Food Courting

Chapter 5: Orange Dream

It was day five of the Coup D'é-Tea, and it was not off to a great start. Cora's iced coffee had an emphasis on the first word—iced—making it inconsumable through her soggy paper straw. When she took home the leftover brew the night before, she figured if she removed it from the freezer as soon as she woke up, it would be perfectly thawed by the time her bus arrived at the mall. That was where she made her first mistake: she had assumed she would remember a change to her routine of eight years, and had only removed the drink as she was scrambling to put on her shoes. She couldn't afford to make another mistake that day, not when war was afoot.

Sure, the battlefield had been relatively quiet since the first day, and Fruitastic was struggling with only a bunch of frazzled workers, but that's also what worried Cora. She couldn't let her guard down even if Farron wasn't there, because as soon as she did, Fruitastic would launch another attack. Maybe they were gearing up for a promotion that would steal the rest of the customers in the food court, and Farron was lying in wait. Once the rush was at its thickest, Farron would burst through the wall beneath the giant clock, shouting "oh yeah!" before handing out fruity drinks. How else would Farron retaliate after her defeat?

A part of Cora was concerned that she had been too obnoxious over her victory in the close-off, but the rest of her was adamant that she deserved to gloat. Cora won that battle fair and square, and there was no way Farron would miss three days of work to sulk about it. Or maybe she would. All Cora knew about Farron was that she was a show-off who always looked like she wanted to murder someone and spent way too much time at the gym—probably.

Regardless of the MIA assistant manager's whereabouts, Cora needed all the help she could get to stay on her toes, hence the block of day-old coffee that she tried and failed to break with her straw as she rushed through the mall parking lot. By the time she reached the food court, there was a sufficient amount of liquid against the walls of the cup, and while her straw certainly bent easily, the sharp kinks didn't let the beverage travel far.

As soon as Cora lifted the lid to drink directly from the cup, a solid force collided with her hip.

Her eyes squeezed shut just as cold coffee washed her face, and the block of ice hit her nose soon after. She spluttered like a whale spewing brew from their blowhole, trying to dry her face with wet hands. Was it possible to be blinded by coffee? Would visions of coffee beans disco dance in her head now?

That's when the realization hit her: she was standing in the middle of the food court during the lunch rush, drowning in coffee. Around her, the crowd was painfully quiet, broken only by a high-pitched, whispered "oops" and frantic scampering from somewhere beneath her. And...what color shirt was she wearing again? If it was white, then she seriously pissed off some supernatural entity who cursed her with bad luck.

Were fruit deities a thing? She figured she was well within her rights to battle Fruitastic, but maybe consuming tropical pizza the night before had been the final straw. Perhaps pineapples took just as much offense to being added to pizza as pizza purists did. But it's not like she had physically put the fruit on it. All Cora did was trade two croissants for it with the Pizza Shack worker on her bus the night before.

Even if her shirt wasn't offering the public a sepia-filtered visual of her bra, the sudden silence was enough to warm the cold coffee covering Cora's cheeks. Her instincts told her to run and hide; her common sense reminded her that she couldn't see, and not only had she just collided with something, there was likely a cylindrical block of ice somewhere in her vicinity.

Luckily, she found the ice soon after. Unfortunately, it was her foot that made the discovery when she stepped on it.

It took everything in her power to make her fall from grace a silent one. Cora knew she could handle any physical injuries from hitting the ground. What she couldn't endure was drawing attention to herself with the high-pitched scream she was barely holding back. In some ways, it was a relief she couldn't see what was happening around her. In exchange, she was free to imagine the sneers and laughter directed at her as she fell, trying and failing to regain her balance with her flailing limbs.