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.