http://penastory.com/2016/01/04/a-strangers-youth/

He had the gait of a child, a happy one. It was apparent that he had never had to face any of life’s many troubles. Zoe looked at him from her work station and tried to figure how old the new boy could be. “Eighteen, maybe nineteen,” she thought to herself “twenty-one at most” she added, taking another look at him and noticing he had a little mustache. She shrugged, “They grow fast these days,” she muttered to herself as she dismissed his being twenty-one from her head. “He could not be that old. Looks fresh out of high school or first year in college so eighteen or nineteen it should be.” He was roaring the lyrics of Justin Beiber’s “Love Yourself” along with his phone. He was loud and carefree and did not look like he gave two cents that he was at work or in public. “He sings like he is in his shower and dances like no one is watching. He has to be nineteen.” She said again, this time a little bit louder as if she was talking to somebody and not her computer screen which was her only companion.

She envied him. It was a warehouse job; boring. She did it because she needed the money to survive not that she relished the eight hours she had to spend in what she had now come to refer to as a hell hole. She envied the attitude with which he went about his work, This “I might as well mix pleasure and business, get as much done as possible while listening to my favorite songs. I will pretend I am Justin in one of his music videos and I do not care who laugh” attitude. The mindset would probably make him never see the warehouse as the hell house that it was.

She sighed and looked up from her computer screen as Emeka began singing Soldier Boy and Nicki Minaj’s “Yas Bitch” all the while bumping his head invigoratingly and moving energetically. Zoe looked at him wistfully as he mimed the lyrics and made video impressions. He walked past her and flashed her a smile as he walked down to end of the line, scanned the items he was about to pack and danced for a second before grabbing another label. “He is actually working and having fun,” she thought to herself and she realised the wanted that. A part of her wanted to join him in the music video, become Nicki Minaj and rap alongside to his Solider Boy A part of her wished he was not that young and free but she knew that was never going to happen.

She was forty two, old and saddled, imprisoned in decorum, strangled by responsibility and caged by perception. Not too long ago, she had been him in a different life. Cheerleader for the Basketball team in high school, won the Oregon State Cheerleading Championship, lost in the quarter finals of Nationals. At senior year homecoming party, stripped in front of a crowd after five shots of tequila, made out with a boy right there and there, followed him home that night. Young, stupid, and free but now she was this woman clicking away at her computer, recording inventories and envying a stranger’s youth.

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