so this happened: a diner AU
Mar. 16th, 2014 12:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nepharious“Oh, look,” Ashley says as the bell above the door jingles a welcome, “It’s your favorite murder robot.”
“Rude,” Neph hip checks him into the cash register and plates up a triple mint chocolate chip muffin. “You’re rude and unfunny and nobody likes you. Logan hears you talking about a customer like that, you’ll be cleaning grease traps.”
“You comp half her drinks! How’s that a customer?!”
Neph sniffs and sails away, Ashley’s distressing snicker dogging her all the way to Lee’s table. It’s always whichever open one happens to be next to the windows and closest to the back of the diner, the better to survey the full scope of the place. Lee’s just sitting as Neph approaches, orienting her bags and books and laptop and, okay, her hi-there smile might be a tad automatic, sit a tich funny on her mouth, but Neph’s sure it’s gotten more natural since she first started coming by. Warmer, too. Her answering grin is a million watts, no shutters, and she slides the plate across the formica with a flourish.
“What is it this time?” Lee pokes at the muffin and normally Neph would encourage her to eat with her hands but it’s been unseasonably warm; those melty chips will smudge up the margins of Lee’s books something awful, so she plucks a napkin-swaddled fork from her apron pocket and intervenes with haste.
“Mint chocolate chip. Triple! Whaddaya think, you want some milk or tea or coffee with that?”
Lee winnows a forkful of chocolate-on-chocolate off the muffin with the kind of care most people reserve for scooping caviar and fancy shellfish. Not that they serve either, here. Neph rocks from heel to toe as she chews, awaiting the verdict, which is:
“Milk and tea.”
“Gotcha, be right back with those,” she turns, tucks her tray under her arm, then turns back to add, “You better have some good ones for me, today!”
Lee’s gaze sweeps the diner, a little more intense than most people might find strictly comfortable. “We’ll see,” she says. Neph bites down on a grin.
~
Lee probably visits the diner two or three times before Neph notices, but definitely no more than that. They might be near a college campus, but Logan’s place is too run down to be properly vintagey and too out of the way for the actually really excellent food to be worth the trip for most. The place seats maybe thirty people, max, and they keep truck driver hours, so only the truly lost or truly Yelp-savvy undergrads ever find them. Neph’s still not sure which Lee was, originally, she only knew that they seemed to’ve picked up a new regular. One with a creepy staring habit.
Or, not creepy. It’d be creepy from a dude, but on Lee it’s…yeah, okay, it’s a little robotic, she’ll cede that point to Ashley. Neph simultaneously registered Lee’s face and the name on her card and took note of the way she watched the other patrons over her laptop, head tipped ever so slightly to the right, fingers still and curled over the trackpad. She also ordered something new with every visit, working her way through the menu and Neph about slams her fingers in the cash register when she realizes it’s being done alphabetically.
They’ve picked up a dork stalker. A stalker who is a dork. Who is not there to stalk any of them, or any one customer in particular. In that case, she concludes stalker to be an inappropriate term, and settles for ‘Olympic People Watcher.’
Lee has worked her way through the regular menu (not hard to do: the food’s good but it’s not super variable, since they’ve only got Logan on the range) when Neph approaches her. With intent. She has, of course, come by to take orders and make peppy diner small talk, but the other girl always seems pained by the niceties and Neph hasn’t had time to push. That changes when she sets a pear and apple tart down by Lee’s elbow and takes the seat across from her with one of her own.
“Hi,” she says, and without further preamble, “So, we usually have some different pastry every day, we get ‘em in from a friend who runs a catering company so, you know, there’ll still be stuff for you to try now that you’ve had the ‘Wagons West’ omelette. I’ll save one for you if this is gonna be a thing.” Their menu doesn’t go past W, a fact that’s been worrying her more and more the past week or so.
“Thank you,” Lee replies, and Neph’s gotta hand it to her, because she totally would have stammered if some waitress had called her out on her ordering habits. Neph’s answering grin is a little too wide and a little too sweet and she leans a little closer.
“You’re welcome, now I gotta ask. What’s with the surveillance routine? ‘Cuz you don’t really ping my creepdar but I don’t wanna be an accessory to any Single White Female crap.”
Lee actually blanches, just goes kind of an eggshell color under her normal gold and Neph almost feels a little bad. Has she misread this? But no, because those are the sideways-shifting eyes of someone who’s totally just been called out. So Neph waits, and there is no possible way for Lee to outwait her; she she learned the art of uncomfortably knowing silences from Logan and the man used to be a Navy Seal. Lee doesn’t squirm so much as grasp for words, as if the shapes are all wrong in her mouth, but eventually she says:
“I’m guessing at stories. Theirs,” a jerk of her chin takes in the row of narrow booths behind them, half full, and the mostly unoccupied stools at the counter. “It’s…I’m teaching myself how to observe and, ah, what to do with it, after.”
At Neph’s frankly disbelieving stare, she adds, “I’ve been told that I…am not very good at nonverbals. So I’m working on that.”
Who told you that? Neph wonders, And HOW did they tell you that, so’s you’d go and make a project out of it? Aloud, she only says, “Okay. The couple by the gum ball machine. Shoot.”
And to her utter and lasting delight, Lee does. She tilts her head and scans the man and woman the way Neph always sort of thought TSA agents ought to, like she can see right through their clothes but has absolutely no intent besides determining whether or not they’re carrying an IED. After a moment she points out the awkward posture between the two, how the woman’s torso is ramrod straight and inclined aggressively forward, how the man is slouching and tucking his chin, hands twitching on the table between them. They both wear their hair short and severe, and their clothes are almost too neat. Lee imagines they must be military, that they are together-together, but the woman outranks the man and this has caused some tension that’s just now coming to a head. Perhaps they’re arguing over deployments.
“Actually,” Neph’s finished off her tart and has her chin in both hands, “Mimi’s the local station chief’s daughter. Tom just made detective. Her dad doesn’t know they’re dating but, dude, I think she’s totally been pulling rank on him so you’re mostly right.” She grins and gathers up their empty plates. “I like your version better. Way less tawdry.”
Because she totally knows words like ‘tawdry’.
With Lee’s motivations established and verified, they settle into a routine. Neph saves Lee a pastry-o-the-day and, if things aren’t too busy, sits with her while she samples it and shares her observations. As they become more comfortable (or, honestly, as Lee realizes Neph’s taking to this game with unholy glee rather than a judgey side-eye) the stories become less mundane. The group of nondescript gentlemen with thinning hair and nearly identical horn rimmed glasses? Ex-NASA scientists, secretly meeting to continue defunded research. Logan’s old army buddy, Wade? Government-sanctioned assassin, fueled by greasy burgers and transfats. The mom managing four identical blonde kids in spotless white jumpers? Aliens, totally aliens, don’t even fight with me on that one Lee no three year old is that ketchup-free.
Ashley calls them catty. Neph sings back “Diner waitreeeeeeess!” in a no-shit-Sherlock voice but, well, it’s not as if she hasn’t been spinning similar tales in the privacy of her own head for the last couple years. Lee’s efforts are way more earnest than that. She’s genuinely just trying to get people. Is there a better application for Neph’s encyclopedic knowledge of diner gossip and local drama? She thinks not.
In between the carbs and sugar and people-watching, she learns a lot about Lee that first semester, although it comes in dribs and drabs. She’s double majoring in anthropology and polisci, she’s allergic to soy but not gluten, she’s here on a student work visa, she’s trilingual, she will eat dairy anything and her gratitude at the way Neph forces blithe conversation is both unspoken and super intense. About two months in, Neph picks up on how carefully Lee dispenses pronouns when she talks about the people in her life, especially when it comes to trading embarrassing crush stories, and she scraps a half-formed notion to introduce her to Han. Even though she’s pretty sure Lee’s now common-law married to Han's pastries.
If Lee ever notices that Neph offers little about herself in return, she never says.
~
Midterms and finals are the literal functional worst, students crowding all the locals and regulars out with their mudslide of books and papers and panic. The diner takes on this distinct smell, coffee, stale sweat and ground molars. Neph takes one look at the milling crowd outside the still-locked doors and reaches for an index card and Ashley’s sharpies.
“We don’t do reservations,” he says as she props her makeshift sign on the back-corner-window table.
“You’re not the boss’a me,” it’s not her best retort, but Ashley knows better than to appeal to their actual boss, because Logan was never very good at denying her anything, and that was before the accident. He’s kind of a lost cause now, which Neph does her best not to abuse terribly.
So, anyway, Lee’s table is safely empty when she shows up with no more than her usual number of books. She visibly balks at the ‘Reserved’ card between the salt and pepper shakers, because Lee is too smart to leave things like thirty page papers until the last minute but dumb enough to be surprised that someone might make a little effort to secure her company. Neph shakes her head and plates up the day’s special, coffee cake.
“Thank you,” she says, and Neph just blows her the wettest raspberry she can manage, because the finals crowd has sapped her conversational prowess as well as her will to live.
Three hours later she shouts “I AM ON BREAK” and pegs her apron at a varsity type frantically waving an empty coffee mug. Nobody else even looks up from their laptops, that’s how insane they all are right now. Neph throws herself into the seat opposite Lee's with a groan.
“God,” she heaves, “You must be having a field day with these guys.”
“I see them every day,” Lee pushes her glass of water across the table, bisecting it with a condensation slick. “Yours are more fun.”
Neph makes an agreeable noise and downs half the glass, leaning her shoulders back against the cool windows. It’s dark enough outside that the whole diner feels like a cocoon, warm and close and heavy. Her own weariness weighs on her such that she doesn’t catch herself asking, “Did you ever tell yourself a story about me?”
Lee’s side of the table is all silence, but Neph looks up and, yikes, she’s never been on the receiving end of such a piercing look. It’s equal parts brown laser eyes and furious eyebrow game. If she weren’t so tired, if things hadn’t been good with Lee for months now, she might flinch.
“I…have been trying,” comes the stilted reply, “But you don’t…fit so easily.”
That is just about the oddest thing Neph could’ve imagined. She props her chin in her hand and leans in so the edge of the table digs against her ribs. “I don’t see what’s hard to get,” she admits. “Diner waitress. Open book.”
“No. Well, yes, but,” Lee visibly steels herself, which, Neph hadn’t realized she’d stopped doing during their conversations until she relapsed just now. “You like to have goals. There’s always something, even if it’s just descaling the coffee machine or clearing a table. You have a list in your head, always, but—you don’t want to take this place over from your dad. You’ve said. So…I don’t know…what your goal is.”
If Neph stares at her a moment too many it’s because she’s wiped, not ‘cuz she’s been neatly dissected by someone who claims to have the social awareness of a cuttlefish. She’s always known Lee’s sharp, but now she can see just how keenly, and just how incompetent she must feel with all those details and no context. Worse, she hasn’t even tried to make up a framework for them, the way she might’ve with a stranger. Neph feels a little bad for taking away the ease and privilege of anonymity.
“I,” she starts, stops, swallows and tries again, “Last year, I had a shot at going to Nationals. For gymnastics. I was gonna…eh,” she shifts, lifting her chin to scratch at a few flecks of dried coffee that somehow splashed up over the course of the afternoon. “There was an accident.”
Lee has to twist to look at Onida’s photo, hung prominently next to the menu board. In it, she’s wearing her dress blues, and her dog tags dangle from the frame. Neph’s never told the story, but anyone who comes around often will eventually see the way Logan touches the corner of the frame whenever he passes, the way Neph compulsively straightens it, how Ashley will mime a fist-bump its way after an especially grievous burn. Most of the regulars know she passed in a crash about eighteen months back, so Neph’s not surprised Lee’s acquired the intel by osmosis.
She nods when Lee turns back, yeah that’s how we lost her, and adds, “Messed my arm up pretty bad. Guess now I’m just…trying to decide what’s next.”
It’s nothing she hasn’t already told herself, but it still sounds a little pathetic out loud. Lee only nods and mashes coffee cake crumbles together with her fork, until the mass of them is flat and solid enough to scoop up and eat. “College?” she asks.
Neph winces. “Dunno, I’m not really smart—” Lee makes this face, she does it every time Neph says something self derogatory, this pinched ‘hdu talk about my friend like that’ face that secretly warms Neph’s toes, “—like that. With tests and stuff. And I’ve never been good at writing, so all those application letters…I don’t think I’d get in.”
Athletic scholarships had been on the table, once. Not any more. She squeezes her left elbow, thumb circling over the hard knots of scar tissue under her sleeve. Lee’s pinched face modulates into something like oh!, as if she’s only just realizing she’s never seen Neph’s bare arms. Or she’s noticed before but hasn’t been able to find a context that fit the observation. All credit to Lee’s growing skills, Neph’s sure she would’a gotten there come summertime.
“But you’ve thought about it,” Lee points out. “What would you go for?”
“Sports medicine?” Neph tosses that out there like a joke, like she hasn’t been thinking about it nonstop since she scraped her way out of high school. “Like, there are so many ways you can fuck yourself up accidentally-on-purpose when you’re seriously training, and I just thought…you know, I already get that, I could help with that, maybe.”
Lee nods and they lapse into silence, Neph’s head back against the cool glass window and Lee’s ankle leaning companionably into hers. There’re ten minutes left to her break, two days of finals week yet to power through, and a whole gaping future shrinking away before her. It’s kind of a lot.
“I could help you with your applications,” Lee says, apropos of nothing, as if she hasn’t got her own exams and whatever’s on her plate this summer and a student work visa to renegotiate. As if nobody ever criticized her people skills. “Committees seem to respond well to robot.”
They stare at one another, Lee’s face the most wickedly deadpan thing Neph has ever, ever seen, and she hears herself groan “Ohhhh my god, I’m going to murder Ashley.”
“And here I thought that was my job description.”
“Oh my GOD.”
She’s shaking with silent, embarrassed laughter, hands over her face and she really is going to beat Ashley over the head after close. Lee just snorts and nudges at her ankle and says “Well?”
“Yes, okay, Jesus, yes. Thank you.”
“Next week,” at Neph’s answering nod, Lee adds, “Bring those apple and pear tarts?”
“Are you sure you don’t wanna make an exception for Han, ‘cuz I’m just saying.”
“Tarts, Neph.”
“Right.”
“Rude,” Neph hip checks him into the cash register and plates up a triple mint chocolate chip muffin. “You’re rude and unfunny and nobody likes you. Logan hears you talking about a customer like that, you’ll be cleaning grease traps.”
“You comp half her drinks! How’s that a customer?!”
Neph sniffs and sails away, Ashley’s distressing snicker dogging her all the way to Lee’s table. It’s always whichever open one happens to be next to the windows and closest to the back of the diner, the better to survey the full scope of the place. Lee’s just sitting as Neph approaches, orienting her bags and books and laptop and, okay, her hi-there smile might be a tad automatic, sit a tich funny on her mouth, but Neph’s sure it’s gotten more natural since she first started coming by. Warmer, too. Her answering grin is a million watts, no shutters, and she slides the plate across the formica with a flourish.
“What is it this time?” Lee pokes at the muffin and normally Neph would encourage her to eat with her hands but it’s been unseasonably warm; those melty chips will smudge up the margins of Lee’s books something awful, so she plucks a napkin-swaddled fork from her apron pocket and intervenes with haste.
“Mint chocolate chip. Triple! Whaddaya think, you want some milk or tea or coffee with that?”
Lee winnows a forkful of chocolate-on-chocolate off the muffin with the kind of care most people reserve for scooping caviar and fancy shellfish. Not that they serve either, here. Neph rocks from heel to toe as she chews, awaiting the verdict, which is:
“Milk and tea.”
“Gotcha, be right back with those,” she turns, tucks her tray under her arm, then turns back to add, “You better have some good ones for me, today!”
Lee’s gaze sweeps the diner, a little more intense than most people might find strictly comfortable. “We’ll see,” she says. Neph bites down on a grin.
~
Lee probably visits the diner two or three times before Neph notices, but definitely no more than that. They might be near a college campus, but Logan’s place is too run down to be properly vintagey and too out of the way for the actually really excellent food to be worth the trip for most. The place seats maybe thirty people, max, and they keep truck driver hours, so only the truly lost or truly Yelp-savvy undergrads ever find them. Neph’s still not sure which Lee was, originally, she only knew that they seemed to’ve picked up a new regular. One with a creepy staring habit.
Or, not creepy. It’d be creepy from a dude, but on Lee it’s…yeah, okay, it’s a little robotic, she’ll cede that point to Ashley. Neph simultaneously registered Lee’s face and the name on her card and took note of the way she watched the other patrons over her laptop, head tipped ever so slightly to the right, fingers still and curled over the trackpad. She also ordered something new with every visit, working her way through the menu and Neph about slams her fingers in the cash register when she realizes it’s being done alphabetically.
They’ve picked up a dork stalker. A stalker who is a dork. Who is not there to stalk any of them, or any one customer in particular. In that case, she concludes stalker to be an inappropriate term, and settles for ‘Olympic People Watcher.’
Lee has worked her way through the regular menu (not hard to do: the food’s good but it’s not super variable, since they’ve only got Logan on the range) when Neph approaches her. With intent. She has, of course, come by to take orders and make peppy diner small talk, but the other girl always seems pained by the niceties and Neph hasn’t had time to push. That changes when she sets a pear and apple tart down by Lee’s elbow and takes the seat across from her with one of her own.
“Hi,” she says, and without further preamble, “So, we usually have some different pastry every day, we get ‘em in from a friend who runs a catering company so, you know, there’ll still be stuff for you to try now that you’ve had the ‘Wagons West’ omelette. I’ll save one for you if this is gonna be a thing.” Their menu doesn’t go past W, a fact that’s been worrying her more and more the past week or so.
“Thank you,” Lee replies, and Neph’s gotta hand it to her, because she totally would have stammered if some waitress had called her out on her ordering habits. Neph’s answering grin is a little too wide and a little too sweet and she leans a little closer.
“You’re welcome, now I gotta ask. What’s with the surveillance routine? ‘Cuz you don’t really ping my creepdar but I don’t wanna be an accessory to any Single White Female crap.”
Lee actually blanches, just goes kind of an eggshell color under her normal gold and Neph almost feels a little bad. Has she misread this? But no, because those are the sideways-shifting eyes of someone who’s totally just been called out. So Neph waits, and there is no possible way for Lee to outwait her; she she learned the art of uncomfortably knowing silences from Logan and the man used to be a Navy Seal. Lee doesn’t squirm so much as grasp for words, as if the shapes are all wrong in her mouth, but eventually she says:
“I’m guessing at stories. Theirs,” a jerk of her chin takes in the row of narrow booths behind them, half full, and the mostly unoccupied stools at the counter. “It’s…I’m teaching myself how to observe and, ah, what to do with it, after.”
At Neph’s frankly disbelieving stare, she adds, “I’ve been told that I…am not very good at nonverbals. So I’m working on that.”
Who told you that? Neph wonders, And HOW did they tell you that, so’s you’d go and make a project out of it? Aloud, she only says, “Okay. The couple by the gum ball machine. Shoot.”
And to her utter and lasting delight, Lee does. She tilts her head and scans the man and woman the way Neph always sort of thought TSA agents ought to, like she can see right through their clothes but has absolutely no intent besides determining whether or not they’re carrying an IED. After a moment she points out the awkward posture between the two, how the woman’s torso is ramrod straight and inclined aggressively forward, how the man is slouching and tucking his chin, hands twitching on the table between them. They both wear their hair short and severe, and their clothes are almost too neat. Lee imagines they must be military, that they are together-together, but the woman outranks the man and this has caused some tension that’s just now coming to a head. Perhaps they’re arguing over deployments.
“Actually,” Neph’s finished off her tart and has her chin in both hands, “Mimi’s the local station chief’s daughter. Tom just made detective. Her dad doesn’t know they’re dating but, dude, I think she’s totally been pulling rank on him so you’re mostly right.” She grins and gathers up their empty plates. “I like your version better. Way less tawdry.”
Because she totally knows words like ‘tawdry’.
With Lee’s motivations established and verified, they settle into a routine. Neph saves Lee a pastry-o-the-day and, if things aren’t too busy, sits with her while she samples it and shares her observations. As they become more comfortable (or, honestly, as Lee realizes Neph’s taking to this game with unholy glee rather than a judgey side-eye) the stories become less mundane. The group of nondescript gentlemen with thinning hair and nearly identical horn rimmed glasses? Ex-NASA scientists, secretly meeting to continue defunded research. Logan’s old army buddy, Wade? Government-sanctioned assassin, fueled by greasy burgers and transfats. The mom managing four identical blonde kids in spotless white jumpers? Aliens, totally aliens, don’t even fight with me on that one Lee no three year old is that ketchup-free.
Ashley calls them catty. Neph sings back “Diner waitreeeeeeess!” in a no-shit-Sherlock voice but, well, it’s not as if she hasn’t been spinning similar tales in the privacy of her own head for the last couple years. Lee’s efforts are way more earnest than that. She’s genuinely just trying to get people. Is there a better application for Neph’s encyclopedic knowledge of diner gossip and local drama? She thinks not.
In between the carbs and sugar and people-watching, she learns a lot about Lee that first semester, although it comes in dribs and drabs. She’s double majoring in anthropology and polisci, she’s allergic to soy but not gluten, she’s here on a student work visa, she’s trilingual, she will eat dairy anything and her gratitude at the way Neph forces blithe conversation is both unspoken and super intense. About two months in, Neph picks up on how carefully Lee dispenses pronouns when she talks about the people in her life, especially when it comes to trading embarrassing crush stories, and she scraps a half-formed notion to introduce her to Han. Even though she’s pretty sure Lee’s now common-law married to Han's pastries.
If Lee ever notices that Neph offers little about herself in return, she never says.
~
Midterms and finals are the literal functional worst, students crowding all the locals and regulars out with their mudslide of books and papers and panic. The diner takes on this distinct smell, coffee, stale sweat and ground molars. Neph takes one look at the milling crowd outside the still-locked doors and reaches for an index card and Ashley’s sharpies.
“We don’t do reservations,” he says as she props her makeshift sign on the back-corner-window table.
“You’re not the boss’a me,” it’s not her best retort, but Ashley knows better than to appeal to their actual boss, because Logan was never very good at denying her anything, and that was before the accident. He’s kind of a lost cause now, which Neph does her best not to abuse terribly.
So, anyway, Lee’s table is safely empty when she shows up with no more than her usual number of books. She visibly balks at the ‘Reserved’ card between the salt and pepper shakers, because Lee is too smart to leave things like thirty page papers until the last minute but dumb enough to be surprised that someone might make a little effort to secure her company. Neph shakes her head and plates up the day’s special, coffee cake.
“Thank you,” she says, and Neph just blows her the wettest raspberry she can manage, because the finals crowd has sapped her conversational prowess as well as her will to live.
Three hours later she shouts “I AM ON BREAK” and pegs her apron at a varsity type frantically waving an empty coffee mug. Nobody else even looks up from their laptops, that’s how insane they all are right now. Neph throws herself into the seat opposite Lee's with a groan.
“God,” she heaves, “You must be having a field day with these guys.”
“I see them every day,” Lee pushes her glass of water across the table, bisecting it with a condensation slick. “Yours are more fun.”
Neph makes an agreeable noise and downs half the glass, leaning her shoulders back against the cool windows. It’s dark enough outside that the whole diner feels like a cocoon, warm and close and heavy. Her own weariness weighs on her such that she doesn’t catch herself asking, “Did you ever tell yourself a story about me?”
Lee’s side of the table is all silence, but Neph looks up and, yikes, she’s never been on the receiving end of such a piercing look. It’s equal parts brown laser eyes and furious eyebrow game. If she weren’t so tired, if things hadn’t been good with Lee for months now, she might flinch.
“I…have been trying,” comes the stilted reply, “But you don’t…fit so easily.”
That is just about the oddest thing Neph could’ve imagined. She props her chin in her hand and leans in so the edge of the table digs against her ribs. “I don’t see what’s hard to get,” she admits. “Diner waitress. Open book.”
“No. Well, yes, but,” Lee visibly steels herself, which, Neph hadn’t realized she’d stopped doing during their conversations until she relapsed just now. “You like to have goals. There’s always something, even if it’s just descaling the coffee machine or clearing a table. You have a list in your head, always, but—you don’t want to take this place over from your dad. You’ve said. So…I don’t know…what your goal is.”
If Neph stares at her a moment too many it’s because she’s wiped, not ‘cuz she’s been neatly dissected by someone who claims to have the social awareness of a cuttlefish. She’s always known Lee’s sharp, but now she can see just how keenly, and just how incompetent she must feel with all those details and no context. Worse, she hasn’t even tried to make up a framework for them, the way she might’ve with a stranger. Neph feels a little bad for taking away the ease and privilege of anonymity.
“I,” she starts, stops, swallows and tries again, “Last year, I had a shot at going to Nationals. For gymnastics. I was gonna…eh,” she shifts, lifting her chin to scratch at a few flecks of dried coffee that somehow splashed up over the course of the afternoon. “There was an accident.”
Lee has to twist to look at Onida’s photo, hung prominently next to the menu board. In it, she’s wearing her dress blues, and her dog tags dangle from the frame. Neph’s never told the story, but anyone who comes around often will eventually see the way Logan touches the corner of the frame whenever he passes, the way Neph compulsively straightens it, how Ashley will mime a fist-bump its way after an especially grievous burn. Most of the regulars know she passed in a crash about eighteen months back, so Neph’s not surprised Lee’s acquired the intel by osmosis.
She nods when Lee turns back, yeah that’s how we lost her, and adds, “Messed my arm up pretty bad. Guess now I’m just…trying to decide what’s next.”
It’s nothing she hasn’t already told herself, but it still sounds a little pathetic out loud. Lee only nods and mashes coffee cake crumbles together with her fork, until the mass of them is flat and solid enough to scoop up and eat. “College?” she asks.
Neph winces. “Dunno, I’m not really smart—” Lee makes this face, she does it every time Neph says something self derogatory, this pinched ‘hdu talk about my friend like that’ face that secretly warms Neph’s toes, “—like that. With tests and stuff. And I’ve never been good at writing, so all those application letters…I don’t think I’d get in.”
Athletic scholarships had been on the table, once. Not any more. She squeezes her left elbow, thumb circling over the hard knots of scar tissue under her sleeve. Lee’s pinched face modulates into something like oh!, as if she’s only just realizing she’s never seen Neph’s bare arms. Or she’s noticed before but hasn’t been able to find a context that fit the observation. All credit to Lee’s growing skills, Neph’s sure she would’a gotten there come summertime.
“But you’ve thought about it,” Lee points out. “What would you go for?”
“Sports medicine?” Neph tosses that out there like a joke, like she hasn’t been thinking about it nonstop since she scraped her way out of high school. “Like, there are so many ways you can fuck yourself up accidentally-on-purpose when you’re seriously training, and I just thought…you know, I already get that, I could help with that, maybe.”
Lee nods and they lapse into silence, Neph’s head back against the cool glass window and Lee’s ankle leaning companionably into hers. There’re ten minutes left to her break, two days of finals week yet to power through, and a whole gaping future shrinking away before her. It’s kind of a lot.
“I could help you with your applications,” Lee says, apropos of nothing, as if she hasn’t got her own exams and whatever’s on her plate this summer and a student work visa to renegotiate. As if nobody ever criticized her people skills. “Committees seem to respond well to robot.”
They stare at one another, Lee’s face the most wickedly deadpan thing Neph has ever, ever seen, and she hears herself groan “Ohhhh my god, I’m going to murder Ashley.”
“And here I thought that was my job description.”
“Oh my GOD.”
She’s shaking with silent, embarrassed laughter, hands over her face and she really is going to beat Ashley over the head after close. Lee just snorts and nudges at her ankle and says “Well?”
“Yes, okay, Jesus, yes. Thank you.”
“Next week,” at Neph’s answering nod, Lee adds, “Bring those apple and pear tarts?”
“Are you sure you don’t wanna make an exception for Han, ‘cuz I’m just saying.”
“Tarts, Neph.”
“Right.”
