FIEND

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It was my last summer, and I was spending it behind the glossy counter of a four-star restaurant. Lilypad. The largest gem in my town’s plastic crown. Hotspot of stale graduation parties, naive first dates and elderly bravado. Most days, cars leaked from the finely paved parking lot into the streets. A gaudy fountain fit with marble angels continuously poured outside. At night, the water seemed to glow. 

I got hired purely out of convenience at the end of May, a week after my birthday. My schedule was an empty basket for the manager to fill, nothing more than long walks, terrible movies and obnoxious masturbation sessions. Sometimes I took a Klonopin from my mother’s bathroom cabinet and melted into the floor, but ten hour workdays soon replaced my mindless vacancy like adult teeth. 

The manager asked me two questions during the phone call interview. 

Can you handle money? 

I pulled at my blonde toe hair as his voice traveled into my ear. 

Yes, I said in between pulls.
 

When can you start?
 

Today, I said immediately.
 

A drawbridge pause.
 

Come in tomorrow, he replied, and hung up.
 

My duties were simple. I sat at the front desk, and when customers walked in, I greeted them with a smile and asked if they had a reservation. If they did, one of the waiters would lead them to their table coated in a frosting of cloth. If not, I would ask them if they could possibly wait ten minutes for a table to become available. They usually could.
 

Most of the time, I was surprised how kind the world treated me, how none of my edges ever touched. My hair hadn’t been dirty since birth. 

I had nothing to offer and nothing to take.
 

After high school I’d tried out a college across the country in the woods of Massachusetts. My mother had been given a wealthy inheritance in her thirties and hadn’t worked a day since then. Sometimes it really is that easy. She’d said I could go study anywhere I wanted as long as I went, so I did.
 

In Massachusetts, I stole lipstick. I fucked an older man who told me he was very important though clouds of lint slept on his shirt. I imitated laughter. I pretended to like flowers. I studied philosophy. I spoke French. I asked big questions and wore cashmere. I forgot my name. I spent a year there in that dreamscape, amputated from the real world. But then, I didn’t know the real world— only the clean spots. I tried to care about a similar looking future, one of silk and luxury, but I couldn’t. I didn’t care. There wasn’t anything beautiful that would come of me, somebody who already had everything.
 

What was I doing, I asked myself one afternoon as I sat out on the stoop of my student apartment, smoking a cigarette that tasted like a dessert. The clouds looked like they were hung with wire cables. My fingernails were painted blue. I asked myself again. 

I was wasting time and prolonging what could be a great moment. I was being mean. 

After my realization, I turned inwards. I ate my own tail. I infected. My facade soured. My focus fractured. I walked through the college’s library like a fire nobody could put out. Friends fell out of my life when I stopped pretending to appreciate Egon Schiele and espresso. I never answered calls. 

Then one morning, an idea bloomed from my frustration slowly, delicately. A glass flower. I hadn’t had an idea in a very long time. An expiration plan soon began to grow in the closet of my head. I moved back to my hometown of Bethany, Oregon, my meadow of wealth, and then back into my mother’s house in exchange for whatever salary I could come up with, a rule I decided for myself. 

I spent the winter as a cashier at the local burger place, a position I liked. The customers were honest and meager. Men would shake while asking for another packet of ketchup, women complimented my disagreeable eyes. I always came home feeling like a hero, a gladiator of the real world at last. I slept 

wonderfully, smelling of grease and salt. But the building closed in January and turned into another puny “high fashion” boutique. At the opening ceremony, a mass of shrill wives stared in awe at the sleek, draping dresses and shirts, some zig zagged, some flaring. I yawned loudly and bought an ugly yellow dress for five hundred dollars because I could. As I left, I dropped an unlit cigarette onto the marbled floors. A little bell rang out as the door closed behind me but it sounded like the whine of a falling bomb. 

I took the spring off to grieve, grow my hair out and sharpen my teeth. 

 
In April, I was out in the afternoon, lying on the grass and watching the clouds. The stylings of Amy Winehouse, my trouble queen, poured from the tiny red radio a friend gave me back in college. My mother, dressed in her pale silk robe and hot pink hair curlers, came from the house. She cautiously stood on the porch, looking out for a monster or animal with an affinity for Jazz. I looked back at her from my thought island.
 

“Oh,” she said quietly, as I bled back into her memory, and walked back inside.
 

I spent June learning the ins and outs of the restaurant. You could help yourself to whatever food was left after closing. The bathrooms were cleanest before ten in the morning and after nine. Fridays were the worst because of the high school’s football games which were treated like holidays. Tables would be close to bursting with Quarterbacks downing foamy beers, never mind laws. You could mess up without anybody noticing. If you were going to call in sick, it was best to do it in the middle of the afternoon when everything was calm. If you were going to be sick, call Justin. 

July went by in opulent flashes of fallen shrimp plates, chicken scratched receipts, a suspiciously celebratory after party for a grandmother’s funeral and counting refills. I realized I hadn’t cried in three years and tried to make myself cry by making a mistake in somebody’s reservation, but nobody yelled at me. Nobody was even angry. At home, I got high and laughed so hard my stomach hurt. I saw my mother twice in one week and didn’t speak outside of my assigned lines at work. 

Finally, finally. August came like a dog from the heat. I was tired. Nothing hurt but I felt eroded nonetheless. Each bit of light was an insect bite. What is it about endings that make us go soft? I went to work every single day of the week. 

On my last day, I showed up to work wearing the dress I bought from the stupid boutique. I was originally going to burn it but felt too guilty. 

The fabric was thin as an ideal, the color of vanilla cake, buttercream. Frills cuffed the sleeves. My purposeful black underwear peeked through like an orca moments from breaking the ocean’s surface. 

My face was slathered in melted red lipstick. I was an expensive dolly, a showman. A hard candy. I was selling out. After a night of sleeping in the backyard, I reeked of farmland. Vegetation, sweat and piss. But I was young, starved and unavailable. I might as well have been God. 

Women forced smiles as chandeliers hung from their ears, suddenly aware of the collection of wrinkles around their eyes. They didn’t know I was soon to be expired or that I would have kissed them given the chance. Men stared in fits, between bites or while their wives drank. The hours disappeared. 

At the brink of seven, a woman and her husband approached my counter. From their relative smoothness they appeared to be in their early thirties. The woman’s wedding ring shone like the Atlantic. 

“Hello,” she said, stifling a laugh geared towards my dress. “We have a reservation for two at seven.” 

“What?” I asked, staring at her blankly.
 

“A reservation. For two adults at seven,” she glanced over at her husband who shifted his gaze from my 

chest to somewhere behind me. 

“Oh! Yes, right this way,” I said, smiling. “Sorry. It’s my first day.”
 

I heard her snicker behind me. I let her feel powerful. My parting gift. 

Two hours later and my shift was over. My seat would be empty for the rest of the night, 

my duties taken on by one of the already frantic waiters. I clocked out and headed to the restroom. While I washed my hands, I noted a glass sitting on the sink counter. Untouched but full. A golden pool that shone beneath the fluorescent lights. It smelled burnt but I had nothing to lose.
 

I held the glass like a torch, and swung the drink into my mouth while maintaining eye contact with myself in the long mirror strip. My hair fell in greasy spools, my cheeks were flushed. My pupils were oil spills, honest mistakes. I looked like a king. A bottle rocket. 

The shock of the cold, bitter alcohol stung my wimpy tongue. I only ever drank in Massachusetts and even then, I’ve always preferred to eat my substances. I wanted to crack the glass on my head like an Easter egg but refrained. 

I walked out of the front door and immediately lit a cigarette.
 

The night was damp, disgusting. But I felt like a ballerina let loose from her gem box. How funny, I’ve only ever felt powerful while disappearing. My little magic trick. I took a left at the corner of the street where I would usually take a right to get home.
 

The town was still awake. The little pharmacy was bright, people walked in and out of the local grocery store with bags of kale and milk. I stared at myself in the glass of the store, both predator and prey. As I fell down the street, I stared at everybody who passed me and dared them to look back. My shoes, two inch angel white heels, snared against the sidewalk. 

I stopped at the bus stop to light another cigarette. I cupped my hand around the lighter’s obedient flame and begged the world silently.

Please swat at me, mosquito that I am. It doesn’t have to be like this.
 

The air broke around me. I groaned out loud and reminded myself of the weight around my neck. Years of pathetic vases, sex, automatic forgiveness and graceful accidents. How many more times would I get everything I needed? How long before I forgot what hunger felt like? If not now then soon. If not now then tomorrow. Even God needed a break. Even ghosts need to sleep. 

A light shone from down the street. My pulse was a wild snake in the bag of my flesh. I put the cigarette out beneath my foot and watched the light. What a thrill, to be both gone and present at once. To be leaving. I had seen all I would ever need to. I had done all I could. The air began to soften. I stifled a laugh. Fall would come, in her tender, hazy stretches, and I wouldn’t even know. Leaves would change and I wouldn’t know. How divine. 

A wheeze sounded. To my right somebody asked me what the matter was. 

The bus held me.