Milkshakes and Oddities
1196 Words
The call went on longer than it should have. Mom never suspected a thing. I felt a little bad when I hung up. After all, I was almost lying to my mom. I never lied to her, but it was close enough that I felt awkward about it.
Jackie was patiently waiting for me when I walked back inside. “So, how did it go?” she asked me.
“Well, I’m going to have a lot of explaining to do when I get back home,” I said, I noticed that Jackie had her food, but my milkshake wasn’t there.
“It’s coming,” Jackie said before I had to even ask anything. “She wanted to make sure that it was cold for you.”
“Well, that was nice of her,” I said, giving Jackie a smile.
“It was,” she said and then paused for a second. “Back to your mother. What did you tell her?”
I tried to laugh, but it just didn’t come out right. “The bare minimum. I didn’t tell her anything that she didn’t need to know.”
“So, you didn’t tell her about the umm…” Jackie was looking for the right word. It seemed that everyone was looking for the right word.
“No, not exactly,” I said, looking away from her. “I told her that I had gotten hurt running after the map.”
“So, if she doesn’t know, what were you guys talking about for so long?” Jackie causally drummed her fingers against the table.
“The wedding.” I almost layed my head on the table.
“The wedding?”
“Yes, my brother’s wedding.”
“Oh right. What did she want to tell you?”
“Just a bunch of small stuff,” I said, looking for Winfred, the waitress. She had to be around here somewhere. That was all I wanted. All I wanted was my milkshake. I wanted my milkshake and then to leave.
“It doesn’t sound like you were paying attention that much.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Do you think that you should have been?”
I tried to shrug, but my shrug got caught in my chest, and it just hurt. “Probably, but honestly, I never thought this much about what my own wedding would be like, and now I have to think about theirs a lot.”
Jackie was about to say something, but my milkshake came before she could. “Thank you,” Jackie said, looking at Winifred.
Winifred placed my milkshake down on the table. “Thanks,” I said, taking my first sip
“You’re welcome,” she said, giving us both a smile.
The door opened right after, and we all turned to look. I thought, for a brief second, that it was nice for someone else to be there, it might have broken up the awkwardness of being the only ones there, but that was quickly dashed. Her reaction dashed those hopes. Winifred stared at them in reverence. These were important people. The Pope. The Queen. The Dali Llama. None of them had come through that door. It was an old man with short gray hair. He was also relatively short. He had small round glasses sitting at just the tip of his nose. He was a little round, and I wanted to laugh, and that I think would have been my first genuine laugh if Jackie wouldn’t have kicked me under the table. He looked like a smaller version of Santa, yet, she wouldn’t let me laugh.
I realized, but Jackie didn’t, that Santa and the man behind him hadn’t intended to come in together. There was an odd way they interacted with each other. The man who walked in simultaneously was, for lack of a better word, perfect. The perfect amount of muscles rippled through his black dress shirt. He looked like he could take anyone in a fight, but not like one of those scary bodybuilders. He had black hair, and I couldn’t help but want to see his eyes. He had just a slight five o’clock shadow, and I decided it looked good on him. I was frozen.
I was so frozen that I hadn’t even noticed when I hadn’t actually grabbed for my milkshake and nearly spilled it all over myself. Thankfully Jackie was able to catch it for me. “Wow,” she said, laughing. “Someone is a little distracted.”
“By what?” I asked, still refusing to turn my attention to her.
“By what?” she repeated, grabbing the cup and pulling it further to herself.
I finally stopped and turned toward her. “What?” I asked her.
“You aren’t paying attention,” she said to me.
Had she said something that I was supposed to be paying attention to? “What are you even talking about?” I asked her, turning my attention to her.
“You seem to be distracted by something, though I will say that it looks like a good distraction.” I glanced over at her, and her smile was devilish and knowing.
I smiled. “First off, it’s a he, not an it. Second off, I wasn’t looking at him.” I clearly was.
“Then what were you looking at?” She looked at me.
“I was looking at him, but I was trying to understand something about him, and that was all I was really doing.” That was not all I was doing.
Jackie only partially bought it. “What were you trying to understand?”
“Why Winifred seemed so interested in them. She froze and then walked over to them without saying a word to us. That isn’t a normal thing to do. You don’t find that interesting?”
“Not as much as you do,” she said, shaking her head.
“It’s an oddity,” I said, grabbing for my milkshake.
“You’re the oddity,” she told me.
“I am an oddity, but my oddity connects to other odds, and connects to them, and knows when other oddities are occurring, and this is a big one.” My head tried to piece it together, but it kept hurting; the more I thought, the more it hurt. The more I thought about him, the louder the whole restaurant became, and I couldn’t think about anything else.
“That is a big mass of nothingness,” she said, laughing.
I rolled my eyes. That did not help my head at all. “It means something, and if you were paying attention, you would have understood what it meant.”
“I was paying attention, unlike you.”
“What do you mean, unlike me?” There was something going on.
“The only thing you were paying attention to was that wall of muscle.”
“I was not. Like I said, I was paying attention to the fact that they shouldn’t have been there.”
“It’s a public building.”
“I know that.”
“Then?”
- Writer
