Deeper

That's how I get to be not-friends with Caroline Piasecki.

“You want to come inside?”

That’s all it takes. When she says “Yeah, sure,” I turn and go back in, and she closes her car up and follows me.

I put my iPod on shuffle and start it playing. I like having music for this part of the night—put it on any earlier, and the mixers are too loud to hear it. While I wash my hands, Caroline wanders around, doing a slow circuit of the room. Unlike Krishna, she doesn’t touch anything.

I tie my apron on over my jeans and go back to what I was doing.

“Bob makes the sweets,” I tell her. “I just stick them in the oven at the end of my shift. Not sure if you want to wait that long.”

As though she’s here for a cookie, and not because . . . fuck if I know. I clocked her ex, she showed up at the library, I mauled her, and she told me she doesn’t want to have anything to do with me. Then she started stalking me at work.

What am I supposed to think?

She shrugs.

I fling a chunk of bread off the scale onto the floured surface of the table. “So how’s it going?”

Caroline leans a hip against the table’s edge, all the way down at the far end. “Fine.”

Fine.

Everybody says they’re fine. It’s bullshit.

It’s not as though every conversation I have back home is deep and meaningful, but I never wasted so much time being polite as I do in Iowa.

Caroline’s wearing sweatpants and flip flops and a hoodie you could fit seven of her in. Her toenail polish is chipped, and her hair’s in one of those lazy half-ponytails, like she started to put it up but her arms got tired and she had to abandon the job before she finished.

There are chicks who dress the way Caroline is dressed all the time, but she’s not one of them. On the first day of history class, she wore jeans and a bright blue sweater even though it was still ninety degrees outside. She lined her pen and her highlighter up perpendicular to her binder, and the textbook and the syllabus all out in front of her.

There’s something about her that’s totally pulled together, even when she’s just wearing jeans and a shirt. Not the way she looks, I mean. Something inside her. Like she’s got it all figured out, knows what she wants, knows she deserves to get it.

I can still see how her face looked when she was sticking her nose inside my car, checking out all my stuff, asking me, Don’t you worry about botulism?

Tonight—lately—she’s all wrong. She isn’t fine. Not anymore.

And I can’t let it be.

“How come everybody lies when you ask them that?”

“What, how they are?”

“Yeah. You say Hey, how’s it going? and everybody says Oh, fine. Their hair could be on fire, and they’d still say fine, fine. Nobody ever says You look like shit or I don’t have enough money to make rent or I just picked up a prescription for a really bad case of hemorrhoids.”

“People don’t like talking about hemorrhoids. It makes them uncomfortable.”

“But who decided it was the end of the fucking world to be uncomfortable? That’s what I want to know.”

She shrugs again. “I think it’s supposed to be like lubrication for society.”

“Lubrication?”