Tick. Tick. Tick.

I stared at my watch, willing it to be 8:30pm already. Sadly I still had thirty minutes to go.

Twelve hour shifts were the worst. Especially since management wouldn’t even let us have chairs at the registers. No, us cashiers were lesser than the customers and had to look as such.

The store was basically empty already, so I wished my manager would come out and let me go early. My register was the only one in the store that was open, but most customers preferred the self-checkout lanes anyway and avoided me like the plague. The only exception to this rule seemed to be parents with overflowing carts, and old people who still wanted to pay with a check or use their veterans discount. So literally my two least favorite types of customers.

“Hello?! Young man??”

I was forced back into the present by an old woman scowling at me. She had placed a basket on the counter and was tapping her foot impatiently.

“Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t see you there. My apologies.”

“Young people are so inattentive these days. I miss the old days when men were men and took good care of us women.”

I wasn’t sure why she was ranting so angrily at a simple cashier like me, but I chose to ignore her ramblings and start scanning her items.

“I do hope you’re at least competent enough to not overcharge an old lady on her groceries, boy.”

This woman was relentless. It always seemed like the worst customers came out after dark, and this lady was proving that to be quite true.

“Yes, ma’am,” I replied flatly and continued scanning her items.

I considered double scanning some of her items out of spite, but a woman like her would definitely check and make sure to get me in trouble. As satisfying it would be, that wouldn’t be worth it since I really needed this job. While it only paid pennies above minimum wage, I’d been saving up so I could move out of my parent’s house. They’d been pressuring me for quite some time to be more independent and ‘leave the nest’ as my mom would say. It wasn’t for lack of interest or that I wasn’t trying, it was just near-impossible to make enough money to sustain yourself these days unless you were simply born rich.

My parents weren’t rich but they were both bankers and definitely fell into the upper-middle class, but they were also both very conservative and thought everyone had to make their own way in life like they did or something. So here I was working at a grocery store for stuck up old ladies like this.

“Sir??”

I’d done it again. Gone off into my thoughts and ignored the customer. I sincerely hoped she wouldn’t report it to my manager. It was their fault anyway for scheduling such long shifts and barely paying me for them.

“Sorry ma’am,” I said in the most apologetic tone I could muster.

I had finished scanning her items and she was holding out cash to me, which I grabbed and counted. Entering in the amount of cash I’d been handed, the register system calculated her change for me and opened the till. I placed the cash into it and began counting her change out as I normally did when-

“What are you? Too stupid to give a lady her change back in a timely manner? At this rate I’m gonna miss the new episode of Survivor.”

Ew, who watched live television in this day and age? I had almost forgotten it was still a thing. Also, why was she talking down to me so much like this?

I tried holding in my negative thoughts as I finished counting out her change and handed it to her with my best customer service smile.

“I’m sorry for the wait ma’am.”

“Yes, well...learn to count faster young man. Some of us don’t have time to stand around waiting on you forever.”

She was telling me. Ugh, I needed it to be 8:30 already.

“Yes, ma’am.”

With that, she put the change back in her wallet and her bagged groceries into her cart and wheeled it away. Good riddance. I hoped to never see her again.

The last twenty-six minutes and thirty-five seconds of my shift were some of the most monotonous minutes of my life. My feet screamed at me with how much they ached, and I only had two more customers come through my lane in the whole time which made it go by even slower. Thankfully they were much more polite than the other woman, which wasn’t saying much.

Finally, 8:30 rolled around and I clocked out. The assistant manager waved me off as I headed out the door. The parking lot was nearly empty save for five cars including my twenty year old white Corolla.

As I got in the car and shut my door, I let out a sigh of relief and kicked off my shoes as was my post-work routine every day. I did not get paid enough for this job.

After I had got home and chatted with my parents in the living room while they were watching some cop show, I was finally able to go to my room. As soon as I shut the door, I went straight for my laptop and booted up Fantasy Lands Unlimited.

Fantasy Lands Unlimited was a VRMMORPG that had been out for less than a year but instantly became a worldwide hit. In it, you could play as whoever you liked in a fantasy world that actually felt rewarding, unlike this one.

In the game, I had kept my name, though I had changed the spelling of it from Aaron to Erin. I also kept most of my physical attributes, such as height and weight, and had tried to sculpt my face in a way similar to my own, with a few select changes. The biggest change I had made to myself in the game was that I had chosen the catfolk race, and for gender I had selected female.

My favorite thing about VR games was that the visuals weren’t just on a screen for anyone to see. They were limited to the headset and to only me. Which meant that my parents could walk in and instead of being disappointed their weeb son was playing as a catgirl in a fantasy game, they could instead just be disappointed that I was playing a VR game every waking hour outside of work. In the end though they would just be glad I even had a job and not complain to me about my gaming habit.

Now, why a catgirl? Well, I had always had a certain affinity for cats, and felt similar to one myself, at least in personality. The girl part, I wasn’t quite sure of myself. It just didn’t feel right playing as a man in video games to me. I’d always deferred to female characters when the option was given, and it always annoyed me to no end when a game didn’t even have the decency of giving me a choice.

Once I saw the game initializing, I grabbed the VR headset beside the laptop and placed it over my head. It wasn’t long before I was back in the familiar world I had wished I was born into instead of the one with conservative parents and a deadend job at a grocery store.

The catgirl I played as was a thief and wielded a poison dagger that was only used in the most dire of circumstances. My specialties were in pickpocketing, lockpicking, and stealth. She mostly looked human aside from her orange cat ears, striped tail, and a cat-like nose with whiskers. Instead of the typical, enormous, anime boobs, I had opted for C-cups as I thought they were more realistic and honestly more aesthetically pleasing.

I ended up playing well into the night, and lost track of time. I’m honestly not even sure where I stopped because I passed out mid-session with the headset still on my face and everything. All in all, it was a wonderful night.