I silently wished for the sun to bounce off the window, blinding Trent and cloaking me from what was sure to be an unpleasant encounter. The entire front of Tea Haven was composed of giant windows, which, though tinted to reduce sun exposure, still offered a full and enticing view of the wares (and employees) inside. I was stuffing the cups into their spring-loaded dispenser when Trent Bolger’s hyena laugh rang through the open doorway. But you had to be eighteen to work there. There were no artificial flavorings in Rose City’s tea. My dream job was Rose City Teas, this place in the Northwest District that did small-batch, hand-selected teas. That way, when I graduated, I could work at an artisanal tea store, instead of one that added the latest superfood extract to whatever dismal fannings the corporate tea blenders could find at the steepest discount. It was a significant upgrade over my last job-spinning the daily special sign at one of those take-it-and-bake-it pizza places-and it would look good on my resume. The Tea Haven at the Shoppes at Fairview Court was not a bad place to work. Maybe even high enough to dissolve them, given enough time. The sugar content in our samples was high enough to mask the taste of the plastic cups. Not that it made much difference at Tea Haven. Everything tasted gross out of plastic, all chemical-y and bland. I was categorically opposed to plastic sample cups. Smaug, the Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities, was triumphant once more.Īfter I replenished our strategically located sample thermoses with fresh tea, I refilled the plastic cups at each station. I flinched as boiling water spattered my hands. Smaug, the Unassailably Pressurized, spat its steaming contents into the thermos. I shoveled tea from the bright orange tin into the filter basket, topped it with two scoops of rock sugar, and tucked it under the spigot. Apatan passed me an empty pump-action thermos. I named it Smaug my first week on the job, when I got scalded three times in a single shift, but so far the name hadn’t stuck with anyone else at Tea Haven. Smaug, the Irrepressibly Finicky, was our industrial-strength water boiler.
Everything we sold was enriched with antioxidants or enhanced with natural super-fruit extracts or formulated for health and beauty. Not that Tea Haven ever got such fine teas. He was convinced, despite all the articles I printed out for him-he refused to read web pages-that each and every tea should be steeped at a full boil, whether it was a robust Yunnan or a fragile gyokuro. There was no use arguing with Charles Apatan, Manager of the Tea Haven at the Shoppes at Fairview Court. Smaug gurgled happily and began boiling once again. Apatan wiggled the hose where it fed into Smaug’s gleaming chrome back. “What does it mean, ‘filter error’?” I asked.
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