? ? ?
On my walk to work the next day, I make a promise to myself. I promise that when the girl I hate asks me out to lunch I’ll say No, I’ll say No, I’ll say No. Then, at around eleven, when she sends me a text that says, Weird Swedish Pizza!! Omnomnom!! I text back, . We go to the Scandinavian café she loves. She orders a sausage-lavender-thyme pizza square the size of her head plus a kanelbulle, a cinnamon bun, for later, for what she calls Secret Eating. I get the fennel-pomegranate-dill salad, which comes undressed in a diamond-shaped bowl. While she’s eating the pizza, she watches me forage through limp dill fronds for fennel quarter moons. I try to distract her by making a comment about the weather, how I thought it was supposed to rain today, something to make her look skyward, but her eyes are on me, my fork, the bowl.
“That salad’s small,” she says.
“Not really,” I say, bringing the bowl closer to me. “It only looks small.”
But she won’t let it be. She lifts her heart-shaped sunglasses, leans forward, peers down into the bowl, and sort of wrinkles her nose like she’s just smelled something awful.
“It looks small because it is small,” she says, sitting back. She cocks her head to one side, like I’m curious. “How come you got that?”
I say something about how I just like pomegranate seeds, how they’re pretty, like rubies.
She stares at me until I feel heat creep up the back of my neck. Then she shrugs. She’s wearing this strappy tank that exposes how her shoulders are all bone. She opens her mouth wide and takes a pointedly large bite of pizza, then leans back, chewing, and tilts her tiny face toward the sun.
“I love shun,” she says.
? ? ?
That night, while I’m having dinner with Mel at the bistro with the fun salads, I bitch to her about Itsy Bitsy, which is what I call the girl I hate when I’m being funny about how I hate her. I don’t even wait until we’ve gotten our drinks, I just start in while we still have the oversize menus in front of us. I tell Mel about the scones and the Swedish pizza. I tell her about the salady remark. I tell her what I wished I could have told Itsy Bitsy, about scones turning into more taut littleness for some, while others are forced to grow fat on salad. I figure Mel, who’s fat now, heavier even than I was at my heaviest, will appreciate how hate-worthy she is. It’s what I love most about Mel.
She says, “Itsy Bitsy. I think you’ve told me about her before. She’s the girl who kept eating the lemon slices off your vodka sevens, right?”
“That was Soy Foam. The anorexic from my old work. This is another one, from my new work. And I don’t hate her so much anymore.”
“Itsy Bitsy?”
“Soy Foam.”
Soy Foam was annoying, really annoying, but at least I got her. I didn’t at first. At first all I saw was this terribly small woman from Accounts who, whenever we’d go to lunch, would order an Americano with steamed soy milk on the side, then eat the foam with a spoon, like soup. Then one night, during happy hour, after devouring all my cocktail garnish, she drunkenly confessed she hadn’t had her period in two years and that as a result of premature menopause, she’d had to start shaving her face. After that, I hated her less. But it’s different with Itsy Bitsy.
“Sorry. So who’s Itsy Bitsy then, Lizzie?”
Beth, I want to correct her. I’m Beth now, not Lizzie. But even though I’ve told Mel time and time again that I’m not going by Lizzie anymore, she always reverts back to it.
“Itsy Bitsy’s the super thin one. With the heart tights. Who makes the Cookie Monster noises.”
“Oh,” she said. “Right. Well, why do you go to lunch with her if you hate her?”
“We’re friends. She’s actually really nice aside from this.”
I remember how, during my first week, she sort of took me under her wing. Showed me how to use the photocopier. Got me out of a printing jam by banging her fist repeatedly on the lid until it belched out the other half of my report. Once, when I had a tension headache, she pinched my palm between her thumb and forefinger super hard for five minutes because she’d read online that sometimes that helps. Also, she was the only other girl in the office in her midtwenties. The only one who bothered to talk to me, at least. We even have a girl we hate together: Probiotic Yoga Evangelist, this whore from HR. After we caught each other making gag-me faces at her Bikram Changed My Life speech, which she made between spoonfuls of Oikos in the break room, we sort of bonded.
“Yeah,” Mel agrees. “I guess that makes it harder.”
The waitress comes and I order my heart salad with the poppy seed dressing on the side.
“Heart salad?” Mel asks.