When I Graduated From High School I Applied to Five Colleges and None of Them Accepted Me by Shayla Frandsen

I was so desperate for work that I wanted to shout Hallelujah the very second they hired me over at the 7-11 and not only was I desperate but I didn’t know any better because I took the night shift which is when the pinheads would come in and try to steal stuff or loiter like they were waiting out a storm and anyway that’s what my boss called them, pinheads, and my mom was so worried about me working the night shift alone that she mailed me pepper spray with a picture of the American flag on the canister and called me like four times every shift and I’d have to tell her not to worry about the pinheads and she’d say the who? and finally I had to stop answering her calls because my boss watched back the security footage and asked why I was on the phone all the time and I knew I was on thin ice because he was already mad that I’d had a watermelon Red Bull once without paying for it.

The only thing good about the night shift was chatting with the soda delivery guy named Ryan and he was like a high school dropout, I think, because one time a bunch of teenagers came in wearing long dark robes and he thought they were doing Harry Potter cosplay and I said maybe they just came from graduation and he looked at me like he’d never heard the word before and once after a few weeks of shooting the shit with Ryan during those long dark hours he told me how much he loved Judge Judy and would watch her every day for years ever since he’d lived with his grandma as a kid and he said I love Judy Judge so much she really gets it and I said you mean Judge Judy?

Ryan said my grandma always called Judy Judge one sassy gal and I said in a louder voice Judge Judy and he stopped unloading the sodas and looked at me and said that’s what I said, Judy Judge. Judge Judy, I said, you’re saying it wrong it’s not Judy Judge. Ryan looked at me and the lights in 7-11 were always so bright like we were a glowing shoe box in the middle of the dark desert and a pinhead slurpee’d in the corner and Ryan turned back to his work and said I wish you’d just let me tell a story.

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SHAYLA FRANDSEN — Shayla earned her MFA in fiction in Utah, and previously earned an MA in English in New York City. Her writing can be found or is forthcoming in New England Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Iron Horse Literary Review, Under the Sun, Blood Orange Review, Exposition Review, and others. She has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions. She was awarded first place in both the 2023 Plentitudes Prize in Fiction and the Blue Earth Review Dog Daze Flash Fiction contest.

Art by AMANDA BERGLOFF — Amanda is a mixed media artist whose cover and interior art has been published in the Jules Verne Society’s Extraordinary Visions, Tiny Spoon Literary Magazine, Utopia Science Fiction, Mud Season Review, The Sprawl Magazine, 200 CCs, Orion’s Belt, Crimson Dreams, and other publications.