#I have flat-ish feet and very silent walking style since I was little

[not-your-lifeline]

Relatable.

[fenton-bus]

I.

How To Lose Acquaintances And Discourage People

    All you really need to know is this:

Austin spills his Monster Energy drink on some Hawaiian-shirt wearing redhead in his Poli-Sci class and Trish ends up paying for it for the remainder of her natural life.

∞

A long shadow falls over her IPad screen.

  Despite the fact that she is a grownup-esque, adult-ish, totes mature person Trish honestly cannot help the rapid fluttering of her heart, the dizzy thrill of reckless hope at the possibility that today of all days, in this crummy corner of Daley’s surrounded by sad, dreamless randoms she’s managed to find her James Darcy or Edward Cullen. Bracing herself against her chair, Trish takes a breath, turns around.

 “Do you ever think about parallel dimensions?”

 JK, its Dez, decked out in a leopard print vest, polka dot pants combo that screams I’m a grown man.

 Trish wrinkles her nose. “What are you wearing?”

 He smiles, wide and warm before choosing a direction to stare into like a pirate ship captain gazing off into the horizon. Hands on hips, dignity forgotten.

 A solitary hair flip. “I woke up like this.”

 “Go back to sleep. It obviously didn’t work.”

 His mouth falls open in an all too real outrage, palms spread. Sensing the full twirl before it happens Trish holds up one hand.

 “Flawless.” Dez intones.

 The voice is more Batman than Beyoncé.

 “No.”

 “Bow down.”

 Trish winces. Grits her teeth. “We’ve been over this freckles, you’re not allowed to blaspheme Beyoncé Carter-Knowles.” It’s way too early in her life for this. "Please go put on different pants.”

 “I hear your criticism, Dez rocks back on the balls of his feet. And I’m going to go in another direction.”

 “The door?”

 “Nope.” There is the ear-punching scratching of chair legs being dragged across the wooden floor (and the subsequent staring of sad randoms without lives) and bam, pale, freckled, freakishly long limbs are stretching across the table to get at her pumpkin spice muffin, gargantuan Franken-feet are nudging her flats under the table, and Dez’s face, sparkling with a truly exhausting amount of joy like they haven’t seen each other in four years as opposed to four days is turned toward her like some giant, non-verbal invitation there aren’t enough versions of ‘I Renounce Thee Satan’ in the world to rsvp to. Trish grabs her iced caramel macchiato and hugs it to her chest protectively.

 “Go away.”

Dez eyes her IPad. “Dude, are you tweeting Quincy Jones again? He hasn’t responded to your last five tweets. He flips his hair again. (Trish does not growl) That last one had a pretty aggressive tone.”

“Carrot face, the girl says sweetly. I’m working.”

The doof actually smiles in this commiserating way, like he lives in a world where applying for internships and writing music reviews are in every way comparable to juggling or baking brownies or riding a unicycle down the Long Island Expressway or whatever he does with his free time. Trish rolls her eyes. Seven months ago she would’ve called Dez Wade a doof and moved on but now, his status is clear: he is high king of the doofs. The Eminent Supreme Doof. On his home planet, whole civilizations of lesser doofs have carved his image in stone and decorated the halls of his palace with his stupid, doofy portrait. The amount of sheer doofiness that is able to exist in one pale, stick figure of a body is Beyond.

 Sometimes, the fact that someone like Dez even exists, much less speaks to her on a daily basis is just…how? Or, it would be, if Trish thought about it for too long. At the moment, she’s up to letting it sit in her brain for a maximum of thirty seconds before she decides to go out and

 Anyway, Dez is saying “Cool,” like he’s worked before, and nodding and launching into a conversation he had with his cat this morning and she’s totally succeeding at not paying attention (on goes the IPad, hello Twitter) when he claps his hands real loud, real sudden, and shouts “Okay!”

The barista formerly carrying the iced mocha latte is currently frozen in place, watching it sail across the room. Staying on its given trajectory means it’ll collide with Wall Street Guy who chose today of all days to wear his best Brooks Brothers suit. But the dude is so busy having a deep convo with Bargain Basement 90s Era Will Smith (big ears, neon green windbreaker, dark purple fanny pack, currently singing the items on the specials board to himself) that he doesn’t notice the coffee he didn’t order until it’s sloshing around in what was previously his very natural looking hair piece. (Wall Street has been coming in and ordering black double espressos since midterms. Trish can’t believe she didn’t notice the rug.)

 Wall Street Guy’s yelp is drowned out by the actual scream of the woman at the table behind him, when his wet hair falls on top of her cinnamon bun.

 “My bad.” Dez mutters.

Trish manages to tear her eyes away from the beautiful train wreck long enough to give him her limited-edition, Side-Eye that had he actually been looking at her, would have given him the effect of feeling judged for all eternity.

Now Cammy the Barista is gazing off into the distance. Not like a pirate captain though, she looks legitimately horrified. Trish has seen that very specific brand of shock and terror on her co-workers faces whenever her bosses go on tangents about “trimming excess”. Trish knows that right this very moment, every tiny, seemingly trivial mistake Cammy’s ever made inside these walls is flashing through her head movie montage style. (the soundtrack? Her anguish) Every messed up order, every backed up afternoon rush,  every time she had to tell the long-haired, piercing-riddled, Ray-Bans wearing, tattooed,   painter from Brooklyn on his usual stop in during his morning bike ride no they didn’t have Amish-made, vegan cranberry pumpkin bread maybe he should try the vegan bakery on lower sixth and even though she got here at five and has already had three encounters that made her put quitting back on the table, and even though she has the same fifty-four word conversation with a dude who chooses to walk this earth with an un ironic rat tail every single morning since she woke up desperate enough to apply here, her voice is calm and polite and even a little regretful, like a tiny part of her feels bad about the fact that a major chain doesn’t carry Amish-made, vegan cranberry pumpkin bread-and then, after all of that Judgey McShower Please still finds enough inner tool bag necessary to take time out of his busy fixie bike tour of the lower east side to pluck one of the little white customer surveys from the pad next to the bucket of skull rings on the counter and fill it out, (resting his weight on the counter like the effort exerted by being a douche exhausts him) making passive aggressive scratching sounds with his pencil as he underlines the phrase “tone was needlessly aggressive” three times. 

 He hands it to her silently, hoists his bike on to his shoulder with one hand, and heads for the door. Trish hopes with all of her might that he rides through Hell’s Kitchen and falls into a construction hole.

As Cammy grapples with the very real possibility of being ‘terminated’ (she has school loans and a cat, and at some point, she kind of wanted to travel-or at least  see a view that wasn’t her elderly neighbors listening to Tony Benet and sucking face.) and Trish tears her eyes away from the ‘well I never’ bluster of  Wall Street Guys trembly rage, (if the vicious way he’s stabbing at his phone is any indication, this melt down is going to be epic) Dez manages to execute the ‘backing away slowly’ move while sitting down. He straightens his shoulders and fold his hands on the table like the last four minutes didn’t happen.

 According to Trish’s Creeper Manual, (545 Pgs., De La Rosa Publishing, $150.00 retail value, all funds go to The Trish De La Rosa foundation) sixty seconds without blinking is classified as a stare.

Trish stares back.

Dez starts humming The Jurassic Park theme.

 Her eyes are in very real danger of rolling out of her head and tumbling across this dirty floor.

 Thirty seconds. Forty-five.

 “Oh my God, what?”

 Dez starts. Smiles. “Oh, I was just wondering what I would look like if I had a carrot for a face.”

 “Do you own a mirror?” She says before she can stop herself.

 Inexplicably (no, she doesn’t want to know) the doof’s grin grows. “Would my face like transform into a carrot or would it just get really orange?”

 “Full on carrot. Trish nods. “Think werewolf but lamer.”

 “I could live with that. I wouldn’t have to worry about getting eaten unless I ran into people who really liked carrots. Ooh, maybe there’s some birth defect that causes people’s faces to turn out vegetable-y! Trish!” He slams his fist on the table, winces real hard, finds the strength to continue. "What if that’s my destiny, to gather all of the down-trodden vegta-people, looked down on, denied their rights simply for being full of folic acid.”

 His voice is rising like a Wonka-vator, gaze full of heroic things only he can see (thank god). She takes a long sip of her coffee, wonders what people lucky enough not to be her are doing right now.

 “Maybe that’s why I was put on this earth, to teach them to love themselves. We’ll live a life free of the judgment of you normies; we’ll build our own colony, with our own laws. He rubs his chin in thought. Maybe we’ll live in a pyramid.”

 “I will pack your bags.”

 “Thank you.”

 Trish leans over, smiling indulgently, pats his hands. “Anything for you buddy.”

 “Aww, His face changes. Wait-“

 “Hey, remember when I told you to scram?”  

 Dez nods, “Was that before or after we planned my future as the pop star impressionist Dezyonce?"

 Deep in the caverns of Trish’s temporal lobes, lies a specific set of neurons responsible for the chemical reaction to strong, talented women being besmirched by fools, thus she is just barely able to resist slapping him in the face with his own hand. Assault is assault after all, and she has the feeling anytime spent in police custody would just result in the gleeful taking of pre and post lock up selfies.

 “Listen Freckles, she intones, in the sweet tone that everyone but the idiot in front of her easily recognizes as the Trish DeLa Rosa, limited edition, “I Will Bury You, Then Innocently Read the Eulogy At Your Funeral With The Kind of Solemn Strength and Dignified Crying That Could Get Me An Oscar” timbre. I know some things-the concept of personal space, how much cologne is too much-are like, totally foreign to you, but if you pay attention, there are these tiny little things called indicators, that can tell you whether or not you’re going in the right direction.”

 He’s doing that rapt attention thing, looking at her with undivided, singular focus  like she’s reading him the bible or describing Zalian VII spoilers or giving him explicit instructions as to how to safely survive the on-coming zombie apocalypse. Trish thinks about this look approximately zero times a day, but if she did the quiet intensity of it, marred somewhat by the eagerness with which he leans over, as though it’s necessary to hear the pauses in her speech, would make the words gently elbowing each other for a prominent spot in her mouth feel incongruous.

 But it doesn’t.

 And they don’t.

 "For example, not only is the amount of Fantasy you’re wearing right now about four times the amount Britney would be caught dead in, but I think we can go ahead and classify it as a biohazard.” Trish straightens her back against her chair. "And it’s weird that you don’t already know this, but “go away” doesn’t mean “oh my god, come closer” in magical, confusing girl language. In general it usually means “go away”, in this specific case, she leans over making sure he’s looking directly into her eyes so there’s no goofy sitcom confusion about this later in the week, “it means the English language hasn’t created a precise set of words that would accurately describe how badly I want you to get out of your chair, and walk away right now.” 

 Trish squares her shoulders. “That’s an indicator.”

 She means for that to be punctuation, to go back to her tablet and if there is a God, maybe, just maybe hear the squeaking of a chair being pushed back and the shuffling of oversized P.F. Flyers, and every other sound of her morning being returned to her.

 But. Dez isn’t looking at her. He’s looking at the hand curled around the collar of his sweater. There is a hand curled around the collar of his sweater and his eyes are trained downward, so he can look at it without moving his head. But then he dips his chin a little, just a couple of inches and it’s hers. Her hand. Trish’s.

 “It’s Curious.”

 “What?”

 “I don’t um, I’m allergic to Fantasy so I only…” His voice tapers off, and Trish, Trish rips her hand away. 

 Dez looks at his hands, spread across the table, wiggles his fingers once, two times.

“So, um…yeah.” The squeaking of the chair legs being dragged across the floor is twice as loud, an unpleasant burst in her ears. The shuffling of worn, size twelve sneakers starts.

 Stops.

 “You want people to be afraid of you," His voice doesn’t tapper off, is calm and quiet and if it shakes only Dez knows for sure. But they aren’t. I know what that is, and no one, nobody’s afraid of you.”

Trish looks at the looping pink cursive of the specials board, Boca patties with bean sprouts, blue cheddar hummus, mushrooms and mozzarella on chibata.

 “People feel sorry for you.”

 Green onions and black bean sauce. Margarita pizza grilled cheese. Spinach and kale mini kiesh. God how many specials does this stupid place have?

 “Everyone feels sorry for you and they just act like they’re afraid, because that’s the politest way to do it. No one would ever say it to your face.”

 The thing Cammy puts above the door isn’t a legitimate bell,  it’s from some dumb door handle Christmas ornament reject thing her mom got her as a sort of homemade alarm system when she moved to Bushwick. Like something that sounds like a cat toy was gonna successfully warn her daughter about intruders. It doesn’t even work. The sound gets lost before it reaches the Beans of Columbia display.

 She sits for a minute. Her index finger brushing against her th-

She sits for a minute. Orders another caramel macchiato ‘cause her first one’s cold. She could heat it up but those coffee microwaves make everything taste weird. Her laptop emits a dissonant buzz that sounds like a choir of atonal bees.

 She doesn't move for a long time.