Open Twenty-Four Hours

He had been living in the Rite-Aid since he was, presumably, nine years old. Nobody actually knew quite how old he was, but nine was a good enough guess. 

He was a little difficult to deal with at first, always running through the store and opening bottles of Pepto Bismol thinking they contained liquid cotton candy, but he ultimately grew on the staff, the way a reluctant and isolated Craigslist tenant soon grows fond of their housemate's cat. The staff fed him with portions of their brown bag lunches and with snacks that they purchased with their employee discounts, and allowed him unfettered access to the employees only bathroom and the water fountain in the break room. 

After perhaps four weeks of him living in the Rite-Aid, the general manager began bringing him special meals—like chicken alfredo, or steak and mushrooms—on the weekends. When asked when his birthday was, he would only ever respond with an emphatic "Tuesday!" And so, on the first Tuesday of every month, they would put a candle on a Rice Krispies Treat or a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup and sing him "Happy Birthday," just in case. 

He had a thing for soap. Loss prevention did their best to explain to upper management why the soap stocks were always so low, despite an average number of sales, without mentioning him. Nobody at the Rite-Aid wanted corporate to get involved with the raising of a child, because everybody feared he would one day grow up to wear a suit and lose his beautiful innocence, so they kept him a secret from anyone in charge as best they could. 

Still, he had that thing for soap. He would grab a bar off the shelf and open the box and pretend it was a car, or a spaceship. He would use the bar of soap to draw pictures on the blacktop of the parking lot, or he would affix toothpicks or thumbtacks or other things into the bar of soap and carry it around like a doll, and quietly talk to it. When the staff pointed him in the direction of the toy aisle, he would offer a smile to show his gratitude, and poke around and look at the packaging, but eventually return to his bar of soap. He seemed to have a preference for the blue bars of Irish Spring—but not because of the colour or the smell, but for the way it felt in his hands. The staff couldn't make sense of it, but they didn't dare question his youthful wisdom. 

The boy didn't come with a name. Unlike the countless products lining the shelves or the name badges adorning the members of staff, the boy remained unlabeled. He was counted as an anomoly, a point of a percentage on a spreadsheet vaguely accounted for under the "shrink" category. And so, some of the staff called him Shrink. The boy didn't seem to mind, but then again, he also didn't seem to acknowledge this moniker, either. When talked to, the boy didn't say much of anything at all. He usually just smiled at whoever was speaking to him, and no matter how he was addressed, his typical response was a well-mannered "O.K." before grabbing a new bar of soap to play with.

The only area of the entire Rite-Aid that he wasn't allowed into was the pharmacy. Much like the aforementioned cat metaphor, the pharmacists would have to very quickly shut the door behind themselves when coming and going, or he would dart inside and wander around the numerous shelves of medicine. He seemed fascinated by the myriad colours and shapes of the pills, and by the computers, and the label printers. Once, during Halloween season, he opened a doctor's costume for the white coat and attempted to casually walk inside, but was quickly discovered and removed. The head pharmacist gave him a harsh scolding, at which he simply shrugged, and left to play with his bar of soap.

After some time of living in the Rite-Aid, he experienced a sudden growth spurt, and could no longer fit into the green sweatshirt and gray jeans that he came in with. Even his shoes began popping at the seams, the toes of his right foot poking out like a cartoon hobo. So the staff set a tall, empty cardboard box near the door, and affixed to it a sign that read "DONATION DRIVE" in Comic Sans. Donors didn't know that the clothes were meant for him, and so within a month there was an influx of everything from dresses to baby clothes to big & tall jeans. Ever grateful, he wore everything donated to him—toddler shirts on his head like tight-fitting caps, men's dress slacks up around his chest like a pinstriped grunge throwback, blouses to play pirate, socks on his hands for puppets. The staff didn't dare dictate what he should wear or how. They allowed him to embrace his creativity, to determine his own style, a thing they didn't allow for themselves in their uniformed, corporate compliance.

For the purpose of schooling, some of the more patients members of staff would pull one of the educational workbooks from the bookshelves and a bag of mechanical pencils from the stationery aisle, and sit with him in the break room. He took to the workbooks with ease, never asking questions, simply going through the book as if it all came very naturally to him, which, of course, it did. After only a few weeks of this kind of informal tutoring, he was absorbed in Forbes, lost in Time, and guffawing with Mad. Whatever his age was, he was very bright for it.

Some of the Rite-Aid staff members were concerned that he didn't have any friends his own age, but they weren't quite sure how to facilitate activities for him. That's when the assistant manager had an idea: regional could give permission to host a water balloon fight in the parking lot as a charity drive. Customers would bring their kids, and for every pack of water balloons sold, the store would donate 10% of the profits to the local children's hospital. The assistant manager argued that it was good PR, and regional agreed.

On the day of the water balloon fight, however, the boy was suddenly nowhere to be found. No soap was missing off the shelves, all the magazines were neat and organized, and he wasn't hiding amongst the pill bottles in the pharmacy. Scratching their heads and furrowing their brows with worry, management went ahead with the planned event, but all members of staff present were wondering, in the backs of their heads, just where the boy had gone. Try as they might, they simply couldn't build up the energy necessary to get the children present excited about the water balloon fight, resulting in only four packets of water balloons sold, with only three kids participating. After about ten minutes, each child was sufficiently drenched, and the event ended.

For days after, the workers at the Rite-Aid searched and searched for the boy they sometimes called Shrink. Appropriately, management brought in loss prevention to see if there was any accounting for the boy, but aside from the small discrepancy in the Irish Spring soap bar inventory, there was nothing to prove he had ever been there in the first place. One cashier suggested they take a look at the security footage, but as it turned out, the cameras hadn't been running since 1998, regional opting instead to push for the scare factor than any actual video documentation. 

Years went by. The manager moved up to regional, the assistant manager moved up to general, and aside from a couple of the pharmacists, everybody else quit. Those cashiers who were high school students when they worked at the Rite-Aid would graduate and go on to become nurses, construction workers, or teachers. The inventory handlers left to work for Amazon or UPS. One of the pharmacy technicians made a complete career change and entered the wild world of financial consulting, raking in six figures annually, with a goal of seven.

Every now and then when on conference calls, the regional and general managers would reminisce about the boy who had lived at their Rite-Aid. If asked about him, they would mention the thing about the soap, and the First Tuesday Birthdays, and the magazines. They would insist that he didn't ever actually live in the store, though; that he was just some neighbourhood kid who hung out there. They wouldn't ever tell them about the sleeping arrangement they had made for him in the back room.

Many more years went by until one day, a wide-eyed young man from corporate visited the Rite-Aid with a small group of men in suits, each holding clipboards. They walked through the store pointing at things, taking notes, talking about sales strategies and updating merchandising. The young wide-eyed man didn't utter a word the entire time, only smiling and nodding every now and again.

On their way out the door, the young man paused in the soap aisle and picked up a bar of blue Irish Spring. He stared at it for a while, turning it over in his hands and inspecting every small detail of the packaging, before returning it to the shelf. 

"O.K.," he said, and walked out.