3am
I stayed up until 3am talking with three of my friends. They’re all closer with each other than I am with them, but I don't mind. I like talking to them, and I feel like I’m making up for all the conversations that I didn’t have in high school. They all have clean rooms and expensive shower gels so the next morning when I woke up I pulled everything off my shelves and reorganised my room and scrolled through beauty product after beauty product online trying to figure out what I was supposed to need if I wanted to do things right.
Right now I'm sitting at a fried chicken store. It’s the only food joint that’s open because it’s a Sunday evening. I ordered a hash brown for two dollars because I needed to convert my $50 note into coins so that I can do my laundry. Just then a man who looked around 40 came in with a girl who can’t be more than five years older than me. He ordered for himself, and then asked her what she wanted. She didn’t reply. Her head was tilted slightly forward so that, to look in front of her and not down at the floor, she had to angle her eyes up, staring at nothing in particular. What do you want, the man asked again. He made an exasperated sound and ordered a serving of chips. There was something about the girl that was childlike, but her silence, in that moment, seemed to give her some kind of strange and unspeakable power.
When I left the fried chicken place the man and the girl were sitting outside. The man had his arm around the girl like he owned her. The girl’s face was still and expressionless.
I ate my hash brown as I walked home. It was crispy on the outside but when I bit into it grease surfaced out as if it were a sponge.