Chapter 25

After only a few more calls, he found himself sucked into the whorl of trying to help the city stumble through its day even as its citizens cut each other off in traffic and beat each other up in alleys and got themselves drunk or robbed or locked in the basements of abandoned buildings.

“Yeah, I got a question,” a caller barked at him halfway through the morning.

“Go ahead.”

“How come it’s not against the law for people to be rude?”

“Um…”

“Like this girl. At the Burger King? She’s so rude to everybody! She practically spilled my pop, she’s snapping at everybody. I paid for a large fries but this is barely any. It just doesn’t seem right.”

“It doesn’t sound right,” Mark commiserated. “Burger King might have something to say about it, but it’s not really the kind of thing we can legislate, you know? Who decides what’s rude?”

“She’s rude!”

“She sounds rude. But as far as the law…”

“No, I get it. It’s just, this is really barely any fries.”