Fluffy(24)

You know. Gotta have a hobby.

“Hasty doesn’t give a crap about what’s happened to me. She’s the golden child and always has been. The only time Hasty thinks about me is when she’s looking at pictures from our childhood and an unexpected wind makes my hair cover her perfect face in a photo on Cape Cod from 2003,” I remind her.

“Your parents don’t have a golden child. You’re both golden. You know you hit the jackpot in the wonderful-parents lottery.”

“I did,” I admit. “But don’t try to claim Hasty cares. That’s overplaying your hand.”

We eat in silence for a moment.

“Why won’t you work for Will?” Fi finally asks softly, serious and concerned.

I assemble another bite and chomp down. Suddenly, Taco Heaven has turned into the second half of Law & Order, complete with an interrogation that tastes like cilantro and 2008.

A very unsatisfactory bite gets swallowed. I look her right in the eye and blurt out the truth.

“If I work for him, I’ll fall for him again. I can’t do that to myself.”

“Mal,” she says in a compassionate voice. “You’re ten years older. So is he. You’ve moved on.”

“He never had anything to move on from. All those years. Lockers next to each other. A handful of conversations. Decoding his every look and move like I was a Navajo code talker. He had no idea. It’s–it’s humiliating. Maybe even more than the porn pics.”

“That’s... a lot of humiliation.”

“See? That’s why I don’t want to work for him.”

Fiona wipes her mouth, balls up the napkin, and pushes it inside the guac container, eyeing me. “I think you need to do it.”

“Need to humiliate myself?”

“No. You need to get over him. For good. It’s like scary horror films.”

“My crush on Will is as bad as that?”

“Your resistance to taking a job that you desperately need just because you’re afraid you’ll revert to your high school self kind of is. Not the horror movie itself, but do you remember when I saw The Ring when I was thirteen, and it scared the hell out of me?”

“Sure. You were whacked.”

“Right. And remember what Dale did?” Dale is one of Fiona’s older brothers. We all crushed on him when we were in eighth grade and he was a senior. And by we, I mean me, Perky, and every other junior high girl (and probably a few guys) aside from Fiona.

“Dale made you watch it five or six times, right? Over and over.”

“Yes. Five. He said it would desensitize me to the fear.”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

“I threw up on him the fifth time he made me watch the scene where Samara comes out of the TV.”

“Are you still afraid of it?”

“Yes. And now Dale refuses to sit near me anytime we watch television.”

“Then his advice was a miserable failure.”

“Uh huh.”

“And you’re bringing it up in relation to me and Will and the job because...?”

“Because you need to take the job.”

“You're comparing you throwing up on your brother with me taking a job from Will? You’re making no sense, Fi.”

“And neither are you. So it's a stalemate.”

Bzzz.

My phone interrupts. It’s a text from Perky.

Listen to Fiona. Take the job. You don’t want to move back home. Mostly, we don’t want to listen to you bitch about moving back home. So be a good friend and take the job, she writes.

“I am not taking a job just because you two want me to spare you the pain of my existence.”

“That’s not why. You need the money. Plus, Will is well connected.”

I hate that she’s right.

“Do a good job for him and he could help you get another job. Full time, with benefits, like you had when you worked for the Tollesons.”

“Why did they have to sell the business? And why did they sell it to a heroin dealer?”

“Pretty sure that wasn’t intentional, Mal.”

“I know. But I really loved my life. And it all got ruined when Sven and Joyce decided to retire and sell off. And then the DEA showed up and took my work computer away. And my Soylent.”

Fiona grinds her teeth. “That powdered meal supplement is disgusting. And they took it because they thought it was fentanyl.”

“I know. I went through decontamination, remember?” That was also the last time anyone other than my gyn touched my boob. I don’t blurt that out.

I have some standards.

Besides, Fiona and Perky already know that, so it doesn’t matter.

“Think about it this way. You spent all those years wanting something from Will you could never have.”

“Uh... thanks? You’re really selling it.”

“Your crush on him took something out of you.”

“And?”

“Maybe getting to know the real Will could help you to reframe. Refocus. And move forward by getting something out of him.”

“Like what?”

“A permanent job? A lead? Or even just a reclamation.”

“You sound like a therapist.”