I didn’t regret going with her, not right away. The regret came when we stepped foot inside the restaurant. Even in the moment, I recognized any impulse I had to blame her was misdirected. No, I was at fault here. I had avoided contact with others for so long, I lacked the ability to recognize the warning signs. I hadn’t realized that when you engaged with other people, sometimes their plans were entirely incompatible with your own, and sometimes you wouldn’t find out until it was too late. If I had better crisis management skills, I might have been able to do something about it.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “You don’t look happy.”
How she looked was plain to see. She could tell I was in distress, and she was enjoying it.
I had just the answer prepared for her question, but saying it wouldn’t get me anywhere, so I kept it to myself. All I could do was learn from my failure and do better next time.
This is all a roundabout way of saying another thing I learned that day: I wasn’t the type of guy who delighted in being surrounded by girls in a mellow, pastel environment.
Before we went in, she said, “The shortcake here is delicious.”
I thought that was a little odd for her to say, but it hadn’t set off any alarms. I didn’t know what to be wary of, probably because I had never been to a place like this before. I never imagined there were restaurants with such a radical disparity of the sexes. When I looked at the menu our server handed me, there was a little checkmark next to a box that said MEN. Apparently, they had separate menus for guys. I didn’t know if it was because a male customer was that much of an anomaly, or if the prices were different for men. I would have believed either.
The restaurant was, specifically, a dessert buffet, which wasn’t a thing I knew existed. The place was called Dessert Paradise. In that moment, a fast food joint would have seemed like paradise to me.
I could tell she wasn’t going to stop grinning at me until I said something, so I said, “Hey.”
“What?” she asked.
“Quit grinning at me like that. Listen, are you trying to fatten yourself up, or are you trying to fatten me up? This is the second all-you-can-eat place in two days.”
“Neither. I just want to eat what I want to eat.”
“Makes sense. And today it’s death by dessert?”
“You got it,” she said. “You like desserts, don’t you?”
“As long as it doesn’t have whipped cream,” I said.
“Who doesn’t like whipped cream? Well, you can eat the chocolate cake, then. It’s really good. They have more than desserts here, too—there’s pasta, curry, and pizza even.” She went out of her way to pronounce pizza with an Italian accent.
“That’s good news for me,” I said. “But can you just call it pizza like normal? It’s grating.”
“The parmesan, you mean?”
I wanted to dump parmesan over her goofy head, but I didn’t like to inconvenience other people, so out of compassion for the server who would have to clean up after, I didn’t do it.
I also didn’t want to satisfy her by appearing to be flustered. I acted like I had expected this to happen, and I stood and went to the buffet with her. A typical weekday may have had a smaller crowd, but our school wasn’t the only one with exams this week, and the restaurant was bustling with girls from all of the different high schools.
At the buffet, I picked out whatever caught my eye: a few carbs, some salad, ground beef steak, and chicken fingers. When I got back to the table, she was already sitting there looking happy. Her plate had nothing but desserts, and it had a lot. I didn’t much care for Western desserts—frosted cakes and fruit fillings and the like. I found them overly sweet, and seeing her plate made me feel a little ill.
About half a minute after she began eating, the girl said, “That murder is really scary.”
“Oh good,” I said with relief. “I haven’t heard a single person talking about that today, and I was beginning to wonder if I’d dreamed the whole story up.”
“I think nobody cares about it because it happened in some small town in the middle of nowhere.”
“That’s a more clinical analysis than I’d expect from you.”
Her statement caught me by surprise. I could hardly claim to know her well, but the image of her I’d built in my head wouldn’t have said that.
“I care about it,” she said. “I watched the news. Although I thought, oh, I bet that person didn’t think they were going to die before I did.”
She looked like she had more to say, but I jumped in. “I’m just going to ask this because anything’s possible, but did you know the person who got killed?”
She asked, “Do you think I did?”
“Do you think I think you did?” I replied. “All right, enough of that. Go on.”
“I care about what happened, but I think most people just go about their lives not particularly interested in thinking about life and death.”
“Sure,” I said.
She might have been right. Few people spent their days consciously aware of life and death. The more I thought about it, the more right she seemed to be. The only people who consistently faced their conceptions of life and death were philosophers, theologians, and artists. Well, them and girls stricken with a fatal illness and the boys who stumbled upon their secrets.
She said, “If there’s one good thing about having to confront death, it’s that I live each day knowing I’m alive.”
“Wiser words have never been spoken,” I said, only partly sarcastic.
“I know, right?” She exaggerated a sigh. “Ah, if only everyone could be close to dying.”
She stuck out her tongue, punctuating what was meant to come off as a joke, but I took it to be her true feelings. Sometimes, when a person says something, the meaning doesn’t lie in the message that was sent, it’s in how the listener receives it.
I ate the small portion of spaghetti and marinara sauce I’d put on my heart-shaped plate. The noodles were a little firm, but not all that bad. I realized that, for us, food was like our walks home. We placed an entirely different value on each bite.
Of course, that wasn’t the way it should be. I could lose my life the very next day, based on some killer’s whim—or if not that, something else. I should have placed the same value on that meal as the girl whose pancreas would soon take her life. Even though I could recognize that truth, I was sure I wouldn’t truly understand it until death came for me.
Suddenly she asked, “So, [Classmate I Can Get Along With]-kun, are you interested in girls?”
A dab of whipped cream had planted itself on the tip of her nose. How could someone with that ridiculous face have even considered matters of life and death, let alone offered insight into them? The look was too comical to ruin, and I decided not to tell her.