Page 32 of Leaving the Station
“What did you do all day?” I ask, not wanting to let this go. “If you were by yourself?”
“I told you.” She says this in a harsher voice than I’ve heard from her. “I ate pizza.”
“Right, but now you see my predicament,” I tell her, trying to ease the tension. “I’m thinking eating a pizza takes maybe five, ten minutes, max. So what did you do for the other twenty-three hours and fifty minutes of the day?”
“I walked around. Read a lot of weird things.” She stabs her plastic fork into the mass of cheese. “Did you know that there was a poet in Victorian England named Michael Field who was actually two lesbians?”
“No.” She’s being obtuse, and she knows it.
I try to shake the image of her eating pizza alone out of my head, but it’s stuck there. I need to know more about Oakley’s time in New York.
But then again, if I keep digging, she’d be within her right to direct questions back at me.
“Well,” I say, pointing to my lunch to distract from the awkward pause. “I wasn’t saying that this isn’t good. It’s buttery and cheesy and shit, so obviously it tastes great. But it’s simply not pizza.”
“Don’t say that too loudly or they’ll come for you,” Oakley says.
“Who?”
“They,” she repeats.
“Ominous.”
“As it should be.”
We chat and eat for a few more minutes as the deep-dish “pizza” sinks to the bottom of my stomach like a brick.
Aya waves to me from across the hall, then sprints over at breakneck speed. She runs up behind my chair and grabs my shoulders, using them to spring into the air.
“Ow,” I say automatically, rubbing my back where her little viselike hands had taken hold.
“Very buff,” Oakley murmurs under her breath, leaning into me.
“Hi, Zoe!” Aya says, walking around the chairs so we’re facing each other.
“Hi, Aya!” I point to Oakley. “This is Oakley.”
Aya waves, but she looks suspicious. “Are you two girlfriends?”
Oakley laughs so loudly that it echoes around the room, which turns into choking as she coughs up a chunk of cheese.
“Ew,” Aya says, backing away from the cheese chunk. She looks between us again. “So, are you?”
Oakley’s still coughing, and my heart is beating too fast.
“No,” I tell her quickly. “We’redefinitelynot.”
I turn to Oakley for backup, but she’s staring down at her lunch.
“Oh, okay,” Aya says. “It would be cool if you were. I only asked because my best friend, Cayden, has two moms.”
“Nice,” I say, my voice approximately three octaves higher than normal.
“See you on the train!” And with that, Aya’s gone, back to running in circles, leaving only destruction in her wake.
“Sorry about her,” I tell Oakley.
“Don’t apologize,” she says. “That kid is iconic.”
