Buzzfeed, Boys, Black Magic

the second day

"All I'm saying is you can't prove that the earth orbits the sun."

And with that, Janice cackled, self-satisfied, like she were a prosecutor who had just hit defense with a final, fatal blow. The headache I had then made me want to detach the damn thing from my neck and clobber her with it.

"Janice," I said, as I punched the COOK button on the breakroom microwave, "why do you work at a science center?"

"You can't prove it, can you?" This stupid grin spread across Janice's chubby, middle-aged face. "You spent two-hundred and fifty thousand on a worthless degree-"

"I had scholarships!" I blurted out.

"So they paid you to waste your time." Janice pulled out a sandwich from her brown paper sack. "You're what, twenty-two?"

"Twenty-three." I said.

"Even better." Janice inspected the guts of her sandwich. "You're going to be hag-ugly by twenty-seven."

"Excuse me?"

"You wasted your peak fertility years in some observatory, swallowing this 'earth revolves around the sun' garbage, when you should have been trying to land a man." Janice tilted down her chin and peered up at me through her side-swept bangs. "I was Channel 69's number 1 weather girl for seven years, Mary-Beth."

"My name is Leela-"

"My job had an expiration date, and I was too dumb to get the memo." Janice continued, "I should have realized they'd replace me with some twenty-one-year-old meteorology school grad in a push-up bra-"

"Well, she had a meteorology degree and didn't believe the earth was flat so," I stopped myself from adding that I would probably replace you with her too. Janice wouldn't take that very well. This was my first real conversation with her, and she had already insulted my looks (which- fair enough) and my profession (or what I pretended was my profession). The woman had it out for me.

"Thirteen years," Janice laughed sardonically. "I've been teaching these snotty brats the precipitation system for thirteen Goddamn years."

"You do know that raindrops aren't Jesus's tears, right?" I mumbled as the microwave beeped. I pulled out my pepperoni hot pocket.

"I'm a Hindu," Janice growled.

I slid into the seat across from Janice and noted her freckles and blonde hair.

"That- surprises me," I said. Part of me wondered if Janice hadn't been serious about anything she had just said. If she had simply been listening to the call of the void.

"Jesus is a fiction, created by the Romans to justify their occupation of Israel," Janice insisted. "I was watching this documentary about the dead sea scrolls on the History Channel- there's no evidence he even existed-"

"Hey," I cut her off, "you spend any time on Buzzfeed?"

"The cat pornography website?" Janice narrowed her eyes.

Before I could even respond, Cody from animal science had popped into the breakroom.

"Pornography?" he repeated, slowly, and loudly, and before the breakroom door had even completely closed. "Sounds like we getting not safe for work all up in here, ladies." He threw one of his arms around Janice's shoulder and stretched his other out toward me. I was too far away for him to reach, but even from across the breakroom table, I got a whiff of weed.

"Shut-up, Cody." Janice slapped away his arms. "We're talking about cat pornography, not human stuff-"

By now my headache was excruciating. I pressed my face into my palms.