Normal Lunchtime Conversations Between Friends

A boy, Robbie, and a girl, Pip, walk together in their university’s dining hall at lunch time, each holding a bowl of cereal. They slide into opposite sides of a booth.

Robbie: So how are you and the stalker boy?

Pip: He’s not a stalker boy.

Robbie: He sound’s like he’s close enough.

Pip: Yeah, he probably is. But you don’t really have to worry about him snatching me away anymore.

Robbie: Ooh, what did you do? Did you punch him and scare him away? No, did you tell him you want kids right away like I told you?

Pip: Okay, that was terrible advice. He probably would have agreed.

Robbie: Well what happened?

Pip: He got a girlfriend.

Robbie: When? He was just texting you two days ago!

Pip: Yesterday. He was asking me if I wanted to go out with him on Saturday, and then by the next day... I don’t know, but he found one somewhere.

Robbie: Did he tell you this? How do you know?

Pip: Lizzie told me. 

Robbie: God, Lizzie.

Pip: I told her it’s the last time she tries to set me up with someone.

Robbie: Good!

Pip: (confused) Why are you so interested in him anyway? You’ve never met him, you don’t know what he’s like.

Robbie: Well I know what you tell me, and “probably” being a stalker is enough for me to not like him.

Pip: (stirring in her bowl) But you know I don’t like him either, I don’t want anything to do with him, he’s a creep.

Robbie: Yeah, and so he needs to stay away from you.

(The conversation breaks as the two silently take a few bites of cereal.)

Pip: God, I’m so replaceable. 

Robbie: I thought you didn’t like him.

Pip: I don’t, but still... it sure didn’t take him long to move on. I’m just replaceable.

Robbie: That’s sad.

Pip: It’s true. It’s happened to me so many times this year. 

Robbie: How many?

Pip: Three.

(They both stir around in their cereal)

Robbie: Maybe one of them didn’t mean to?

Pip: What are you talking about?

Robbie: One of the guys... who replaced you. Maybe one of them didn’t know what he was doing.

Pip: Doesn’t matter.

Robbie: But if he didn’t mean to...

Pip: It still hurts like hell. Even if he didn’t mean to. It still hurts to be with him.

Robbie: Well I’m glad at least you finally ditched stalker boy.

Pip: Thanks.

(The cereal bowls are empty by now, but they continue to look down and stir the remaining milk.)

Robbie: I dumped her last night.

Pip: (jerking her head up) What??

Robbie: She cheated on me.

Pip: (turns head to look out window) Wow...

Robbie: No “Are you okay?” or anything?

Pip: I’m sorry. Are you okay? Really. I know you... really liked her.

Robbie: I’ll be fine.

Pip: But you’re not.

Robbie: I really really like her. You don’t... you don’t know how much it hurts.

(She puts her spoon down and sees that he already has.)

Pip: (curtly) You’re right, I don’t know what it feels like to be cheated on. But I think everyone knows what it’s like to really really like someone and have them not think as much of you.

Robbie: (looking down) Yeah.

Pip: (nicer) And it does really hurt.

(They pick their spoons up again)

Robbie: What do you want him to do?

Pip: Who are you talking about?

Robbie: The one who replaced you. The one who didn’t mean it. What do you want him to do to fix it?

Pip: God, I don’t know... I guess... I just want him to know that I’m trying to get over him, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Robbie: Anything else?

Pip: And that sometimes I feel like trash to him, and that’s hard. 

Robbie: Stop feeling like trash. You’re not trash to me.

Left Behind

Her closet was empty and her bed was overflowing. Moving across the country was a little harsh on everyone and everything, including most of her clothes. Kayley was going to college and she couldn’t take everything with her.

She had friends going to school close to home and friends not going to college at all, but Kayley was determined to do something different. For the past 18 years she’d proved to herself she could live at home. It was being able to do anything else that she was unsure of. So it hurt a little that she couldn’t take all the clothes she loved with her, just to make things easier. For each piece she could remember at least one time she wore it, had at least one memory. Maybe it was fitting that she’d have to leave them behind too. She started sorting everything into two piles. The last time Kayley had cleaned out her closet was probably around ten years ago, and the year was somewhere in the 1970s. Not many clothes had made the cut into the keep pile that time. Sometimes Kayley looked back on her old fashion sense and questioned what she was thinking.

She rifled through the shirts and skirts and dresses she couldn’t bear to give away. The keep pile kept growing. From the tiny picture on the college brochure she knew it was too much to take along. Kayley started ruthlessly filling the give-away box with high school dances and amusement park trips and cancelled-school snow days. At the bottom was a skirt.

It must have been buried in the back of the closet, because she’d pretty much forgotten about it. Black and plaid, with pleats and buttons and a buckle, at one time it was her favorite. It wasn’t just a memory, it was fifty. It was her brother’s birthday and the drive-in movies and pizza Wednesday in the cafeteria. It was her high school life. And it was everything she was leaving behind her. Kayley tossed the skirt into the give-away box.

*****

Whenever Samantha drove when it was warm outside, the smell of her car would stick in her hair all day. Despite this she started the trek out to the freshman parking lot. As she yanked the car door shut it creaked with 25 years of old age. Samantha wondered if back in 1985 it even had a new car smell, or if it was always like this.

Her college was down the street from a thrift store but she’d never been. She’d never been to a thrift store at all. But it sounded fun. Samantha pulled into the parking lot and walked inside, not fully knowing what to expect. It looked like all the old garage sales her aunt and uncle used to take her to when they would watch her for the day. Racks of clothes stood next to boxes of shoes and crates of books. In the back looked like furniture and ties and possibly cassette tapes. She delved in.

Most of the clothes she couldn’t imagine ever being bought. She pictured the giant furry coats and strangely patterned dresses hanging in the same spot forever, until the store went out of business and they still hung there, covered in dust. She was even more surprised when in the midst of everything doomed to stagnation, she found something acceptable. It was a black plaid skirt with pleats all around, three black buttons and a silver buckle. Not something she’d particularly seen people wearing around, but she liked it. She looked for the price tag: four dollars. The price was clipped onto the brand tag, and that made Samantha stop. “The Original Ultra Pink Clothes For Fun.” She had no idea what that even meant. The original? For fun? Ultra pink? She got out her phone to look it up.

“Mainly in plaids, popular around 1984-1988.”

The thrift store’s air conditioner must have been broken because all the doors were open and box fans sat all around them. They whirred and swayed the rack of skirts. Samantha tried to imagine the girl who wore this when it was new, when it was fashionable rather than retro. She wondered if she had eighties hair. And mostly she wondered when and why she decided to give the skirt away, and how it ended up here.

Four dollars for ‘The Ultra Pink Clothes For Fun,’  Samantha thought, and bought the plaid skirt with three dollar bills and four quarters. She tossed it in the passenger seat of her creaking yellow car and drove back to the freshman parking lot.

Short Story Ideas

1. Spending the day with an elementary school teacher and realizing how hard and tiring her job is and how much patience and dedication it takes
2. Taking someone to the emergency room at night and sitting in the waiting room forever and everything else involved
3. Figuring out what to get the person you like for Christmas and being nervous about giving it to them
4. Leaving college and going back home for the summer

From Your Best Friend Almost-Girlfriend

To recap what you already know:

You loved me 

then I loved you

but the overlap wasn’t quite long enough.

You moved on without me

and left me here 

to fixate,

latch on to what we almost had.

What no one’s told you:

I want to get there,

but I can’t bring myself to leave here,

sitting in safety,

still believing I’m next. 

You won’t be mine someday,

But I’m all yours.

I’m your trash.

Have a nice Valentine’s day with your girlfriend. 

November

We walk down the sidewalk
in knit jackets and sneakers
just as I asked if you wished to do,
pointing out the warm color of the concrete, while
the uncertain breeze blows through,
killing from the inside,
as leaves fall and crunch beneath our feet
and I stare hard at your skull
trying to see what you really think of me and
regretting telling you incriminating thoughts.

The wind bites harder and I want to talk
about old-time things like the way typewriter buttons click
and how the wax would drip and roll off glowing candles,
but I think better, and stare
at the matching tears in the hems of the bottom of our jeans
that you will never notice,
and when I lift my head
as the cold washes over,
I smile and you smile, and then I stop smiling,
and our gloveless hands freeze, four inches away from each other.

Power

I sit watching TV

feeling perfectly adequate

until the ads point out

my hair is too frizzy,

my legs are too short,

and I need to start shaping up for summer.

My sister is in grade school.

She can’t even spell “Victoria”

but she can’t wait 

for the day she needs a bra

because she can’t wait

to be a play thing rather than a person.

Armrest

These chairs are extremely close together.

I can’t tell if this armrest

is mine

or yours

or the girl’s behind us.

Whoever designed this room has never been a college student

or he would have known

that chairs this close together

aren’t conducive to learning.

Because how am I supposed to concentrate 

on history

or science

or whatever’s actually being taught,

when I’m too worried about accidentally kicking you

when I cross my legs?

In my brain it sounds like,

“The radio was introduced in--” Oh!

Did he just brush my arm?

I felt it.

Did he feel it?

Does he know he brushed my arm?

This chair creaks. 

When I shift to one side, you

and I

and the girl behind us

will know.

My legs are falling asleep.

It doesn’t help

that the air conditioner’s not on

or that this room has no windows,

but the worst part is 

trying, 

trying to pay attention

when all I want to do 

is ask you

if we can share the armrest.