Paula Stokes - The Art of Lainey

Pushing the keyboard to the side, I rest my head on the desktop, wishing I could turn off all the lights and sounds, and maybe the air too. I can still see the customers staring at me, snickering behind their eco-mugs. And Monochrome Girl with her sad eyes.

I haven’t felt like this since I got cut from my junior-high select soccer team. I warmed the bench as a seventh grader and hoped to get moved up to the starting line in eighth grade. Instead, I had the worst tryouts ever and was the only player not invited back. I felt like such a loser walking away from the list of who had made it, my former teammates either avoiding me completely or patting me awkwardly on the back. I swore I would do whatever it takes to never feel like that again.

Someone knocks softly on the door.

“Go away,” I say, hoping whoever it is will take the hint and come back later.

No such luck. I look up as the door squeaks open. Micah is peeking through a one-inch crack, looking like he’d rather be in a dentist’s office awaiting several root canals than anywhere near me.

“What do you want?” I mumble through my tears.

He slides into the little room and shuts the door behind him. “Sorry. Just need to get the recipe for Caribou Cookies.” He reaches above me to the binder where Dad keeps the dessert recipes. The scent of smoke lingers on his clothes, like maybe he just came back from a cigarette break. Flipping through the binder, he pulls out one of the laminated pages.

But then he doesn’t leave.

“Are you some kind of weirdo who gets off on girls crying?” I wipe my eyes on the collar of my shirt. The teal fabric comes away dark with eye makeup.

Micah laughs softly to himself as he slides the binder back onto the shelf. “I hope you don’t really think of me like that.”

Something in his expression stings like lemon juice poured directly on my broken heart. Pity. I hate pity.

“I don’t think of you at all,” I say.

Micah nods. “That figures.”

I know I’m being a bitch, but I can’t help it. Jay didn’t hang out long enough for me to tell him exactly what I thought of his breakup strategy, so the rage is seeping out of me bits at a time, targeting anyone unlucky enough to be nearby. Better Micah than Bianca. He can take it. He’s got a tattoos and a mohawk. Clearly he doesn’t care what anyone thinks.

“Hey,” I mutter, the closest I can manage to an apology. “Be cool and don’t tell my dad about this, okay?”

Micah runs a hand through his spiky hair. Dark brown roots are showing beneath the black dye. “Your dad doesn’t really talk to the kitchen people,” he says. He lowers his voice to a whisper. “I think he’s afraid of us.”

I pinch my lips together. It’s a little funny because it’s totally true. Dad thinks the cooks snort coke in the walk-in coolers and worship Satan in the parking lot. Sometimes I make up stories just to freak him out. That’s what he gets for letting a bald chick in a band do the majority of the hiring. Talk about unfair. I had to beg and plead to get Bianca hired on as a barista for the summer, but Ebony gets to staff the whole kitchen with dregs she fishes out of the gutter in front of The Devil’s Doorstep, Hazelton’s premier (and only) live music venue.

“I could have him killed if you want,” Micah says with exaggerated seriousness. “Jason, not your dad. I bet C-4 knows people who would make it look like an accident.”

C-4, also known as Cal. Another member of Denali’s crack-team kitchen staff. He’s always going on about his collection of homemade weapons and telling everyone his locker is booby-trapped with explosives. Now there’s a guy who makes Micah seem almost normal.

“I’ll pass,” I say, wondering why he’s being so nice to me. Eager to change the subject, I zero in on his hands as he brushes some loose flour from the bottom of his T-shirt. “Why don’t you wear an apron?”

“Because aprons are for losers?” Micah swipes at his shirt again. He’s got what looks like a coil of barbed wire wound around his left wrist. It’s also caked with flour.

“Apparently gloves are too.”

“Nobody wears gloves unless the customers can see them,” he says, heading toward the door. He pauses, looks back at me for a second. “My girlfriend and I broke up a few weeks ago. I know how bad it sucks.”

I bristle again. More pity. “Why are you trying to make me feel better? You haven’t said, like, five words to me since grade school.”

He shrugs. “Bee asked me to check on you. Also, Ebony said I have to work the counter if you can’t go back up there.” Micah inches toward the door. “You know how we kitchen people tend to scare away the customers.”

My breathing has finally returned to normal. I dry my eyes again and try to pretend nothing happened, that Jason didn’t just dump me like I was a total loser. I hate that a coworker saw me break down, but it could be worse. Micah and I knew each other when we were kids but we’ve never rolled in the same circles. He hangs out mostly with other guys at work and I’m not overly concerned about what the Denali kitchen weirdos think of me. “I don’t see why Bald Beauty couldn’t man the counter,” I grumble. “That schedule isn’t going anywhere.”

“Why are you such a bitch to her?” Micah asks.

“Because she’s lazy? And bald?”

Not to mention, she’s been a bitch to me since the day we met. Pretty sure she sees me as a threat to her management position, like I’m going to graduate high school and immediately use my family connections to steal her Denali power.

Micah rolls his eyes. “It’s just a style, Lainey.”

“It’s a lack of style.” I run the tips of my pinkie fingers along my lower lash lines in an attempt to remove some of my smudged mascara. “You’d think she could help out for five minutes. It’s not like my whole world ends every day.”

Micah glances back at me as he slides out of the office. His face twists into a mixture of sympathy and disgust. “That douche bag was your whole world? I feel sorry for you.”

“I don’t need you to feel sorry for me,” I snap a little too loudly. But I mean it. I’m Lainey Mitchell, varsity soccer star. I have my own freaking commercial. I’m not a loser. I rock—I know it. And underneath whatever is going on with Jason, I’m sure he knows it too. All I have to do is figure out a way to make him remember.

Bianca and I head to my house immediately after work. We both flop down on my zebra-print comforter and I lean my head against her shoulder. “Mom knew this was going to happen,” I wail. “She said the leaves showed big changes, separation. I thought she meant Kendall!” Jason’s twin sister, my other best friend, just left town for the summer.

Bianca puts an arm around me and squeezes. “But you’ve never believed in your mom’s tea-reading stuff. Why start now?”

I’ve actually always kind of believed in my mom’s readings. I only pretend not to because—and this might be an understatement—tea leaves are not cool. But according to Mom, when she got pregnant, her doctor told her I was going to be a boy and she kept disagreeing because she dreamed I was a girl. Then her doula, aka the world’s biggest hippie, saw something feminine when she was reading Mom’s leaves and that clinched it—Mom asked for all pink baby clothes. Of course Dad and her friends thought she was having a breakdown so they bought lots of green and yellow stuff to be safe. And then I popped out looking all girly and perfect and Mom got to go around shrieking “in your face” at everyone. Well, maybe it didn’t go down exactly like that, but she’s been reading tea leaves herself ever since. And sometimes I listen.

But it’s not an exact science. She can look at a cupful of glop and pretty much see what she wants to see. And since she and the rest of the world knew Kendall had recently jetted off to New York after being selected for the special teen edition of So You Think You Can Model, I wasn’t too worried about the separation reading.

“I don’t know. But apparently this time Mom nailed it. What are we going to do?”. Okay, so it’s technically my problem, not Bianca’s, but any crisis of mine is a crisis of hers, and vice versa. That’s just how we roll.

She pulls a pair of wooden chopsticks out of her bun and shakes out her thick Latina hair. “Maybe you should try to call Kendall and see if she’s got any inside information.”

“Ooh, good idea.” Not only is Kendall closer to Jay than anyone else, she also knows how to “handle situations,” as she likes to say.

I send her a quick 911 text, but she doesn’t respond right away like usual. I tell myself it’s no biggie, that she’s probably off somewhere posing in body paint or getting an überchic pixie haircut. Still, nothing stings quite like an unanswered text message.

I wait five whole minutes and check my phone again. “I think she’s forgotten about me,” I say, only half kidding.

“She’s probably not allowed to use her cell phone,” Bianca says. “Didn’t you say they wouldn’t even let her email anyone during filming?”

“Yeah, I guess.” It’s nice of Bee to make excuses for Kendall, considering that they don’t like each other very much, which sucks because the three of us all play varsity soccer now and I wish we could hang out together. Bianca’s been my best friend forever, but being around Kendall is like getting swept away by a tornado, in a good way. She and Jason lived in Los Angeles until eighth grade when their mom got transferred here for work, and there’s just something glamorous and unpredictable about everything she does. When we go out, I never know where we’ll end up.