She sits down with a huff. “I swear to you she just gave me side-eye for no damn reason. I asked for an extra soy sauce and she was all, ‘I’ll give you that soy sauce’ reeaall sllooww, and ‘Here, have this side-eye too.’ You know they’re a bunch of racists over at Panda.” She raises her voice now as if she’s yelling back at the Panda Express girl, but her voice is way not loud enough to reach. “Yes, you. Side-eye. I swear I’m gonna boycott this racist-ass mall.”
“That doesn’t even make sense,” Kayla says. She is on day three of her typical “I’m going to eat better from now on, I swear” thing, so she is rocking a Cobb salad from Panera. “Shouldn’t you just boycott Panda? And shouldn’t you do that anyway, because it’s Panda Express and that’s barely food, and would your volleyball coach be even a little okay with you eating that crap?”
Pam’s eyes go all wide and she runs her fingers across her cornrow Mohawk. “Oh I swear to God if you get all holy about food again.”
Kayla winces and tosses her blond bangs to the side. “It’s not again.”
Now Pam rolls her eyes. “Post-Thanksgiving tofu fest. Check. Early January freak-out followed by a trip to Whole Foods with your mom, and then a million phone calls about how deprived you were and how gross radishes are. Check. Valentine’s Day crash diet. Check. Earth Day’s Day of Eating Earth, which is not happening again, by the way.”
“Okay, okay,” Kayla says, cutting a piece of lettuce into tinier and tinier pieces. “God. Self-righteous ever?”
We eat, unable to avoid the Sia video playing above our heads because mall officials have decreed it’s a criminal offense to not be assaulted by at least six sources at any given second. Kayla intermittently texts Shaun, the Chess Club participant most likely to get a girl pregnant at MG.
“Bitch is resting-bitch-face-ing right at me,” Pam says, still not over her made-up drama.
“I hate to disrupt this diatribe about a microaggression that may or may not have happened, or this world-changing conversation about Kayla’s latest unnecessary diet, but I was wondering if for one second we could focus on me,” I say. “I mean, what about me? What about my needs?”
“Drama queen,” Kayla says, putting her phone down and forking lettuce into her mouth.
“Queer card,” I reply, slapping an imaginary card on the counter. We all have cards we get to play, though I only get to play mine once a week because I lost a bet (Keanu Reeves is in fact Canadian, not dead). Pam, whose mom is black and whose dad is Mexican, gets to play her card daily, and Kayla, whose dad is Canadian and whose mom is Scandinavian, gets to play hers whenever the hell she wants. Because privilege.
The girls are looking at me, having decided to grant me center stage for a moment, and suddenly it’s hard to figure out what to say. How I am supposed to feel in this situation. If, say, my mom quit the food truck and I was stuck with it and with an employee I barely know, but we weren’t, say, about to be homeless. I can’t figure it out, so I swallow, and I pivot.
“Can we just for a second focus on the fact that I will never, ever have a boyfriend because I am hideous, and because God forbid anything should ever go my way in this life, ever?”
Kayla rolls her eyes theatrically, looking a little like her saucy grandmother character from the spring production of Pippin, and Pam, perhaps sensing that this is not a groundbreaking conversation as we talk about my burgeoning spinsterhood every day, looks up at the video.
“Oh, look,” she says. “Sia was once a victim, but not anymore.”
“That hardly ever happens,” I say, grateful the spotlight I asked for has been turned off.
The talk subsides, which is excellent because I am partaking in my favorite pastime, which is ignoring my pathetic life by fantasizing about having my first boyfriend.
I get pretty specific when I do this.
This time he is a redhead with a slightly bent nose and eyes so light blue they actually have a vague ocean scent. He plays trombone and he used to be friends with these kids who are now Alt-Right-ers and now that he’s out they troll him online, and one day his dad, a construction worker, visits one of their fathers and says, “You make sure your Nazi son stays away from my boy.” He likes to play Frisbee and makes viral videos of himself lip-synching to Beyoncé songs. We go to the same community college and get an apartment in downtown Mesa along the light-rail, and every night I make dinner — he loves pasta primavera — and we watch British costume dramas on TV. We get married after college and he gets an IT job and I get a job waiting tables while I write my first screenplay, and when I sell it to Hollywood and it becomes a movie, we move to Southern California and get a place overlooking the ocean for us and our two children, Aimee (after Aimee Mann, of course) and Dale (after Dale Bozzio of Missing Persons) — both girls, thank God — and they take his name because it’s something with a little more kick than Edwards, like maybe Darlington. Yes! Dale Darlington. Totally.
“Oh my God,” Kayla says, smirking at me.
I realize I’m smiling like a dork, so I adjust my expression. “What?”
“You’re doing that thing again.”
“I am not,” I say, biting my lip and averting my eyes.
“You totally are. And shouldn’t you have an actual date before you wind up with kids, living in Costa Rica?”
“You could not be more wrong,” I say.
She puts her hands down on the table and crosses them, like she’s waiting for proof.
“Laguna Beach. And he’s Irish this time. Redhead.”
She rolls her eyes. “You are such a ridiculous romantic. We need to get you your first boyfriend. This summer. Hey! We should do a makeover!”
“Um. No,” I say.
“No. We totally should! Right today. Don’t you trust us? Don’t you trust me to make you so beautiful that no boy will ever be able to withstand your gorgeousness?”
“What would you do if I let you?” I ask her.
Pam, who I thought was not paying attention as she is still staring over at Panda in between bites of something orange chickenish, answers simultaneously with Kayla.
“Your hair,” Pam says.
“Your clothes,” Kayla says.
“I hate you both so much,” I say. “Like truly, utterly hate you to my innermost self.”
We wind up back at my place, after a stop at Forever 21, where Kayla bought me a pair of flimsy midnight-blue sweatpants with the word “Star” written all over them and a yellow hoodie with a photo of Jesus, with the zipper running right through the middle of his face. Mom is holed up in her bedroom with the door shut, which suits me fine because I can’t with her right now. I put on the Thompson Twins on my turntable — I am obsessed with ’80s synth-pop and their song “Lies” is everything — and Kayla makes me change into my new outfit. Once I’m dressed, I look at my reflection in the mirror.
“I look like a ten-year-old foreign exchange student,” I say, and Pam bursts out laughing. She’s taken the turquoise lava lamp off my desk and brought it over to my waterbed, where she’s propped herself up on purple satin pillows and is tilting the lamp back and forth to watch the ocean-like lava ooze back and forth.
“Oh my God you do!” she says, and she rolls onto her back on my bed and just cackles. “We’re gonna call you Ludwig, okay? You are from the Black Forest and your Evangelical hosts took you out on your first weekend in the country and picked out your outfit. Ludwig!”
Kayla is lying on my dark purple shag carpet, texting — Shaun probably — and I clear my throat a few times to get her attention. When she doesn’t budge, I go over to where she’s reclined and put my skinny, “Star”-studded butt in her face and wiggle it.
“Whoa, whoa,” she says, looking up from the phone. “What’s with the unwanted lap dance?”
“Your outfit is being besmirched,” I say, and she looks up and I can tell her first impulse is to break out in laughter but she holds it back.
“Oh. Um. I think it’s very — stylin’ —” she says, and Pam throws one of my flip-flops at her. It hits Kayla in the side of the head. Kayla picks it up, dramatically rubs her forehead, and yells, “Hate crime!”