If You're Out There(3)

For a minute I’m somewhere else, still hazy from her lingering words. “Hm?”

“For lunch. At school. Who’d you sit with?”

“Oh.” I’m back to hacking at the cucumber again, just slowly enough to avoid mutilating myself. “I didn’t . . . It was nice out. I sat under a tree.”

When I glance up, Arturo maintains eye contact in that awful way he does. I think it’s all the improv training. He and his teammates share a collective subconscious. They make up instantaneous scenes and say, Yes, and! to everything that comes their way. They also sing. In public. Arturo’s life is essentially my worst nightmare.

“Can’t you sit with the soccer girls?” he asks.

I stop chopping in a huff. “I was the only junior on varsity last year. Everyone I played with graduated. The other senior girls this year are . . .”

“Better than a tree?”

“They’re fine is what they are. I’ll get to know them when the season starts this spring. Happy?”

Arturo scratches at his stubble. “I think I’m gonna have to cut back your shifts.”

“What?” My hand flies open.

“Jesus!” cries Arturo.

I look at my clenched fist, wrapped around the handle I caught midair. A second later and the blade would have pierced one of his canvas flats.

Arturo eyes me warily. “Nice reflexes, by the way.”

“Thanks,” I breathe. “Sorry.”

“What were we talking about?”

“My shifts,” I say, still a little dazed. “The ones you cannot take away from me.” My heart pounds as I scoop cucumbers into a bin. This job has been my life raft all summer. It was a loophole, or a wormhole, or whatever kind of hole it is that lets your mind go blank.

It’s not as if there aren’t reminders here. Priya and I applied to this job together—got hired the same week Arturo came on as manager. There were countless shifts, helping each other through dinner rushes, trading stories of our most eccentric customers, collapsing in those sparkling booths at the end of a long night.

But Priya is at home, too. She’s at school, at the beach, on every walk through the neighborhood. At least in a restaurant there’s no time to think. Because in a restaurant, you’ve got zucchini and gazpacho and seitan wraps to attend to.

“You took every shift I offered you this summer,” Arturo is saying. “You never had any plans! I can’t be the enabler here. You’re much too young to become a hermit.”

“Look. Can we please . . .” I wipe my forehead with my wrist. “I’m drowning here.”

Arturo slips on gloves and lets out a sigh. “You’re right.” He gestures to the knife. “Gimme. . . . Carefully.”

“Thanks, boss,” I say, the to-do list already buzzing through my mind as I hurry away. Through the crack in the double doors, I peek at my tables, right as Samantha barges in with a bucket of clanging dishes. “Ouch!” I stumble back, the area around my eyebrow beginning to throb.

“Shit! Sorry, Zan.” She whips her head back toward the kitchen. “Manny! I need polenta fries and a quinoa burger. And so you all know, I was up studying until three a.m. last night, so nobody bug me!” After law school, Samantha Yun will surely go on to be a state prosecutor, a federal judge, or some kind of badass bajillionaire litigator. But for now we serve Veggie Joes together, and she’s pretty much the greatest.

“Hey, you okay?” she asks, swiveling back to me as I cup my forehead.

“Yeah,” I say, laughing though it definitely still hurts. Arturo walks up and she lets him kiss her cheek. I avert my eyes out of respect. Sam hates PDA.

“Have you been considering my proposal?” asks Arturo.

“Uh, no,” says Samantha.

I perk up. “What proposal?”

“I’m trying to get her to introduce me to her mom,” he says, turning to her. “It’s not fair, you know. The entire Reyes family practically throws a parade whenever you come over.”

I smile back and forth between my adorable bickering work-parents, but Sam just rolls her eyes and walks off to make a salad at the station. “You want to kill my mother?” she asks as Arturo follows, with me at his heels. “You want that on your head?”

“So, what?” he says. “I just have to be Korean?”

“Not necessarily.” Sam pauses in contemplation above the shredded carrots. “But maybe like . . . Like a God-fearing anesthesiologist. That’d be pretty good.”

He groans. “At least let her give me a chance. You could take her to one of my shows!”

Samantha gives me a knowing look—the kind that makes me love her. “He really thinks that’ll win her over. Watching a bunch of guys in plaid pretend to be a talking spaceship.”

“That was one scene,” says Arturo, possibly pouting.

Sam softens a little, smiling his way before looking around, as if to regain her train of thought. “Oh right. Some lady keeps whining about veggie gravy.”

“Crap,” I say. I rush to the back to ladle some out myself and bolt toward the double doors.

“There’s a one-top for you, too,” Sam calls after me. “Reggie. Table nine.”

Out in the crowded dining room, I deliver several salads, even more apologies, and the long-awaited gravy before finding Officer Reginald Brooks at his usual booth. He’s sipping ice water in full uniform, his radio crackling.