Confessions of a Small-Town Marathon Girl
A navy jumpsuit, cute guys, late night danger, and frozen pizza misadventures.
This story is true, though some names and identifying details have been changed for privacy.
I worked at a Marathon mini-mart my senior year of high school.
It was far from glamorous, but it was a job. And it got me out in front of people in a way I’d never been before.
Groc-O-Line was located on Route 14, a highway stretching from Chicago into Wisconsin and beyond.
If you were driving from the city and came upon Harmilda—the life-sized cow statue planted in the middle of the Main Street and Route 14 intersection—you’d gone just a little too far.
(Harmilda was a mashup of Harvard Milk Day, a celebration of the town’s historic claim to fame as The Milk Capital of the World.)
We all wore navy jumpsuits.
Mine hugged me in all the right places and was probably the sexiest, most fashion- forward outfit I’d owned up to that point, not counting bikinis.
The place was owned by Bill, a red-haired, thick-mustachioed man close to my parents’ age, as far as I could tell. He was rarely on the premises. Rhonda, the manager, wasn’t around much either unless she had a shift or some bookkeeping to tend to in the back office.
Otherwise, if I had a shift, I was the only one there.
At night, it felt like being in a harshly lit fishbowl.
An easy target for anyone driving through town at twenty-five miles an hour. Locals, strangers on their way to more interesting places… ax murderers.
It was an innocent time. There was no emergency button or protocol of any kind. If there was a stickup, I guess I was on my own.
On any given night, there could be hundreds of dollars in the drawer.
And lots of cigarettes, food, and drinks.
Beyond ringing people up at the register, I had to keep shelves stocked. If I had the closing shift, which was often, I had to sweep, clean the outdoor bathroom, count out the drawer, and take the locked leather envelope of cash to the bank drop box.
At midnight.
I loved working there.
I was confident in my role. I was fast on the cash register, and the drawer was rarely off by more than a few cents.
People, namely attractive guys from school, seemed to see me differently.
I mean, that uniform turned heads.
I could feel their eyes scanning my body. My heart raced. It was… thrilling.
If the customer was old and/or creepy, however, it was not thrilling at all.
(I wish I’d hung onto the jumpsuit. Believe me, it looked better than what the AI-generated photo could create.)
I didn’t freeze up like I normally did around attractive guys. I suddenly knew exactly what to say.
Would you like anything else?
Here’s your change…
Have a great day!
I was the mini-mart goddess.
Every day held something new and potentially exciting.
The added bonus was that I was able to feed my sugar addiction with an array of candy: Hershey’s bars (mostly), ice cream treats, cookies, and pastries. I would’ve easily outgrown the uniform had my metabolism not been so fast.
Rhonda occasionally left with a bag of groceries she may or may not have paid for. It seemed like the unspoken rule was that you could eat whatever you wanted while working there. Maybe even take a few things home.
One night, a cute guy from school stopped in wanting pizzas. For free. Of course I wasn’t going to just start handing things out. Unless, of course, he swept and mopped the floors.
This arrangement may have happened more than once. With other cute guys. Word must’ve gotten out.
One day, like any other, Mom informed me we had to go see Bill.
Turns out, Rhonda had been watching me from the corner one of the nights I gave out frozen pizza in exchange for sweeping. With a police officer.
I was fired.
My parents must have been so proud.
Looking back, it’s wild they left a seventeen-year-old girl there alone at night handling bank deposits and cigarette inventory.
Those were different times. Oh, so different.
The uniform remained hung up in my farmhouse closet for years, until Mom must’ve cleared things out. She was good at throwing stuff away without asking.
But once a Marathon Girl, always a Marathon Girl.
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I live in the Chicago suburbs with my husband, chasing my lifelong dream of writing a novel. When I’m not sharing memoir-ish stories and unfiltered thoughts, I’m blending smoothies, walking backwards, or staring at my phone waiting for a text from my Navy son. Read more about why I write here.
My big job in high school was Blockbuster Video, and I loved it too!
This was so fun to read.