Midnight (Winter Tales Book 1) by Cole Denton

Author:Cole Denton [Denton, Cole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-12-05T16:00:00+00:00

My best friend Adomas and I were walking to the store that got the stuff imported from the U.S. Today was the first day of our winter break, and we usually hung out the entire time. It was ice cold, and as we talked, we could see our breath.

“So, you and Dominykas are playing Santa?” he asked me after I explained Rami’s letter to Santa.

“Well, sort of. Actually, I really don’t know. Dom is determined to get her some makeup, so I thought you and I could price some things out. That way we know how much money we need to come up with. My task today is to get prices, and he’s going around town to see what kind of odd jobs we could do,” I said as we crossed the street to MickUS Imports.

The owner’s surname was Mickus, and he had the name on the front of the store. But he was clever and had the “us” capitalized. So it read “MickUS Imports” in gold lettering that had been faded by the sun and tortured by the rain and snow. It was another run-down looking building owned and operated by a creepy bastard. It was somewhat of a shady store according to my parents. He loved price gouging, and if something was in high demand, he had no problem raising the price on you at the register.

Everyone knew it.

Yet everyone flocked to his store in hopes of getting something imported from the U.S.

It wasn’t that stuff in Lithuania was bad; it was just that the stuff coming from the U.S. was special. We almost ended up with a small box of Pop Tarts once. But when my mom got to the counter with it, she realized there was only a few days left before the expiration date, and Mickus was charging the equivalent of nine U.S. dollars for them.

As we walked by the store’s window, I peeked in and could see it was jammed with people. My guess was that people were trying to get stuff for loved ones and friends for the holidays. And now we were looking for makeup from this shitty, price-gouging store.

“Do we know what we’re looking for exactly?” Adomas asked when we stepped into the busy store.

“No. Not really,” I said quietly as we started walking up the first aisle. “Okay, well, my mom has a lipstick and some powder thing that she puts on her eyelids with a cotton swab,” I explained.

“Okay. Lip stuff would be good probably. We see a lot of girls putting that stuff on at school.”

“Oh, over there, I bet.” I pointed to a sign over an aisle that said “Women” in Lithuanian and in English.

Everything in this store was like that. Signs and tags were written in both languages. Some die-hard Lithuanians often stood outside the store with signs that encouraged people not to shop here because the owner was anti-Lithuanian. Fights sometimes started outside and spilled over into the store.

We turned to walk down that aisle and then came to a stop.

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