I am mean today. Perhaps it is the state of the world right now or my lack of sleep, but I feel just plain mean.

However, I can say without a doubt I used to be meaner.

When I lived in Phoenix, I got a job in a major chain record store. This branch was unusually small; it was located in a dying strip mall in the ugliest part of an ugly town. Every month or so word would come down from the mucky-mucks that the store would be closed at the end of that week and we should be looking for other jobs. I never was rattled by this; I knew that $5.50 an hour could be had just about anywhere. My co-workers were mostly the cool, laid-back record store geek-types that I always felt most comfortable around when I was younger.

HOWEVER there was one girl who worked there who was named after a month, and not a normal girls’ name month like June or April, but January. If a team of ex-Nazi scientists went into a laboratory for 50 years to create the most annoying, insipid, mindlessly happy, urge-to-strangle-it inducing robot, working a shift with January would still be worse and anything that those goose-steppers could invent. Some girls are are so stupid, men just see them as easy targets (you know this is true). But January so grated on the nerves of everyone she met, I don’t think any of the guys who hung around the store ever tried to sleep with her. She did have a best friend, of course, because girls like her always have freaky lil sidekicks.

At this time I was known to the regular customers as the jazz snob with an extremely low bullshit tolerance, and I have to admit that when January would put on one of her pop-punk records and skip around the store with her pigtails flying stupidly behind her, I could literally feel steam come out of my ears. Every so often she would pause on her rounds an ask one of our co-workers, blinking cutely, “If I was a vegetable, what kind of vegetable would I be?” Almost without fail, that person would say “a carrot”, I’m not sure why.

Oftentimes I just felt sorry for her. She told me once that her mother (before she died) had told her that she named her only daughter “January” after a character in a Jacqueline Susann novel (“Valley of the Dolls”, anyone?) who whored herself out because of her drug problems and then overdosed halfway through the story. From the little bits January revealed about her personal life, I could tell that her father didn’t care about her very much; he was just throwing money at her to keep her temporarily happy with small material things. I knew that public school had let her down as well; she was in her first semester at the local community college and couldn’t even fathom how to start a simple freshman level essay. She often revealed herself to be very ignorant about common sense things and was constantly putting her foot in her mouth.

Even so, I told myself, the fact remained that I was beginning to grind my teeth whenever she opened her mouth to speak. Something had to be done. I didn’t want to quit my job; it was easy and it was always interesting watching many of my co-workers go through the various phases of their crank high. Most of them had second jobs and made the questionable trade-off of meth for sleep. So I hatched a plan.

For a while January and I were the closing clerks. At 10.30 when the store closed, it was just she and I and the twitchy closing supervisor who was 25 but looked 45 because his wife was on a long list for a heart transplant. January and I would sit in the tiny cube known as the counting room, elbow to elbow, silently seething with our mutual hatred for each other as we counted stacks of rumpled bills, credit card slips, and checks. I was usually plus or minus a dollar, because I was careless and would alternate between shortchanging people or giving out too much change. January usually had bigger problems with her till; she was pretty math deficient and sometimes had to go fetch our supervisor for help (who was usually out tidying up so we could leave).

About two weeks after I had hatched my plan, January hit a typical snag with her cash drawer. She walked out of the room to get Rick, who would sigh and count her till for her, while she hovered over him and tormented him. The moment she left I made my move. I reached into her till, pulled out a twenty, and tucked it into the waistband of my pants. When Rick returned with January trotting behind him, I announced, “I’m done! Can I go now?” Rick said yes and dropped my money into the safe. I went into the employees’ bathroom and pulled out the twenty and promptly flushed it down the toilet; of course I didn’t steal the money so I could spend it. I didn’t want it. I felt a little twinge of reget as it swirled down and out of sight, but I told myself “well, it’s all over now.”

Rick was in the back room for a long time. Eventually he sent January out to help straighten the racks with me, and about fifteen minutes after that he unlocked the doors and sent us out. “I just can’t get January’s totals to balance,” he said, frowning with frustration.

Three days later she was fired.

Was I happy? Yes, I was happy she was gone but not overjoyed. I knew I had done everyone a favor, because even the store manager dreaded working with her and was sorry he hired her.

It was one of those weird things you do that you try to feel guilty for and then can’t but don’t know why.