There we were sitting in the corner table, the table in every restaurant that fills the awkward space between the waiters' station and the bathroom door.
They never know what to do with the space, so they fill it with fake potted plants, dim lamps and small tables for two - for the unattractive, depressing couples trying to rekindle a flame, fools without reservations, desperates with an empty stomach and people too ugly too care about being seen in the "lonely table" - or not seen, as the case may be.
My friend Anna, sitting across from me, fiddling with loose change as though fascinated, is far from ugly. But she has this knack of breaking her own heart, of picking the wrong boys who don't understand the beauty of her thick hair and piercing eyes - boys who care about voluptuous bosoms and fiddle with another kind of loose change.
The restaurant isn't that full, so it shouldn't even have this kind of table. It's clean, but on the side of the mall that no one passes. I don't even know the name of the place, something like Awesome Burgers - it looks like the kind of place with a name like that, with its empty pastel-colored tables and a sauce bar in the center with ridiculously tiny plastic cups and napkins too rough to use. The burgers are cheap and good and small. The onion rings are stale and taste like potato.
Anna looks at me with her piercing eyes. "We are so sad," she says.
I look around for confirmation, from who I don't know. The amorous young couple there who would have made passing adults shake their heads? The small group of teens, a bit older than us, who are not speaking loud enough for their age?
I have to agree. "Look at us," I say. "We are good, decent girls. And yet, here we sit eating food from baskets with over-filled sauce cups."
Anna dips her potato-tasting onion ring in the plastic cup overflowing with tomato sauce; it drips onto the sheen table.
"Being good, decent girls we shouldn't have to sit envying sexually active couples and perverted men," I add, then finish the last of my burger.
"You envy them?" Her eyes are really piercing now, in that peculiar kind of expression only girls understand.
"No. Yes. Well, they're happy in their misery."
So here's what it's about. We are two broken-hearted girls. Anna's boyfriend moved to Japan, but he dumped her first. I thought Anna would soon be chipper and set her piercing eyes on some other scoundrel. But look at her, leaning her head low against the wall, close to the table.
As for me, mine just left me. He left with a girl he and I used to know, but I don't want to know either of them anymore - if I think about it my stomach churns like when you're woken on a bright Sunday morning for no reason or see a spider eat a fly. But Anna's making it hard for me to forget just by the way she rests her head on the wall.
Two businessmen come in and sit behind us and order randomly off the depressingly simple menu, their chubby fingers pointing at this and that. They start talking about profits and mergers and things we don't understand and hope never to understand - probably just how they would feel about our topic of conversation: the misery of being teenage girls.
I sip on my peach tea and ask her what she is thinking.
"About the ice fights we used to have."
"Why'd you think of that?"
"The ice in my peach tea." Her glass is empty now except for the melting ice.
Then she goes on at length about how when she wasn't looking, he used to grab ice cubes from the refrigerator and stick them down her back or behind her knees and then the ice would melt and there'd be nothing between their skin but cold water dripping onto the floor.
That's pretty sweet, I think, but instead I say "That's pretty weird" because I know that's what she needs to hear. She shifts her gaze, pouts and nods.
You could never ask Anna why she fell in love with him. I don't think you can ask anyone why they love somebody; they just do. Adults always give us crap about how at our age we don't understand love, how we're too young for it. Sure, we know what love is.
Love is that feeling when you don't know if you're sad or happy because everything depends on another person, what they do, what they say, what they think about, what time they eat, sleep and go to the bathroom. Love is about ignoring all the bad things they do and focusing on all the good things they do, even if it's only 10 percent of the time.
Well, that's what they tell me. That's true love, I think. Honestly, all I've known are those momentary loves, you know. Where one weekend you see someone, and you don't really know what makes him stand out, maybe his hair or the way he walks, or his shirt or boots, but the rest of the night you force your friend to force you to talk to him - or you force your friend to follow him around with you. In the end, it doesn't matter who the boy is, he could be 10 years older, he could have a girlfriend or a boyfriend, he could be a drug dealer (it's happened), you would still call it love and write his name all over everything - until the next weekend. Maybe it's infatuation, but I call it love (and we believe it is every time we change our last name in our schoolbooks for the umpteenth time and scrub last week's boy's name from our wrists) because it sounds less silly.
A middle-aged man passes the restaurant, wearing shades that cost more than Anna's and my outfits combined. He looks at Anna, lowers his shades, raises his eyebrows. Anna doesn't look over 18, but who says middle-aged men can't wink at pretty teenagers?
"The world is screwed up," she says. We're staring at the man; you can see his hands itching for contact.
"What do you miss about him most?" she asks me suddenly, her eyes piercing into me again.
What a question. Did I miss the way he yelled off my balcony, pretending it was the Titanic (a quirk I tried to let go)? Did I miss the way he would fix my hair, making it even messier? Did I miss how he'd look me up and down to see what abomination I was wearing that day? Did I miss the way I'd tone myself down, because I felt I just had to? Asking what someone misses about a person is like asking why they love them. There's only one answer: everything and nothing.
I didn't like the way he'd walk slightly in front, the way he'd answer with "maybe"s, the way he burped, all those little things that seem so big and endless now.
"Do you want the last onion ring? We could break it in half," Anna says. We smile, and gulp down our halves. A pop song comes on, by a young, new pop star who sings the kinds of songs girls listen to in bed. The young couple smile at each other, savoring the moment.
"Just what we needed," Anna says, and then adds, "The sad thing is, maybe I still do love him."
I pause, then: "Maybe we girls like to be hurt. We're out now, and we would happily come back, just to get hurt again."
"Why do you think we do that?"
I look around. The group of teens has left, their table covered with dirty napkins and crumbs. The couple are still gazing at each other, their eyes filled with promises of touches.
"Maybe it makes us feel alive. What else is going to? School?"
Anna smiles. "Yeah right. I hope this song will stop soon."
I can tell she's thinking about him. That's what girls do when they're silent. When they're talking too. It doesn't matter. She's thinking about next summer holiday, when he'll be back from Japan, perhaps he'll be taller, his hair longer - in a good way. He'll speak fluent Japanese and he'll bring her something - but maybe not. Maybe texts will go unanswered, calls ignored, gazes unreturned, like the awkward times after they weren't "them", before he left.
"I don't want him back," Anna says, lifting her chin. I raise my eyebrows. "Do you?" she asks.
The sad thing is, it's not unusual for two girls to sit in flickering fluorescent light, letting the smell of onion rings permeate their newly washed hair (why not? No one is going to smell it and say "Your hair smells fantastic today"), chewing burgers and drinking over-sweetened peach teas. Maybe love is not about the other person at all. Maybe love is about loving yourself enough and if the other person loves you enough.
In the end, it doesn't matter how many ice fights we have or how many times we pretend the balcony is the Titanic; it doesn't matter if he fixes our hair or looks at us or thinks of us (when he was talking to that pretty girl in his class), or he calls us late - I think love also means respecting yourself.
It's about what we do when the ice has melted and his hands are wet on the back of your neck; it's about whether we join him on the balcony and pretend to be Rose (I prefer being Jack); it's about doing your hair sometimes, and not other times. It's about what you do when he talks to the pretty girl, it's about calling him instead, or better yet, not waiting for his call.
It's about accepting that he didn't call, that he was out with that pretty girl, that they are "they" and you two are not "we", that you are just you. About how when you finally get up again after crying in bed, you know you're not a person anymore, but a weeping, lonely creature who takes on the responsibility of the person who made you like this, in the name of a "love" that lasted a week.
"The movie starts in five minutes," Anna says.
We get up, leave the dim restaurant and join the crowd on our way to watch Inglourious Basterds for the fifth time. Because it's funny and gory and explains to us how we feel and what we want to do: scalp scoundrels.
