Buzzfeed, Boys, Black Magic

the frozen banana

It was no secret the post-college life had been rough on me.

If it weren't for the fact that Abby had been receiving the same, strange Buzzfeed results, I would have thought that maybe I had hallucinated them.

I graduated in December. It was now June. And I had done nothing.

I hadn't been sleeping well. I hadn't been eating well. Most days, the only human interaction I enjoyed, if I enjoyed anything at all, was the short conversations I'd have with my brother at dinner, when he'd return home from his IT job at the call center. We'd talk about the president and the protests and how weird the world was getting as we'd huddle over our ramen, like refugees from the last sane years of the past century. We wouldn't ever talk about what happened to Mom in January, or if Dad would have sued her oncologist. The house was now empty except for us two. We had learned that ghosts are best left in the ground, unbothered.

It was on special days, my favorite days, that I got to see Abby. The days she'd get off. She worked as a nurse at one of the local hospitals. Not the one Mom died in, which was a small blessing. I fucking hate that place, and never want to be reminded of it ever again. Not that Abby's hospital was much better. When Abby started nursing school, she made a point to tell me that hospitals aren't like Scrubs. By this January, though, I had long lost whatever fantasy I once held of her workplace- fast-talking internists who dispensed increasingly inventive insults, musical numbers in the OR, doctors who did more than pop into hospital rooms and casually tell people they were dying. 

It only takes one traumatic major life event to knock the fantasy out of you.

Of course, now that Abby had finished orientation, she'd only have a couple days off a week. The rest of our friends had fled our hometown, for plusher, more metropolitan pastures, where you might actually find snappy, resume-plumping jobs with a liberal arts degree, and young, semi-attractive men.

Where Abby and I were stuck, we had no such luck.

And on a June Thursday afternoon, in our town, the only males at the local shopping mall were well under the age of eighteen or over forty, with children at their ankles.

"You know what I think you need?" Abby paused to maneuver the frozen banana into her mouth. As she bit into it, its chocolate shell cracked and fell to her Birkenstocks. A couple of teenage boys loitering outside the Spencer's snickered. She threw up her free middle finger and they scurried past the fidget spinner stand to the hellish depths of Hollister, like rodents, like the frightened mall rats they were.

"Suicide pills?" I asked.

"A job." Abby licked the small glob of chocolate that had melted onto the left corner of her lips. "Heard back from the California observatory yet?"

"Rejection." I said, but it didn't sting. It was a lark that I had even applied for the opening at the Griffith Observatory. Nobody even did any actual science there. The position was a part-time tour guide. The perk was that I'd be able to go to the top of the place at night and look down at all LA's glowing orange lights and pretend I was in Blade Runner. I was basically a replicant already. That kind of view, every night, could soothe my anxious, android-brain.

"What about the South Mountain one?"

"Rejection," I said, and this time it did sting. SM Observatory was local, owned by the astrophysics department of my alma mater, the hometown research university, and was a place where people did science. It paid peanuts, but at least I'd be working.

"I applied for an instructor job at the Newton Science Center," I popped a Gertrude Hawk peanut butter smidgen into my mouth, "it's kiddie shit, but it's all I got left. It's been almost a month though, so I probably won't hear back.."

"Never know," Abby said, but there wasn't any hope in her voice. "How's things going with Ethan?"

I didn't want to talk about Ethan.

We stepped onto an escalator.

"Nothing new then?" Abby struggled to keep her banana on its stick.

"I'm starting to seriously believe he's an objectosexual." I said, a little too loud, before noticing the bouncing twin toddlers a few steps in front of us.

"Objecto-what?" Abby snorted.

"I mean, he's getting up there," I said, "You'd think that by now he'd want more out of life than just his car, right?"

"Maybe not," Abby shrugged. "Maybe he doesn't want to ever get married or have a family or-"

"That's what I'm worried about," I said, and winced because I knew I still had a crush on him. "He's five years away from forty for fuck's sake-"

"I hate to interrupt," the father of the bouncing twin toddlers a few steps in front of us had turned around and locked eyes with me.

And then I was certain my big, filthy mouth had offended him. I didn't even know why I bothered to apply for that instructor position the Newton Science Center. I'd be fired before the end of my first shift.

I opened my mouth to apologize.

"Forty sneaks up on you." He said. His blue eyes were bloodshot and underscored with purplish bags.

"Waa?" I uttered, like I had just woken up and couldn't formulate English words.

"What?" Abby asked for me.

"Forty sneaks up on you," the father repeated. "You're twenty-two one day," his gaze dropped to my feet and immediately bounced back to my eyes, as if to say, I'm literally talking about you, "and then you're forty the next." The escalator step on which he stood reached the bottom floor and he grabbed one of his toddler's hands. "Take it from someone who's been there."

And he and his children disappeared beyond the Starbucks and into the Chick Fil A.

"Oh Lordy," Abby couldn't contain herself as we walked out the mall doors. "He totally thought you were actually dating Ethan, and like, pushing for marriage."

"Waa?" I uttered.

"He was trying to defend poor Ethan," Abby giggled, "poor, weird Ethan."

I was glad Abby could see the humor in the situation. Because all I could see in the escalator man's tired eyes was the inescapable forward march of time and the icy grip of existential dread. Tomorrow I could be forty, and with nothing to show for it at all.

Abby chose a bench in the shade, over looking the crosswalk to outdoor shops and the parking lot. We sat down. She nibbled what remained of her banana.

"What am I gonna do?" I stared at the Sephora across the street and also at nothing at all.

"We could ask Buzzfeed?" Abby suggested. "There's got to be a quiz about where you're going to find a man, or a job, or something?"

"NO!" I reflexively knocked the frozen banana stick out of her hand. "I don't really want to know!"

"Dafuck dude," Abby stared at the banana melting on the sidewalk, "now what am I gonna eat?"

***