Right this way!” Mike begins to lead him away from the front of the store as he shakes his head at himself, disappointed in his stupid cop-out. He takes a deep breath and steels himself for embarrassment to actually ask what he came here to ask.
“Where, uh, where’s the usual cuh-cashier? Isn’t the b-blond b--buh-boy usually here?” He says, grazing a finger over the paperback spines on the shelves as they make their way to the non-fiction section.
“Oh, he’s moving to Portland this weekend, so I’m the new guy,” Mike grins and pulls a book off of a shelf labelled Animal/Nature Interest. “Will this one work for you?”
Bill looks down at the book titled A Beginner’s Guide to Ornithology, and despite the feeling that his heart had been cut a thousand times, he gives Mike a weak smile back and nods. Now that the holidays are ending and his dreams of the Boy are dashed, Bill figures he should pick up a new hobby.
“Don’t be so melodramatic,” Richie rolls his eyes, “He was just a boy at the mall; go look now and they’ll be twelve of them in the Gap right this second. Go get over the boy by getting under one of them.”
“I’ll go get under one of them if you don’t learn how to keep a job,” Eddie pushes Richie’s long legs off of his lap. Richie’s new job at the Sunglasses Hut has already brought the news that, unfortunately, due to an incident with a beagle and a pair of Raybans, he has been let go.
“Give Bill a break, melodrama is in his blood,” Beverly says, laughing as she sits on the floor between Eddie’s legs and the coffee table, “Remember when he dedicated his fiction piece to me in ninth grade creative writing?”
“That was a dark time for me!” Bill throws a pillow across the room at her from his position on the couch.
“I just really thought that the Boy and I had this…. connection.” Bill sulks.
And sulks. And sulks. And sulks a little bit more.
In fact, Bill sulks for so long, and so intensely, that even his workplace begins to take notice.
“What do you mean I’m fired? It’s the week of Christmas! There has to be some rule against that.”
“We don’t want to be firing you right now either, Bill. It’s literally the busiest week of the year, but we’ve had more than a couple of complaints from parents about you, and I can’t say I disagree with them.”
“What are you even talking about? I’m great with the kids!”
“Usually, yeah, but whatever kind of a mood you’ve been in this past week has kept you from smiling, and you’ve played some mightily inappropriate songs over the speaker.”
“They’re all Christmas songs, though!”
“The Ramones ‘Baby, Please Come Home’ is not a Christmas song for four year olds, Bill.”
And so now Bill doesn’t have his shitty temporary, seasonal job as an elf anymore. Fucking Doug, his annoying bald manager, hands him his last check and tells him to turn in his uniform after he washes it, as if Bill is actually going to do that. He just rolls his eyes and leaves, keeping his head down after he tears the dumb elf hat off as he walks towards the front door of the mall. He doesn’t spare a second glance back towards the Santa’s Workshop, or even one for The Bookbag.
Bill does look up, though, when he runs straight into someone walking briskly in the opposite direction. He looks up to either apologize or yell at the person, but his words die in his throat when he sees who it is that ran into him.
“Book Boy?”
“Book Boy? Good to know I left an impression, then.” The Boy chuckles good-naturedly, a dimple forming beside his smile. Bill feels his heart beating significantly faster and he grins back, unable to help himself. “I almost didn’t recognize you without your ears.” The Boy gestures to the hat still gripped in Bill’s hand.
“Yeah, well,” Bill used his other hand to rub the back of his neck, “That’s n-not going to be a puh-problem anymore. I got f-f-fired for p-playing the Ramones.” The Boy raises an eyebrow and when he replies, Bill swears that he sees hearts.
“Well, if they don’t like the Ramones, then they’re definitely not worth you.”
Bill’s grin nearly doubles in size before faltering when he remembers why he was playing the Ramones in the first place. “Wait, I th-thought your coworker said you muh-moved to Portland? What are you doing b-back huh-here?”
“To Portland? I would never set foot in Portland if I could help it,” the Boy scoffed, “No, that’s Ben, the other cashier.”
“Oh. Th-then why have you been g-gone all week?”
“This past week was Hanakkuh, I’ve been celebrating with my family.” The Boy says slowly, smile fading a little. “Why, is that a problem?”
“N-no!” Bill assures him, voice high and a little loud. He knew he would fuck it up, but Richie’s voice in the back of his mind telling him that he’s just a boy in the mall kept him from falling apart, ironically enough. “My n-name is Bill.”
“Um, okay. I’m Stan,” Stan. Bill could get really used to saying that.
“Okay, Stan. Will you g-go out to dinner with me?”
“Like on a date?” Stan’s smile returns, along with his dimple. Bill really, really wants to kiss that dimple.
“Like a d-date.”
“I would love to.”