So I’m eating scones with the girl I hate. The scones are her idea. She says eating one of them is like getting fucked. Not vanilla-style either, the kind with whips. She’s eating the scones and I’m watching, sipping black tea with milk but no sugar. Actually, she hasn’t quite started yet. She’s still spreading clotted cream on each half of the split scone, then homemade jam on top of that. As she does this, she warns me she might make groaning noises. Just so, you know, I know. That’s fine, I shrug, feeling little bits of me catch fire. I’ve got the teacup in my hand, my finger crooked in the little handle that’s too small for it, so the circulation’s getting cut off. I watch her bite into the scone with her little bunny teeth. I watch gobs of clotted cream catch in either corner of her lips. She tilts her head back, closes her eyes, starts to make what must be the groaning noises. I pour myself more tea and cup it in both hands like it’s warming them even though it’s gone cold. Then I pretend to look out the window at the dismal view of the street. I say, “Busy in the office this morning,” and try not to think Cunt.
She is, after all, a friend and colleague.
“What?” she says, her mouth full of scone. She hasn’t heard me because of her groans.
I repeat that it was busy in the office this morning, loudly, over-enunciating, then I do think Cunt.
“Mm,” she says. But she’s too high on scone to really carry on a conversation. She’s so high, she’s swinging her stick legs back and forth underneath her seat like a child and doing this side-to-side dance with her head like the one she did when she ate the fried pork chop in front of me at Typhoon a few weeks ago.
There’s her groaning and there’s her stick legs and there’s her aggressively jutting clavicles. There’s the Cookie Monster impression she does after she describes food she loves (Om-Nom-Nom!). There’s how the largeness of the scone seems only to emphasize her impossible smallness. Mainly, there’s the fact that she exists at all.
There’s also her outfits, which she buys from vintage shops, and which are usually a cross between quirky and whorish. Today, she’s wearing this spandex playsuit like something out of a Goldfrapp video, which she’s paired with sheer tights that have a back seam of little black hearts. Over that she’s wearing a red bell coat like the ones little girls wear when they ice skate in picture books. I had a coat like this when I was five but in pink. There’s a picture of me in the coat, holding my father’s hand in a frozen-over parking lot somewhere in Misery Saga. This was just before he left. In the picture, he’s looking down at this small thing holding his hand as if he can’t believe how small this thing—me—is. In the picture, I’m about the same size as the girl I hate is now.
She catches me looking at her and she says, “What?” and I say, “Nothing.”
She looks at my cup of cold tea and at my lack of scone. “How come you didn’t get one? Aren’t you hungry?”
“I’m going to have a salad later,” I tell her.
I’m already picturing it: me in the blissfully empty break room, my Tupperware forest of spring greens, the dated copy of Hello! I’ll pretend to read if anyone comes in. I won’t turn on the lights.
She shrugs, takes another bite of scone. Then she sort of squints at me.
“You’re very salady,” she says.
“Am I?”
After she’s done, she sinks back in her chair, pats her nonexistent stomach through her playsuit, and says she’s feeling sleepy. She sighs, faux-pouts.
“Wish we didn’t have to go back to work.”
“Yeah,” I say, signaling for the check and grabbing my purse from the back of the chair. She reaches over and pats the fuzzy leopard-print purse like it’s a pet of hers.
“Pretty,” she says.
On the walk back to the office, we discuss our worst temp jobs. Like me, she also left college with a useless degree in the humanities about a year ago, and since then she’s had a string of them. Her worst one, she says, was the one before this one. The boss kept trying to fuck her. Also they had this photocopier she’s pretty sure was possessed by Satan. Also it wasn’t near any good lunch places.
“What about you?”
“The one before this one,” I tell her. Actually, it’s this one.
“Satanic photocopier?” she offers.
“Fax,” I say, looking at the long white line of her neck, offset by a cheap black choker.
“Ooh,” she says. “Worse.”
When we reach the office, before we head to our respective cubicles, she turns to me, her lips and cheeks still flushed from scone, and says, “Text me later, okay?”
“Okay,” I say. Then she trots off, and I see how her little heart seams are perfectly aligned down both calves.
All afternoon I have the waking dream where she gets so fat on scones, she explodes.