“Hey!” she said to nobody in particular, “does the noise in my head bother you?”      [cuz my sister can sure as shit hear it]

Gary and Midge frowned and shrugged and Lance looked annoyed. He watched her over his drink. “Get it together,” he said quietly.

But the racket in her ears was so loud she yelled over it “Pass the damn ketchup!”

“Whoa!” said Midge and handed her the red plastic bottle. “Don’t have yourself a hissy fit, Sheba!”

Angie squirted thin red zigzags on her burger. She measured her breath in small doses and searched the room again for something to distract her. Her eyes careened around LuAnn and the steady clink-chink of silverware being wrapped. Finally, on the right, behind the long counter was an equally long mirror. There her face stared back at her: poised, tanned, irrelevant. No doubt about it. A large paper doll. She closed her eyes and had the vague sensation of a fist around her heart. Something like a laugh or a scream dissolved in her throat.     [or maybe it was one of those waffle fries that wasn’t all the way cooked]

When she looked up again, Midge was still smoking and Gary was punching little holes in his bun with his straw and then blowing the pieces of bread at Midge, looking to shoot one through the smoke rings. Lance was leaning his chair back on two legs, his knees against the edge of the table, his plate clean and untroubled. There was that smile on his face again, the one she would have walked over cut glass for yesterday. “Lance?” she asked.

“Yeah doll, what do you need?” He eased the chair back down on all fours. “Besides me, I mean.”

Angie stared at him. He was everything she had thought she wanted. He was more pain than she could have imagined. She leaned into the table to—maybe, just by looking at him—gather his face, pull something about him towards her. And she searched his eyes for anything in there—God, anything?—to put her arms around.    [but he was full of shit and so all she saw in the dude was the shit that he was]

He noticed her staring at him, squinting harder to see, and he said “Hey! Earth to Angie! Are you going to eat your burger, or what? I’ve got things to do, places to go, people to see.”      [fuck off, douche bag, said Angie, you’re wasting my time n I wish I had hair like kelsey’s her hair is the man!]


[Yo A-dogg. shhh, u r sleeping. i found this um story on your comp after u came home 2day with that wah-i’m-so-stressed from college xcuse. good one. is this seriously 4 a class? i told u Lyle was an asshole. might wanna change the name though cuz that’s like if i wrote a story n called the girl kel-LIE instead of kelsey. i fixed the ending so u should totally add that. now it rocks. but I think u should call the dudes wife. fer real. id do it for u but I don’t want to piss u off so well talk when u wake up k? don’t show this to mom, though. she’ll crap. ha! gotta go to xcountry prac. Kels-izzle]