eleven.
Vintage photographs of actors from the sixties were framed on the brick red walls, surrounding the white and black booths of Mandy Lee’s thus making the place a fit for wandering hearts. The stench of coffee and newly baked bread gives a breakfast feel to the diner despite that it’s already in the afternoon. It’s one of those few things Jasper liked about winter – every meal feels like breakfast; warm and stomach-filling.
Mandy Lee’s made him feel at home, for he isn’t sure what home counts as anymore, he knows he’s either close to or far away from it.
He rubs his hands and exhales breaths in them as he sat at an empty booth besides the window, Jade sitting bleary eyed across from him. Her hair is a dismantled mess that she isn’t bothered to untangle of, so instead, she pulls the hoodie – his hoodie, the one he gave her when she couldn’t stop shaking and blames it on the winter – over her head. Her nose is puffy from what she claimed as the weather. But he knows better.
A waiter greets them and places a couple of menus on the table.
He doesn’t know what made him do it, but he is now leaning his abdomen on the table, a hand reaching over to slide the hoodie off her head. She looks up to him with surprised eyes. Ignoring her glare, he starts to brush away the hair that stuck to her cheeks, and then with both hands, starts to untangle her messy hair, neatly placing strands at the place they should’ve been. One of his ex-girlfriends – one he can’t and refuse to remember the name of– hated it when anyone – him included – touches her hair intentionally that she would slap those hands away and plan a killing scheme for them whilst she’s in the shower, scrubbing her hair with half a bottle of shampoo. Jasper doesn’t know about Jade, whether she’s a serial killer in secrecy, except that she’s had her eyes closed and she’s holding her breath tight. When he sits back down, she gasps. Her eyes open. Her palms on her jeans.
In his mind, he scratches out serial killer out of the list and scrawled in thief. She’d almost stolen his heart.
“God, can’t we just get on with the ordering?”
“Caffeine?”
“Definitely caffeine. A large bottle of Coco-Cola and coffee beans fillings pie, if possible. With a lot of whipped cream on top. Or just have a bowl of whipped cream as a side dish. Yeah. That sounds pretty awesome, don’t you think?”
He smiles, calls up for the waiter and they order their food. (No, they do not order pie with coffee-bean fillings or a large bottle of Coco-Cola or even a bowl of whipped cream, for that matter, but they keep coffee – black coffee and white hazelnut – in the list.) Once the waiter leaves, she bangs her forehead on the table and groans.
“Suck it up already,” he says with a laugh. Mainly because he knows that the aftermath of lending your soul to The Book Thief is not something one can easily “suck it up”. She lets out another sad groan as he shakes his head, his smile suppresses wider on his face. He catches the memory of the first time he reads it at the age of fourteen, where he reads it simply due to looming boredom and he remembers being heartfelt about the story, but the feelings stopped there – and the book was then buried deep in his drawer of socks and boxers. It wasn’t until a year later that he locked himself up in his room for days, for the death of his mother tore him apart, that he starts to look for the book again and upon finding it, he reread it, with tears staining his cheeks. And then he read it again. And again. And again and again, he made sure he wasn’t in public when he reads it so he wouldn’t get caught swiping tears off his face.
As he grows older, the characters become his companions through hollowness and very rarely, happiness, with the narrator Death as his best friend.
Looking back at Jade now, he wonders how anyone can look that cute when sobbing. She’s the first one he knows, and God, doesn’t he want to know more about her; other than the way she cries and laughs and slips words out of her mouth without meaning to and gets insecure about herself pretty quickly and that she strives to be proved and appreciated by the people she loved. To leave a mark on this world, even how ridiculous and impossible as they sound.
