was asking her to return the key for the room she’d stayed the night in. Gwen dropped it in her palm, and Mranda released the new key and pointed at the two elevators. "Top floor."
The girl hadn't been very nice about it, but Gwen knew she didn't have anything more to lose, so she made her way across the lobby and punched the up button. Maybe she’d find a penthouse suite with caviar and champagne and a film crew waiting. They’d shout, surprise! This isn’t really your life." Missy would be there smiling, Steve beside her. They’d tell her she could go back home, and that building her life around theirs made her a winner. But the doors opened to quiet, empty quiet. There wasn’t even a welcome sign, or a name on a door, just a long corridor and carpet the color of concrete.
Not the penthouse.
Gwen checked her key and walked to room nine-twelve. The key slid in, and behind her she heard a door creak open. She turned, but it closed. She started to enter her room again and spun around, but she didn’t see anyone. Great. Her neighbor was probably a serial killer or worse, some kind of gopher, fearful and just popping up to check if the coast was clear of predators. She shook her head and entered her own room that smelled of disinfectant. The ninth floor was abandoned save for the serial gopher and her, but she had to admit it beat the pants off a roommate and strawberry vomit.
She’d scanned her student I.D. card, the one she’d had made just like the DMV lady told her to. If it didn’t make her official, it did, at least, fool the food service. The cafeteria smelled just like she remembered. It held a pleasant but thick mix of hot oil, coffee, and taco meat. The smell was the only thing familiar. She stopped on the stairs to survey the large room. There hadn’t been much of a salad bar before, and the long scarred tables had given way to clusters of round ones, new, given the solid state of them. Most were filled with students, and she could see more in the half-a-dozen lines. The greatest concentrations remained at the slice of pizza and the taco bar.
There’d been one entrée at a time when she’d last eaten there, and it nearly always floated in gravy. Conventional wisdom insisted that gravy could rescue food that was cooked in giant batches. It couldn’t. The gravy had driven her off campus her sophomore year. Her last year. The gravy and being fired from her work-study job in the kitchen. At least old man Jameson wasn’t there anymore. Or probably alive. She’d fought with him over her fancy pants addition to the school’s recipes.
The day he'd fired her, he’d said fancy pants like that was a bad thing in cuisine. She’d walked out so mad that she probably owed the university a shift. She’d like to imagine the cinnamon she’d put in the French toast batter had led to something better than just unemployment, like maybe that rogue moment had sent her on a path of trail blazing. But in truth, it had only gotten her fired and into a cheap apartment where she’d taught herself to cook by recipe and experimentation. By that Christmas she was gone from even that tiny apartment. For good.
She heard a guy behind her clear his throat and felt her cheeks redden. Mid-life, back in the cafeteria, and all she could do was hold up traffic. She scooted the rest of the way down the stairs, couldn’t think past the smell of taco meat, and gave into it.
She sat with her lunch at one of the new tables. Alone. That wasn’t entirely new, not for the past several months at any rate. She’d be alone in her house too. Or anywhere she went. No matter where you go, there you are. Wasn’t that some kind of greeting card or Zen wisdom? The mean kind. Still, the taco wasn’t half bad, even without fresh cilantro, but it could be because she hadn’t eaten since… the granola bar she’d found in her purse. It felt odd to not have planned the meal, grocery shopped, and prepared it, but the ease of having food made for her didn’t feel as good as it should have. It wouldn’t be much of a break for a golfer to have someone golf for them either. Cooking was her tasty