Rhodes didn’t understand then, and it doesn’t now—she doesn’t really know what it means to be a little further down the food chain than everyone else. I’m not much further down than she is—I’m just as white, Christian-adjacent, abled, and straight-passing as she is—but I’m aware of it.
“Yeah, just, you know—” Sarah’s pupils were blown out. She held on to me for dear life, the way Rhodes’s barely younger brother and then-dance-track student, Griffin, clung to Rhodes’s arm. Sarah liked Griffin then—she was infatuated, really. I think she thought he’d be an easy segue into being a fixture in Rhodes’s life forever.
She thought wrong.
“The motherfucking patriarchy,” said Griffin.
The motherfucking patriarchy. As if that phrase in and of itself wasn’t the purpose of the installation, the fact that women are continuously victims of sexual violence in Western culture, so much so that it has permeated our patterns of speaking and even the way we curse.
Rhodes sighed, and nodded appreciatively.
Sarah sighed, and nodded appreciatively.
Griffin sighed, and nodded appreciatively.
This is art, they communicated, with stoops in their shoulders and ennui-burdened frowns. This is life.
This is suffering.
Pot only ever makes me more philosophical. Everyone around me was melting into puddles, and I was practically writing ninety-nine theses on third-wave feminism on the back of a fifteen-year-old Kwickee Mart napkin that had been stuck to the bottom of my boot.
Griffin wobbled on Rhodes’s left. He was transfixed by the swirling lights against the far wall—reds and whites, then blues.
I stumbled, and then tripped over myself, even though I hadn’t taken a step in minutes.
Whatever was in the air was strong, and apparently it was all part of whatever the lead artist was trying to communicate to the audience. It occurred to me in a detached way that maybe I should be afraid I’d be next in the cooler.
Around us, the installation shifted quickly. The women in the coolers broke character, made eye contact with their would-be purchasers. The girl behind the counter turned to whisper to someone dressed in all black, invisible where they stood in a dark corner. People began to scramble, and unbind themselves, and dart for doors that led into back offices and alleyways.
“This is so realistic,” Rhodes mused. “I wonder what the shift means.”
“This must be the end of the second act,” Griffin said. As a dance-track student, he wasn’t watching the installation like an artist. He was watching it like a performer.
The pulsing music overhead squealed to a stop, but tinny, familiar sirens continued—a higher pitch than those on a police cruiser, or any kind of emergency response vehicle. It felt like an entire lifetime later that I recognized the sirens from the Conservatory security team’s safety vehicle.
“Rhodes.” It sounded like my voice was coming from outside my body.
She didn’t hear me.
Somewhere on the surface, I was panicking. I knew my stomach should be falling through my butt, and my hands should be shaking, and I should be screaming in the faces of the girls next to me.
There was a Savannah College of Art and Design scholarship with my name on it, and the ink had barely dried. It had been the kind of deus ex machina blessing that only happens in the movies and never to the people who need it in reality—people like me, whose parents were filing for bankruptcy literally the same day as the scholarship winners were announced.
This couldn’t be happening.
To my right, Rhodes and Griffin had disappeared. Sarah was gone, too, and when I ran out the front doors of the old gas station, their car was empty. They left me. All that was left was the panicked-looking Conservatory security officer blocking my view of the parking lot.
From that moment on, everything was different.
* * *
Sylvia’s Diner has always been exactly what it sounds like.
Everything is oak veneer. Everything. The walls, the ceiling, the Formica countertops, the fronts to the refrigerators and stove.
Every. Thing.
The menu is relatively small, and half of the items are sold out in perpetuity because Sylvia (the woman who owns the place) refuses to order the random ingredients she needs for us to throw it together. None of us have food permits, and the only reason the health board hasn’t shut us down is because they like Sylvia’s sweet potato pie too much.
Sarah and I have been working here since the summer before we transferred to the Conservatory, and in two years nothing has changed—even if everything else in our lives has.
“You can’t hate Rhodes forever,” Sarah says, for what feels