Mallory walks in to a clang of little bells and Iris waves down to her. She watches the top of her head as she orders her coffee.
A minute later, Mallory comes over and slumps into the chair opposite Iris. Her hair is in loose pigtails, a little greasy at the scalp, and she is wearing a heavy gray sweatshirt, though it is well over eighty degrees outside. She sets her cup down on the table, closer to Iris than to herself. She makes no move to drink from it.
“Here,” Mallory says. “I don’t want it.”
“Oh, thanks,” Iris says, gently pushing the cup to the side. “So.”
“Yeah, so.”
“Do you want to tell me what happened?” Iris asks.
Mallory rolls her eyes. “I just had to get out of the house. Sneering into the mirror isn’t doing anything for me and Nathan is sick of looking at me like this.”
“Nathan?”
“Nathan? My boyfriend? God, can you retain anything?”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Whatever. At least I’ll get unemployment for a while. So freeing, right? I feel so unencumbered I could puke.”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I think about what I would do with my time if I didn’t have a job. Haven’t you? You could take a class, or learn how to do something…”
“I don’t need to learn shit. I need to be able to pay my internet bill so I can keep judging celebrities’ outfits.”
“Yeah, of course.”
The two sit in silence for a moment. The music over the speakers stops suddenly and Iris only then notices that there was music to begin with. Everyone in the café appears jarred out of something, eyes searching the silent air. A moment later the music is back, on a different radio station now, but filling the same need. A collective sigh of relief, masked now, unshared.
Mallory starts laughing, a loud, rollicking laugh. She doesn’t seem to have noticed the shift.
“And the funniest part is,” Mallory says, her laughter cooling, “I was going to quit anyway.”
“What?”
“I’d been drafting my resignation letter in my head for months.”
“Why?”
“Because I couldn’t spend my life like that anymore, always under the gun, on deadline, we need this yesterday, like everything is life or death.”
“I can’t even imagine. So, then, it’s a good thing you got fired?”
“No, because now I’m humiliated. And I didn’t get to give her my awesome letter. I was going to call her Countess Bitchface.”
“I don’t know what I’d call my boss if I called him anything.”
Iris thinks of the look on her boss’s face as he examined the melons, holding them up to his ear as though attempting to crack a safe. She wonders where he is now, since he isn’t where he said he’d be. He could be absolutely anywhere. She slumps down a little into her seat in case he’s here.
“And now what?” Mallory continues. “It was always my plan to have some killer thing to leave for, to gloat about, and I waited too long.” Slowly, her hard fuck-all expression gives way to a blank stare.
“Well,” Iris says.
Mallory is looking at her fingernails.
“What would you do?” Mallory sighs, reaching for the coffee now, taking a long slug.
“What?”
“You said you’ve thought about what you’d do with all the extra time if you didn’t have to work. So? What have you come up with?”
“Oh… nothing, I guess. I don’t know what I was getting at. I was just trying to help.”
“Then why’d you call in sick? You don’t do that. Remember when you broke your wrist sophomore year? You went to Spanish before you went to the health center. I could hear you whimpering under your breath the whole time.”
“I didn’t break it. It was just a sprain.”
Mallory leans back into her chair, regards her. “But you’re not even sick, are you?”
“No, I don’t feel good, really.” If necessary, Iris believes she can will a cold to strike. A flu, if she concentrates hard enough. She could still do it.
“You look fine to me.”
“It’s my… throat. My throat hurts.”
“Do you want some tea? I’ll get it.” Mallory starts to get up.
“No, don’t. I’m fine.”
“So you are playing hooky. Whole day. Free as a bird. What are you going to do with the time?”
“I don’t know.”
“You could call Marcus back. He said you never returned any of his calls.” Mallory squints.
“I don’t think he ever did call…” Iris thinks back and realizes she doesn’t know if he’s called or not, though she can’t imagine why he would. She can’t say she’s been checking her phone very regularly, or always remembering to charge it. She’s barely been paying attention to anything.
“Is there someone else you haven’t told me about? Is that why you never call the guys I set you up with?”
“Hm?” Iris inhales sharply, “what?”
“You really don’t pay a lot of attention,” Mallory says, and Iris is startled, as though her thoughts have been broadcast aloud without her knowledge or consent.
“Do you?” she prods.
Iris remembers then, how to defuse things when Mallory starts to needle like this. How to distract her. She tries to mirror Mallory’s smirk.
“You must be planning some sort of revenge, right? Against Countess… what was it?”
“Bitchface.” Mallory’s face softens a little into a smile, though her eyes remain narrowed. “I would like to let the air out of her tires.”
“With what, like a switchblade?”
“With my goddamn incisors.”
Iris laughs first, and Mallory follows, her teeth flashing.
“You could put sugar in her gas tank.”
“Too pedestrian,” Mallory sniffs.
“Superglue a quarter to her windshield, right in her field of vision? She wouldn’t be able to get it off without cracking the glass.”
“That’s better.”
“Or, you could wait until she goes out, sneak into her office, take her chair apart, and fill the legs with strips of raw meat. She wouldn’t notice at first, probably. Not until the smell got really bad.”
“She’d call building management and have them tear the whole place apart. You’re sick.”
“I told you I was.” Iris clutches her throat and makes a wounded face, making the two of them laugh again.
Iris decides then what she’s going to do today. She stops laughing as her own plans for a more benign sort of mischief begin to materialize.
“There’s only one problem,” Mallory says, grimacing.
“What’s that?” Iris asks, staring vaguely at the wall behind Mallory.
“No. I could never get back into that building. I was escorted out by security.”
“Why?”
“I said some stuff. I’m not telling you. You’ll think less of me.” Mallory narrows her eyes, pleased with herself as she takes another sip. “So. Now what?”
“I’ve got to go.” Iris stands up from the table and heads for the stairs.
“You should print that on a business card,” Mallory calls out.
Iris turns back with an apologetic smile, then continues down the stairs. She thinks it was a smile. She may have just swiveled her head, her face blank. But she can’t worry about that now.
She steps out onto the street and the morning is settled now, sunny and stagnant. She walks around the corner to her car, shining in the too-close, too-hot sun.