amphibi.us

1.

This might be heaven, the girl thinks. She is nineteen, and for now these clichés substitute for emotion; but this heaven is not without its flaws, and the girl is not comfortable; rather, she is wide awake with the sun filtering through the blinds, and she asks the boy if he wants to get up and get something to eat. He yawns and smacks his lips and says, “Maybe later,” but she knows that this means, no, because he usually doesn’t get out of bed early unless he has to, and he doesn’t usually eat breakfast, waits until afternoon to hit the cafeteria and gorges himself with the help of his meal plan money. The girl crawls out from under his arms and sits on the edge of his bed. She can smell cigarettes in her hair, and she looks down at her bare legs, stubbly now, and thinks it’s probably for the best that they not go out in public, at least not until she cleans herself up a bit. She turns around and strokes his shoulder and tells him to call her when he wakes up. He mumbles something, and she stands up to leave, to walk down the two flights of stairs that separate his dorm room, his world, from hers. At two p.m. he calls her and asks if she is still hungry. She wants to say, of course, of course I am, for you I am always starving, but this is too much. She just says, yeah, sure, famished, hungry as a hippo, I could eat a horse.

2.

The girl turns the keys in the ignition, and the boy in the passenger seat stares out the window as they pass a Wal-Mart and a used CD store and a half-dozen fast food places and a Shell station that sells amazing sugarfree cappuccinos. The boy, a law student, does not speak until the girl pulls up behind an SUV in the McDonald’s drive-thru; he asks, “Did you want anything?” The girl stares at the menu, but her mind does not seem capable of registering any of the words or numbers; maybe, she thinks, I’m still stoned. (She had only known this boy for a few days before she found herself in the Craftsman house he and his friend rented, inhaling the kind of smoke that made her laugh at stupid movies and made her comfortable doing otherwise uncomfortable things, and waking up the next morning, this morning, in this house to the sound of his friend pouring cereal into a bowl and the boy himself mumbling that he wanted, more than anything in the whole goddamn world, an Egg McMuffin, and asking if she would be willing to drive him there; he was one year away from a law degree and a just few more away from a trophy wife and fact-reciting Aryan children and a house on a lake somewhere, but he still didn’t have a car.) Finally, the SUV pulls forward to pay, a relief because the girl cannot stomach any more of these thoughts. She removes her foot from the brake, and says, “Just a Diet Coke.”

3.

The girl follows the boy down the creaky stairs. Bleary-eyed still, they enter the restaurant through the back door; the air is thick with rice flour and steam. In this land of opium and red lanterns, she, age twenty-three, met this artist boy, and they kissed and they sought adventure and maybe, just maybe, they even found it, this fleeting sort of enlightenment, for a few brief, sweaty moments last night. They order in broken Chinese, and the boy pays for his food, and the girl, too, pays for her own bowl of three-kuai noodles.
—Or maybe not.

4.

It is 9 a.m. on a Saturday, and the boy, the spoiled son of an ex-governor, tells her he’s sorry he’s been sending her mixed signals, but that he’s just not interested in a relationship right now, and that he feels like a total asshole because he thinks she’s possibly the most brilliant person he’s ever met and whatever, etc. The girl doesn’t say anything; she wants to leave, to shower and wash the smell of him from her, but she has no other ride home. Satisfied with the one-way flow of conversation, he stands up and walks into the bathroom, shuts the door. She sinks into his worn leather couch and watches cartoons while he takes a thirty-minute shower and spends an additional fifteen minutes styling his hair. He asks her how his hair looks and she answers, “Fine,” and she asks him when he’s going to take her home and he says, soon. But, when ten minutes later they are on his Vespa, speeding down city streets, he does not make the turn at her intersection. He stops in front of a burger place, because he tells her, he is hungry. When it’s nearly their turn at the counter, the girl tells the boy what she wants—a grilled cheese—and then she disappears into the restroom. She reapplies her eyeliner and stares at herself in the mirror for five minutes. She walks out, and sits down at the table, and while they wait for their order, he begins throwing new ideas out for the concept album they’d talked about writing together. But then he stops mid-sentence and stares out the window at a woman with long, tan legs who strolls by. This woman is, of course, beautiful and already with a man, and she’s probably already eaten and she probably didn’t have to duck into a bathroom with unflattering lighting and study the mountainous geography of her own face and bad life decisions for minutes that dragged on like centuries to ensure that the man she was with would pay for her meal.

5.

The girl sits alone in his apartment. He is a consultant, works at a high-tech company up north where all the high-tech companies are located, and where there are a million Chili’s and AT&T stores, and where in the early evenings they often go eat and then go fawn over fancy phones. It is nearly noon, and he is there, up north, and probably preparing to take lunch somewhere, while she just rolled out of his IKEA bed and is thinking about breakfast. She grabs a stale pseudo-gourmet donut out of a box on the counter, sits down at his table, and uses the remote to turn on the LCD TV; a talk show, no thanks; she turns it off again. She takes a bite of the donut, and imagines someone sitting across from her, someone talking about movies or art or something, someone reaching across the table to wipe a crumb from the corner of her mouth, someone spilling coffee on the table and apologizing profusely, someone telling her to put the disgusting donut down because he wants to make her something better—something not churned out on an assembly line, something not laden with chemicals, something made and served at home, something fresh and original, something adventurous and enlightening, something that tastes of morning, something she doesn’t have to pay for, something unprecedented and revolutionary and served with a side of undying passion and devotion, or maybe just an omelet.

© CJ Hallman, 2010