At Krispy Kreme, Tarah O'Neil works with dough to make a little dough so she can eventually enroll at Johnson & Wales University.

08:52 AM EDT on Monday, July 26, 2004

BY LYNN ARDITI
Journal Staff Writer

CRANSTON -- The pink neon "hot light" at the Krispy Kreme on Pontiac Avenue has gone dark. But at 11 p.m., the drive-through is still open and cars keep pulling up.

Toyotas. Hondas. Saturns. SUVs.

Tarah O'Neil is 18 and working the night shift. She has ivory skin, blue eyes and dimpled cheeks. Her ponytail loops out the back of her Krispy Kreme cap. Her hands move with caffeine-fueled speed.

Journal photo / Glenn Osmundson Tarah O'Neil, 18, takes a break at her night-shift job at Krispy Kreme doughnuts, in Cranston, where she was named Employee of the Month in April. Soon, she'll start a second part-time job.

Her headset beeps. Another customer. She rattles off the standard greeting.

"Thank you for choosing Krispy Kreme, now serving hot glazed, how may I help you?"

" . . . You want whipped cream on that?"

"I'm sorry about that, you want cream, no sugar?"

She fills the order and goes on to the next: two chocolate milks and a half-dozen original glazed.

A shiny red Honda Accord pulls up to the window. The two teenage girls inside are decked out: French-braided hair, low-cut tops and glittery jewelry.

Tarah serves dozens of teenagers like these every night. They stop by the Krispy Kreme on their way home from the malls and nightclubs. These are the suburban teens who drive around in new cars, heading for college-bound futures.

The statistics tell part of their story. In 2000, the top-earning 20 percent of U.S. families with teenagers reported incomes of $90,000 or more a year. That was more than four times the income of teenagers living in households in the bottom 20 percent, according to an analysis of 2000 Census data by The Center for Labor Market Studies, at Northeastern University.

The social profile of America's teenagers is right there, at the Krispy Kreme drive-through window.

On this muggy night in July, the economic divide hits close to home. Tarah recognizes the girls in the red Honda from Toll Gate High School, in Warwick.

"Clubbers," she says, after their car pulls away. Tarah rolls her eyes. "I'm not a clubber."

Tarah graduated in June. She made the honor roll. She plans to go into fashion design. She'd like to enroll at Johnson & Wales University.

But first, she needs to earn some money. She wants to pay her mother back for her car: an 11-year-old Ford Taurus that cost $1,300. And she has to figure out how to pay for college.

Journal photo / Glenn Osmundson Tarah O'Neil, 18, makes 7.50 an hour, or $10 an hour for an overnight shift, working at the Krispy Kreme in Cranston. This week she will start a second job, at Macy's.

Tarah has been working since she turned 16. She lives in a two-bedroom condo, in Warwick, with her 6-year-old brother and her mother, a physical therapist who earns about $35,000 a year. Money is tight. Tarah tries to help out.

So, despite her mother's misgivings, Tarah has decided to take a year off before she applies to college. Her job at Krispy Kreme pays $7.50 an hour. She gets $10 an hour if she works the overnight shift.

The restaurant's vinyl swivel stools and black-and-white photos of smiling kids at Krispy Kreme in the 1940s and 1950s conjure images of a Norman Rockwell America.

In its modern incarnation, Krispy Kreme customers can stand behind a glass wall and watch doughy rings bob along conveyor belts as they are fried and glazed.

Customers don't see the young man at the back end of the conveyer belt, smashing his gloved fist into a doughnut. David Perry is a 17-year-old high school dropout who works in processing. He wears a white apron and a stud in his left year. His job, on this night, amounts to doughnut destruction.

Krispy Kreme demands perfection, he explains. See? He points to a doughnut with a dimpled hole. In goes his fist. Squish.

A few feet away, Tarah dips balls of fried dough into a swirling vat of chocolate. The processing crew is down one worker, so Tarah is helping out.

Every shift has a crew leader, but Tarah is the one to whom coworkers often turn to when they need a hand or have a question.

"Tarah, the scale don't work."

"Tarah, there's no peanut oil in this, right?"

Her coworkers include a 67-year-old woman who started working for the company when she lost her job as a machine operator at a pen factory, and a 68-year-old man who used to work on a naval base.

Tarah checks her cell phone to see if her boyfriend, Kyle, has left her a message. He's 19, and works days at Shaw's supermarket and nights at a beer distributor warehouse.

Their one-year anniversary is coming up this month. But Tarah says she's in no rush to get married. She wants a career first.

When she asks Kyle about his career plans, she says, the conversation goes like this:

Are you gonna go to college?

I don't know.

Do you want to go into business?

I don't know.

Tarah is wiping down the counter around the coffee machines when Angel, the crew leader, walks over.

"All right -- ready?"

Tarah gets a lesson in how to empty coffee pots. It's one of the last things she has to do before she gets off at 3 a.m.

Then she'll drive home, sleep 3 1/2 hours, and wake up before her mother leaves for work at 7 a.m. Tarah and her little brother, Headley, will horse around in their living room until it's time for Tarah to drive him to the school bus that takes him to summer camp.

Then, Tarah will try to catch a few more hours of sleep before she goes back to work.

The Krispy Kreme's general manager says Tarah has potential. In April, she was named employee of the month. The managers are training her to be a crew leader. That could mean a full-time job, at $10 an hour.

But Tarah has other plans. She wants to build up her résumé. So she's decided to take a second job. She'll be working in the swimwear department at Macy's. The job pays $7.75 an hour. She starts this week.

If you have story ideas about people who work unusual summer jobs, please contact Lynn Arditi, Journal staff writer, by e-mail at: larditi [at] projo.com, or by calling 277-7335.