Thanks for the Trouble - Tommy Wallach Page 0,43
it over lunch. You guys about ready to bounce?”
We were going to eat here.
“Are you kidding? You can’t wine and dine this beautiful lady at the museum café, Santé!” She pinched my cheek again, harder this time. “Museum food is for dumb tourists. I got a way better place in mind.”
Where?
“Lemme just finish this real quick.” She reached over and drank the rest of Zelda’s coffee. “Ew. Also cold. All right, let’s do this. I’ll lead the way.” She drew her plastic sword and marched out of the café.
It wasn’t like we had to follow her, of course. But it also wasn’t like I had any better ideas.
BRAINWASH
“WHAT IS IT?” ZELDA ASKED.
“It’s BrainWash,” Alana said, “the only combination laundromat, diner, and concert venue in the known universe.”
She was attempting to parallel park in a handicapped spot just outside the laundro-diner-venue. I pointed out the sign. “Doesn’t matter. I’ve discovered I’m totally irresistible to cops. Seriously, I’ve never gotten a single ticket, and I can’t drive for shit.”
To punctuate the point, she drove up onto the sidewalk and then back down again, jostling the car in front of us and then tapping the one behind. Somehow, we still managed to be about a foot and a half from the curb when these maneuvers were completed.
The place looked like your standard diner, with the standard Formica counters and neon signage and steel tanks of what had to be shitty coffee. Alana recommended the breakfast burrito, so we ordered three of them, then sat down at a metal table right next to the smallest stage I’d ever seen. Through a doorway, I could make out the laundromat portion of the establishment, which was crammed with weekend washers dressed in their laundry-day best.
“So what did you want to talk to us about?” Zelda asked.
“Right. So here’s the thing—” Alana’s attention was suddenly drawn to Zelda’s right hand, which was poised to unleash a cascade of sugar into her coffee. “Hold up. You don’t drink it black?”
“Never.”
“But isn’t life already fake enough without watering it down with sugar?”
“Can something be watered down with sugar?”
Alana frowned. “Okay, that’s true. But just take one sip before you put that crud in.”
“I’ve had black coffee before.”
“I know, I know. Humor me.”
Zelda lowered her face to the rim of the mug and came up grimacing. “Yuck,” she said.
“Exactly! See, coffee is supposed to taste bad. That’s what makes it coffee.”
“I prefer the illusion,” Zelda said, and went ahead with her cream and sugar.
“To each her own.” Alana took a big gulp from her own mug. “It is pretty gross, isn’t it? Maybe you’ve got the right idea.” She poured in a bit of cream. “Okay, so here’s the deal. I realize this might seem out of nowhere, given that I barely know either of you, but all my other friends are part of the same fucking clique, so there’s no way I can talk to them, and Zelda, you just seemed so mature and shit at the party last night, and you two look so happy together, I figured who better to ask, you know?” She took a breath, then another sip of the coffee. “That is much better, actually.”
Your point? I wrote.
“I think Tyler is cheating on me.”
“Who’s Tyler?” Zelda asked.
“My boyfriend,” Alana said.
“And why do you think he’s cheating?”
“It’s just little things. Like, sometimes he doesn’t answer his phone, and when I ask him where he was, he gets all nervous. And last night, at the party, he was really weird and distant and shit. Also, he works at this movie theater on the weekends, but he never wants me to visit him there. Oh, and then there was this one time where he had a hickey on his neck and it was really faint and he swore I was the one who gave it to him but I couldn’t remember doing it.”
“That’s a lot of circumstantial evidence,” Zelda said. “Do you have any hard proof?”
“Not really. Just feelings. Bad feelings.”
“Interesting,” Zelda said, and I could tell she really meant it. Treat me exactly like a teenager, she’d said to me yesterday. Well, nothing was more teenagery than relationship drama.
“Parker, what do you think?” Alana asked.
I’d never really liked Tyler, even though he was a lot nicer than Jamie, but maybe that was just because I was a little jealous of him.
I don’t know, I wrote. How could I?
“Use your gut, man.”
My gut just says I’m hungry.
“Parker’s right,” Zelda said. “You can drive yourself crazy with suspicions,