Milkshake! Duck!

Howard stared at him, a few cookies-n’-cream rivulets tumbling down his face. “What do you mean, ‘you quit’? You’re supposed to protect me!”

“Sir, you got milkshaked,” Breyerson said, flicking a glob of whipped cream from his lapel. “You’ll be fine.”

“I was hit! With a projectile! On your! Watch!” Howard, his obsessively moisturized face turning deep red beneath the milky droplets, stamped his foot. Stamped his foot, like a child does. “You’re supposed to jump in the way!”

“Jesus Christ, Bry,” was the static crackle in the infernal earpiece. “Do not do this right now. Just take a breath, tell him you’re sorry—”

Breyerson popped the plastic bit out of his ear, like popping the cork off shook-up champagne. “Sir,” he said. “I am trained to shield you with my body, if necessary, to prevent a lethal attack. It just now occurs to me that would be a disgraceful waste of my life.”

“That’s your job!” Howard shrieked, his vocal fry failing to cover the tinny echo of that sentiment from the earpiece in Breyerson’s palm. Breyerson looked down at that delicate and extremely chuckable plastic cuff, and wondered why he had ever been so afraid of disappointing it. “I was just assaulted, and you leaned out of the way! You let it happen! You wanted it to happen!”

“Sir, that is not true,” Breyerson said. “I would never deprive that sweet little girl of her milkshake. That sacrifice was hers to make.”

“Sweet little girl!” Howard looked around at the people gathering to watch them, suddenly expecting them to be on his side. “That juvenile delinquent did a terrorism on me!”

The milkshake of mass destruction had mostly hit the sidewalk. There was no denying the attack was intentional; the young lady recognized Howard, addressed him by name, and when he turned to her with a, well, Epstein-y smile, she had launched her frozen treat in a glorious arc, thrust both middle fingers after it and screamed, “Fuck you!” before tearing off down the street. Breyerson hadn’t seen such defiant courage since an IED brought him home from Afghanistan, minus a foot.

Turning the earpiece between his fingers, Breyerson said, “You know there’s actually a lot of research that goes into personal security. We analyze threats, follow up on people of interest, vet staff and—”

“I don’t care!” Howard—oh, stamping his little foot again—balled his hands into fists, and shouted, “All I want—”

“Except in your case, sir.” Breyerson’s voice rolled over Howard’s like a Zamboni on a snow cone. “It was immediately clear that you have no threats.”

The sad puddle by the crumpled cup was oozing between cracks in the concrete, warm milk ferrying little Oreo icebergs toward molecular Titanics. The snail trails of the initial assault were drying on Howard’s face, picking up a tacky sheen as all that blustery color drained away. “You…what? I’m…an important man…”

The earpiece see-sawed back and forth in Breyerson’s skeptical hand. “You’re a rich man. You’re a powerful man. You have a lot of influence. But all of your enemies are, well, mostly children. Minorities. The under-privileged. The biggest threats to any public figure are Nazis and sexually motivated stalkers, and Nazis just love you.”

“I have a diverse fan base.”

“Sir, you do not,” Breyerson said. “We even looked into your exes and business partners, and they all mostly just ignore you. You piss off pacifists. You’re a far bigger threat to that child than she ever would be to you.”

Howard thrust out his arms, and a cherry went flying. “I’ve never assaulted anyone!”

“Right. And you think that makes you nonviolent,” said Breyerson. “The way you think that cross on your tie makes you Christian. The way you think never cursing makes you polite. You wanted me to tackle that girl, tackle a kid a third my size, who isn’t old enough to choose her own bedtime. You want her to go to prison, to suffer, to lose her future, over a motherfucking cocksucking milkshake. Sir.”

The man’s teeth were clenched tight, his fists squeezing and fidgeting at his constipated sides, and he managed to growl out, “You’re fired.”

“Great,” Breyerson said. “I’m done. I take my duty very seriously. When I lost my foot, I thought I lost the power to serve. I hemmed myself in to one idea of what it meant to be a man of honor, and I took some shitty, slimy jobs trying to pursue that. And a little girl who would rather give up the one luxury she had instead of swallowing another minute of your bullshit is more of a hero than I turned out to be. You need people like me to call you special. I’ve just now realized I don’t need one thing from you.”

“Money,” said Howard.

Breyerson laughed. “There are so many ways in this world to make money. You know that better than anyone, and you take it wherever you can find it. There’s honest ways out there, honorable ways, and it won’t take me long to find one. I will never run for office, never own a business, never have a slumlord’s wealth of properties, but you know what I do have?”

“A fucking pink slip!” said a tiny, tinny voice in the tense silence.

A slow smile spread over Breyerson’s face, delicious as a high-flung milkshake. “Enough.”

The earpiece dropped into the frothy slop, and Breyerson’s artificial heel came down to crush it. He handed his ID badge out to Howard, and when the dumbstruck official refused to move, that laminate clattered on the spattered concrete. Howard turned and walked away, a spring in his prosthetic step.

The sky looked bluer. The air felt clearer. As Breyerson walked he knew not where, he swore he could hear fucking birds chirping. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a flash of pink hair, a head bent over a shaking, colty frame, clutching a cell phone for dear life as tears mixed with vanilla backsplash on her shirt. “Hey!” Breyerson hailed. “It’s okay! Let me buy you a milkshake!”