But, they’d probably cackle at him for being a big geek, waiting all night just to get his hands on a new iPad. Why can’t you just wait until the next day, or the next week, when the rush will be over? They’d probably say something similar, anyway. Even if he told them it was his sister’s birthday was the following day, and it was seriously important that he get her desperately-desired tablet before then, they probably wouldn’t understand.
For the first couple of hours he tried to focus on his book – a chunky Stephen King tome he hadn’t gotten around to reading yet, even though it had been out for a while.
“Hey, how’s it going?” his mom called at about eight o’clock, worried about her little man.
“Oh, fine, yeah. I got a good place in line.”
“Are you warm enough? Do you want me to bring some more clothing?”
“It’s sunny out.”
“It won’t be for much longer. It gets cold at night when there’s no clouds, Dylan.”
“I’ll be fine.”
He talked quietly into his iPhone, not wanting to be overheard, especially by the girls up ahead. He didn’t think they’d be listening in – they had their own constant stream of conversation about this album or that album or the latest relationship status of friends not currently present to protect themselves from gossip. Even so, he didn’t want them knowing the only person who knew he was here was his mother.
A little later, as the sun started to drop rapidly drop the other stores of this open-air mall, and the breeze took on a slight chill, he started to regret not asking his mother to bring something warm. He had a thin sweatshirt he could put on – but he’d been using that as a cushion the past couple of hours, after his butt went to sleep on that hard concrete sidewalk, and he was loathed to go back to bare ground.
But seriously, when he glanced over and saw how attractive those girls were, and how much more stylishly they were dressed – and clearly more popular than him at whichever school they attended, you could tell from their bounding self-confidence levels – there was no way he could have faced a visit from his mom in front of them. How humiliating that would be.
So he’d suffer in silence.
The light faded, and the light of his kindle came on. Stephen King was always good for passing time – his conversational style had never failed to comfort Constant Reader Dylan, even if it was supposed to be horror fiction.
While he did his best to respect their privacy, some of the girls’ conversation did catch his ears from time to time.
About 10 o’clock, a group of three guys turned up to say hello to the girls, and Dylan found himself trying to work out if any of them were actually dating. The girls were batting their eyelids like crazy as the guys were standing above them, hurling out gentle taunts about waiting in line all night with a bunch of tech geeks, the guys pushing out their chests like big pidgeons to flaunt their athleticism, and Dylan had no doubt the three of them had been on the school football team or whatever. Probably had sports scholarships to somewhere impressive.