I took a drink of water and it felt like pointy little puppy teeth dragging along my throat. I tried to block it out. I had to go into work. But there was no denying the familiar burn and involuntary wince. I didn’t have to shove a flashlight into my mouth and look for the white spots to recognize the strep throat that cost me plenty of school days when I was a kid. I called my manager and he said he’d rather cover my shifts than have me get everyone else sick.
I needed money. That pretty much goes without saying when you’re living in Los Angeles, but lack of funds wasn’t the only reason I wanted to leave my apartment. I didn’t want to spend a few uninterrupted days locked inside with Sam and Pam. My roommates.
“I don’t know, this one makes you look super nice, but you’re not super nice. Y’know? It’s like, you should find one that puts out that badass vibe. That’s more you than this,” said Pam. She flipped over another picture. “Yeah, this one. Look at that. That’s a girl you want to have your back.”
“Yeah but if it’s just for an electronics commercial, I don’t need to look like I can change my own tires,” said Sam. “I need a headshot that will get me more jobs. More relatable, y’know?”
They sat at the kitchen table with a pile of pictures spread out like a Japanese fan. I walked into the kitchen but neither of them turned their head.
This was something I had gotten used to over the past month. Sam and Pam always thought the next commercial would lead to a big break, but they’d only landed a combined one commercial since graduating from acting school the year before. This was why they needed a roommate. This was how I found myself living inside an actor’s workshop. But I usually didn’t see much of them. They were either going to auditions or sitting in their shared room.
I heard my phone beep in my bedroom and I lost a breath. Nobody texted me anymore. The only person I thought it could be was Derek, and that scared the hell out of me. I power-walked into my bedroom and turned over my phone with a shaking hand.
Hey, just checking to see if everything’s okay.
Coral? Why would she be checking on me? Over the year we’ve worked together, the only contact we had outside of the restaurant was to cover a shift. I texted her back that my throat was pretty raw but I should hopefully be back by the end of the week. Then came the shocker:
My mom always made me a homemade chicken soup when I was a kid. I can run some over if you’d like?
Where was all this coming from? I tried not to over think it and just gave her my address.
Just before the sun hit the horizon, there was a knock at the door. I opened it and found Coral holding onto a clear Tupperware container filled with a yellow broth, soft-looking noodles, corn, carrots, and shredded chicken.
“Hey Sarah. How’s it going?” Her head was tilted a bit to the side and her mouth was pressed into a smirk. Her eyebrows were squeezed together beneath her shiny, black hair.
“I’m okay. Just a little sore, y’know?” I rubbed my hand on my throat just in case she didn’t know what it meant to have a sore throat.
“Well here, take this.” She handed the soup to me. “I made it this afternoon. I gotta run to work, but I’ll see you soon, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah sounds good.”
She gave me another smile and started walking down the hallway. Why was she being so nice all of a sudden? Not that she was mean before, but this seemed like a level-jump on our relationship as coworkers.
Whatever the reason, the taste of a personal relationship was amazing. I had been spending nearly every minute by myself for the past month besides when I was at work, and I didn’t think that really counted. I only came to live with Sam and Pam because I had to find somewhere to live after Derek broke up with me.
Stupid Derek. He was the whole reason I moved to Los Angeles a year before. He was also the reason I didn’t have any friends out here. We always hung out with his friends. We always did whatever he wanted to do. Maybe that was our problem: spending too much time together. Maybe that’s what led him to not want to renew our lease on the one-bedroom we shared.
“I think I’d be more comfortable in a studio,” he’d told me.
“But there’s not enough room for all of your stuff and all of my stuff in a studio.”
“Yeah, well that’s the thing.” He scooted away from me on the couch. “Maybe we shouldn’t live together anymore.”
He’d said he wanted to experience the city on his own. I was some sort of anchor or flat tire or shattered femur that held him back from enjoying himself. I found myself with a week to figure out where the heck I was going to go and had to resort to the classifieds on the internet. Enter Sam and Pam, the barely-above-worthless acting duo with firm sights on the Academy Awards, but not on a steady income. If they share a room in a two-bedroom and split the rent three ways, they don’t have to pull in as much money. And I get to live with two people that see me like a walking job that only puts money towards rent.
A couple days passed and I started feeling well enough to go back to work. Coral continued to text me until I finally punched back in at the French restaurant where we waited tables. I didn’t get a chance to talk to her until we happened to take a break at the same time.
“Hey, here’s your bowl back. The soup was great.” I set the plastic bowl and lid, fully washed, on the table between us. She glanced up from her phone and gave me a quick smile.
“Thanks. Glad you liked it.” She went back to looking at her phone without touching the bowl.
“I hope some more tables show up. I’m barely making anything tonight,” I said. Coral glanced up and shrugged her eyebrows, didn’t even take the time to shrug her shoulders, and made the what-are-you-gonna-do face before looking back at her phone.
I resigned myself to eating my shift meal in silence: a casserole the chef threw together made from duck, potatoes, some sort of cream base, and spices I’ll never be able to pronounce. But I was crushed. I thought I had finally connected with somebody on more than a polite level.
As soon as I got sick, she was my best friend. But then once I got better, I was less interesting than pictures of people she’d never met. I’m still the same person. She’s still the same person. The only thing that changed was I wasn’t sick anymore.
I couldn’t stop thinking about this throughout the shift until most of the servers were cut a little before the kitchen closed. We had to park in a lot across the street so we always walked over there together. We counted up our checks and paid into the register, finished our side work, and punched out. As I mindlessly performed these tasks, I had an idea.
Nobody cares when everything is okay. Only when the plane is going down do people address true feelings. And that’s what happened with Coral when I was sick. She probably had some inkling towards a friendship with me, and when I wasn’t okay some friendly instinct kicked in. And now that I’d had a taste of a real connection with somebody after being in a severe drought, I was fixated on it. I couldn’t go back to being just another set of feet making noise towards the bathroom.
We were standing on the street corner waiting for the light to change when I made the decision. There were four of us altogether. We were either complaining about customers, checking our phones, or envisioning our next meal. Nobody was paying attention when I took a step off the curb before our light turned green.
A car approached from the left. Its right blinker was on and it was slowing for the turn when I stepped in front of it. He couldn’t have been going more than fifteen miles an hour.
One of the girls yelled, “Sarah!”
It only took one hop to land on the hood of the car and the driver quickly slammed on his brakes. I didn’t hit the windshield. I might have barely dented the hood. But mostly I rolled across it and landed with a thump on the other side of the car.
“Watch where you’re going you piece of shit!” yelled one of the girls. The others came running around the car to check on me.
I assured them I was okay as they helped me back to the sidewalk where I sat on the curb. The driver was freaking out but I assured him I was okay until he finally drove away. Once he was gone, I let out a short sob.
“Oh my god, Sarah. I can’t believe that guy just hit you!”
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah, I think I’m fine,” I said. “I just, I don’t know.”
“Hey, I know what’ll make you feel better. How about all of us go out for a drink tonight! Forget about all of this shit?”
I looked up at the three girls standing around me. They were looking back at me like I was a lost puppy and it couldn’t have made me happier. I slowly nodded and wiped the tears from my eyes.
“Yeah, I think that’d be nice,” I said.
After a couple days, the break table was just as void of conversation as it was before. My text message inbox housed only the old texts I refused to delete.
During a lunch shift, I passed a customer her coffee while she was passing me her plate, knocking the mug back towards me and burning my arm in front of a couple other servers. We went out for sushi that night. I figured I might as well try it at home. Pam and Sam were doing whatever it is they do in their bedroom while I prepared myself a simple meal in the kitchen. A quick slip of the knife and an alarmed shout, and they were running out of the bedroom to find me bleeding over the sink. An hour later, we made popcorn and watched a movie.
Things hadn’t been this good since Derek decided to downsize apartments. It didn’t matter to me that I had become their project, their sick pet that needed extra attention. I was in a chasm of loneliness and I was willing to take any form of help I could find. The contact I was receiving didn’t strike me as dishonest. If they didn’t care, they would continue not to care even if I didn’t bleed in front of them. Putting myself in a position of pity only magnified their positive feelings towards me, it didn’t create them. And if I could use a shortcut to make friends, I wasn’t in a position to turn it down.
I couldn’t stop myself from letting the case of beer smash my toe in the grocery store. The physical pain I felt was nothing compared to the emotional reward of having a stockboy help me around the store, even grabbing things from the top shelf for me. So what if I turned my ankle outside of the gas station? The man working in the attached auto shop was incredibly kind when he let me sit in the car as he pumped my gas.
It became a puzzle: What could I do in this situation to convince a stranger to become my friend? Maybe not “friend,” but at least a casual, temporary well-wisher. And that was enough for me. Any little bit of social contact I could get throughout the day kept me going until I finally ran into Derek. I figured this would be an eventuality since I continued shopping at the grocery store down the street from the apartment we shared. He moved into a studio in the same complex, so I knew he still shopped there. But when it finally happened, he was at the street corner sitting on his bike and I was alongside of him in my car waiting at the red light.
This was my chance. I didn’t know what went wrong with our relationship but I knew how to fix it. I knew oncoming traffic would have a turn arrow, leaving us to sit in the red for a minute or so longer. But once our light turned green, there was sure to be at least one or two jerks that would try to sneak through before the rest of us started pulling forward. This would be my chance to pull into traffic, get hit by a car while still being totally in the right, and it would all happen directly in front of Derek who wouldn’t be able to control himself when he fawned over me in the resulting wreckage.
It almost went according to plan.
First, the green arrow came and cars piled through like the road behind them was collapsing. I started pulling forward in anticipation of our light turning green. When it did, the flow of traffic from the opposing green arrow stopped. I let my foot come off the gas and coasted into the intersection as Derek pulled alongside me, oblivious to the fact that I was there. That’s when the car decided to pull a last-ditch effort to turn left.
I was looking at Derek, thinking about how annoyed I used to get at having to store that clunky bike in the dining room. I turned my head towards the windshield and saw the red sedan as it squealed its way through the intersection. I hadn’t fully pulled forward so I was nothing but a bystander as the red car crunched the front wheel of Derek’s bike which sent him spinning. His shoulders rolled along the passenger-side door until he finally fell like a wet towel to the pavement. The red car paused for a moment before peeling out and disappearing into the dotted fabric of traffic in the distance.
I parked my car in the middle of the intersection and got out.
“Derek! Oh my god!” I ran around my car to where his mangled bike lay in the road.
He looked up before he said anything. “I’m okay. It’s not too bad.” He glanced down the road from a sitting position. “Where is he?”
“He’s gone. Can you stand?” I helped him to his feet and he held a hand to his back. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, it’s just—” He touched the side of his head where a slight trickle of blood leaked from a scrape. His torso would probably be bruised, but he didn’t look nearly as bad as the remnants of his bike. “Holy shit. One more foot forward and I would be a splatter stain right now.”
“Oh my god, Derek.” I couldn’t help myself. My arms seemed to be pulled by strings around his neck until I was squeezing him and crying in the middle of the street. Some cars were honking, but mostly they were just watching. A few impatient drivers cut in front of others to pull around us. Nobody else got out of their cars to help.
He brought his arms up and we held each other on this concrete stage with the traffic lights needlessly changing above us. People ignored the lights and were driving through wherever they could fit. But we weren’t paying attention. I was reliving the last year of embraces through one hug under the scrutiny of strangers. I felt like I could just lift my legs a bit and he would cradle me like a child, forever protecting me with his blatant invincibility.
Was I being sucked in by the sympathy role that I had been trying to play? At that point in time, it didn’t matter. I was exactly where I wanted to be until he finally released me.
I spoke up before he could say anything. “Let me give you a ride home.”
He picked up his bike and a couple pieces fell from the gears. The spokes on the front tire looked more like wire hangers and it was so bent that it didn’t even creak. It had become one, solid piece of aluminum.
He nodded. “Just let me throw this in the trunk.”
We crammed the bike into my trunk and climbed into the front seats. He entered his seat slowly as if testing the temperature of a pool.
I knew the drive wouldn’t take long. Three minutes, tops. I didn’t have much time to figure out what I could do to flip the sympathy off of him and onto myself. There was nothing I could cut myself on, nothing I could burn myself on, and nothing I could slam myself into short of a car accident.
There was no physical action I could take that would off-set Derek’s accident and my only option left was to say something like, I was going to do it on purpose. I was going to slam my car into another just so you would treat me like you used to, if only for a moment. Loneliness is something everyone has to deal with, but I don’t care. I can’t handle it and I’ve found ways to get through the day, but that’s not enough. I want nothing more than for you to invite me inside and never make me leave so I don’t have to see Sam and Pam for the rest of my life. I’ll renounce my possessions and we can start all over. From scratch. Two new people entering a new relationship that will be stronger than the last because we know what mistakes to avoid. Don’t we? The only way for us to find out is for you to invite me inside.
But I wasn’t able to say it out loud. And now we were pulling up to the front of our apartment complex where he had a new apartment and I didn’t live anymore. We made it the whole ride without speaking and I couldn’t bring myself to start now. He was a foot and a half to my right but he might as well have been on a spaceship outside of the Earth’s gravitational pull. I parked. He opened his door, but he didn’t get out.
“Do you wanna, maybe like, come inside for a little bit? See the new place?”
A genie somewhere had done me a favor. Every piece of my being felt pulled towards the front door of the apartment complex. I could almost feel myself floating through the glass of the windshield and up the steps, but I realized I couldn’t get out of the car. I couldn’t go anywhere near the inside of his apartment. My compulsion for contact had taken control of me and it wouldn’t be long before I cut all my fingers off on the kitchen counter while he was in the bathroom, or some other terrible scene. I pictured myself with stumps where my fingers used to be, blood pooling around my shoes, and I was disgusted. Even if my plan worked and Derek felt so bad for me that he took me back, I wouldn’t be able to look at my hand without retching.
I took my hand from the steering wheel and looked at the cut marks from the previous week. The burns. The bruises. All designed by myself as a means of connecting with somebody. But I now realized that none of it was real. It was all fleeting like the scars that would hopefully disappear as time passed.
I couldn’t go inside. I could never go inside.
“Actually, I have somewhere I have to be,” I told him.
He nodded again and then closed the car door softly. He walked to the back of the car and I popped my trunk. The car shuffled a little before I heard him drop the collection of aluminum onto the street. My trunk slammed and I looked in the rearview mirror. He gave me a slight wave and lifted the bike. He squeezed his eyes tight as he carried it, wincing with each step on his right foot. I wanted to watch him until he disappeared behind the door of the apartment complex, but I pulled away.
I didn’t turn the radio on, instead electing to focus on my wounds as I drove away from Derek. Sitting with Sam and Pam seemed like torture, but that was better than putting myself through actual torture. Around the corner was another streetlight with a CVS on the corner.
Oh good, I thought. I can pick up some burn cream.
Josh Rank graduated from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee and has had stories published in The Missing Slate, The Feathertale Review, Hypertext Magazine, The Oddville Press, Drunk Monkeys, Corvus Review, The Satirist, and elsewhere. He recently moved to Nashville where he’s set a quota of saying “y’all” at least three times a day. More ramblings can be found at joshrank.com.