Yeah, but there is no pace, and no one is getting laid.
“You mean the diner server?” I eyed said waitress who winked at me, letting a quick fantasy play out in my head. A moment later my glass wasn’t the only damp thing about the table.
The little diner just outside campus limits was still a favourite haunt for locals and students alike. A pretence that all the wealth in the kingdom wasn’t indeed theirs, and that they could live a normal life, offspring of billionaires all of them.
*cough* us *cough*
More fakeness and bullshit.
I bought into it just like everyone else.
“Um, yeah,” Angelica replied sheepishly.
“Girl in the chair, thank you for spending another amazing Tuesday Not Date Night with yours truly.”
“Talk to you next week, sister,” Angelica sent air kisses and signed off.
I pulled the earpiece out, turned it over and dropped the tiny miracle of technology into my black glitter purse, the item totally out of place in the white and red splashed retro themed milkshake bar-cum-diner that served alcohol after ten P.M.
The bell over the door tinkled. I craned my neck to watch who came in, praying it wasn’t my late date now that I’d made my choice to go the hell home.
Two tired cops on their local beat, each grumpier looking than the last, entered the diner, marring the colorful facade with their gritty noir darkness which made it my cue toreallyleave.
Date Night is done for another week.
“Fuck me, my life is sad,” I muttered, finishing my water.
“You want a coffee to go, sweetie?” The waitress appeared at my table on cue.
“Thanks, Misha. Appreciate you.” I made a heart with my hands and she ruffled my hair.
“I won’t be a minute, date girl.”
She didn’t lie; in less than sixty seconds I clutched a tall, black, burned coffee that singed my insides and clung to them like so much ash as I made the diner door tinkle on my way out, waving to my regular waitress.
“Sooo sad,” I sang to the night air, scaring a sleeping quail that hightailed it along the dimly lit path I took, darting side to side in a flurry like a suicide chicken as it assumed I chose to chase it.
Run, run, birdie.
I giggled at the tiny creature’s antics as it veered off the path and disappeared beneath a bush. A pair of luminous, disembodied eyes peered back at me.
“Night night, cutie.”
I blew the quivering quail a kiss, and turned off at the next fork away from campus and the lecture halls at the exclusive, rich kid and legacy alumni admissions only college.
Rippton wasn't a place where I thought I'd spend my newly found freedom, but my parents paid the tithes to be rid of the only child they never seemed to want seeing as I didn’t fit into theirperfect progenymould while I inherited a boatload of abandonment issues and an apartment of my choice on the edge of town.
Sororities and parties never did it for me. Perching on my window seat, a glass of red wine dangling from my hand as I watched the college town grow silent each night, leaving me with the taste of dew on the icy night air, though? That did.
The same air that drifted through the arched floor to ceiling window I left open every night that was big enough for an adult to easily step through if they were willing to risk their existence over a sheer, four-story drop to the filthy streetscape below.
The nights I left my window open were the nights I slept best, as though the soft murmur of the sleepy town’s night time comings and goings filtered through to me in my dreamstate like a conversation I could listen to but didn’t have to engage in.
Hell, I'd even woken once from a dream to find a glowy, white angel standing at the end of my bed. Lost in a dream? Maybe. Cliche, but true. It took a few blinks for him to disappear, but my comfort level rose, and I clung to that pretense that all was right in the world, and that good girls went to heaven.
Not that I’d ever been the epitome of one of those, but I could pretend on that basis too.
Anyone else might freak out, but my weird happy zone appeared to be the reverse of everyone else’s.
