Behind the cafe counter, a wide-shouldered girl with a violet streak on either side of her hair greeted me at the same time, every day. Her wife-beater looked as if she hadn’t taken it off in years. This was the kind of girl I’d wanted to be in high school, when I had no control over my externalized self. Now, she was the kind of girl that made me nervous. 

I didn’t want to have sex with her. I wanted her to take me to where she lived and drop a tiny brass key into my hand. I wanted to unlock her journal. To sit on the edge of her bed as she read it to me. I hadn’t gone so far as to imagine what it said; I only knew how it would feel to hear what passed through her head.

I lay my bare arms over the counter. I pretended to read the slab of ingredients suspended above her while she slunk against the far wall, typing into a phone. Adjacent to me, a couple tilted their stools off the linoleum. The man’s hair was thick and mousey, sprinkled with dandruff. The woman was balding at the crown. She buried her finger inside his ear and wiggled, stroking the atrium as if it had swallowed a penny and she was trying to dig it out. I looked at the girl behind the counter, now talking into her receiver. I angled toward her. I tucked back my hair. I could wait forever if it took that long.