Tuesday & Max

7

DON'T IT ALWAYS SEEM TO GO

THAT YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'VE GOT TIL IT'S GONE

THEY PAVED PARADISE

AND PUT UP A PARKING LOT

Tuesday's order is exotically purple with cabbage, rampant with flavour and squished rustically between two seeded buns. The place Max has chosen for lunch, she realises quickly, is the kind of place that considers its food, its art.

"So where have you been this whole time?" Max asks.

Tuesday shrugs. "Working usually."

"Why?"

"College isn't exactly what I thought it would be."

New beginnings had turned out a lot like old beginnings. Then, she sat alone among people she might once have called friends. Now, she sits alone among new faces. Perhaps the problem isn't Them after all. Perhaps it's her.

"Why not?"

Tuesday's surprised by the volume of Max's questions. He's always come off quiet. Maybe, she wonders, he's decided that she – of all people – is worth getting to know.

"Why'd you keep disappearing last year at school?" she fires back. She means it to come off cheeky; worries it's just rude.

Max sips his coffee. He pauses for a moment, but when he answers her, he looks her straight in the eye.

"My mother was ill."

Tuesday blinks. For a long moment, she's rendered completely speechless. His mom was sick too? When she does open her mouth, her voice is hoarse and she coaxes it out. "What?"

"Not, like, physically. Like—" He struggles visibly, then sighs. "She has OCD." Before Tuesday can say anything, he clarifies. "But she's not just tidy."

Tuesday laughs uneasily. "Yeah, I was gonna say."

"Sometimes she gets too unwell and I have to go and stay with my uncle. He lives in Suffolk." Max smiles; she sees piers and seagulls and sandy ice creams in his faraway eyes. "I really like it there."

"I can't believe I didn't know that."

"Nobody really did." Max shrugs. He opens his mouth, pauses, then speaks. "I'm sorry about your mom."

Tuesday hasn't heard that from anybody in a long time. Discomfort twists her stomach; a mixture of intense loss, the residual nausea that comes with it, and awkwardness. She feels sorry for him. Sorry that he felt he had to say something, and sorry that it's prompting her to talk about it more.

"Yeah. That's okay."

"Was it breast cancer that she had?"

The question is a surprise. He said it. The C word. He captured her eye and asked an actual question about it.

"Yeah. She was in remission, though. They just cut it out." They'd actually cut it off. Her chest had been a bubble wrap of swelling that had eventually drained to a wide open plain, with two neat scars like unfinished x-marks-the-spots.

Max tilts his head and Tuesday's suspicions are confirmed. He doesn't know the full story.

She takes a deep breath because somehow, she still needs it for this.

"My mom was a travelling florist?" Tuesday begins, eyes on her half-eaten lunch. She hopes he doesn't question the job. It was weird, a hobby more than a career, and it doesn't matter much now. "A Land-Rover hit her van on the way to a festival and she lost control and came off the road."