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“Bob makes the sweets,” I tell her. “I just stick them in the oven at the end of my shift. Not sure if you want to wait that long. ”
As though she’s here for a cookie, and not because … fuck if I know. I clocked her ex, she showed up at the library, I mauled her, and she told me she doesn’t want to have anything to do with me. Then she started stalking me at work.
What am I supposed to think?
She shrugs.
I fling a chunk of bread off the scale onto the floured surface of the table. “So how’s it going?”
Caroline leans a hip against the table’s edge, all the way down at the far end. “Fine. ”
Fine.
Everybody says they’re fine. It’s bullshit.
It’s not as though every conversation I have back home is deep and meaningful, but I never wasted so much time being polite as I do in Iowa.
Caroline’s wearing sweatpants and flip-flops and a hoodie you could fit seven of her in. Her toenail polish is chipped, and her hair’s in one of those lazy half ponytails, like she started to put it up but her arms got tired and she had to abandon the job before she finished.
There are chicks who dress the way Caroline is dressed all the time, but she’s not one of them. On the first day of history class, she wore jeans and a bright-blue sweater even though it was still ninety degrees outside. She lined her pen and her highlighter up perpendicular to her binder, the textbook and the syllabus all out in front of her.
There’s something about her that’s totally pulled together, even when she’s just wearing jeans and a shirt. Not the way she looks, I mean. Something inside her. Like she’s got it all figured out, knows what she wants, knows she deserves to get it.
I can still see how her face looked when she was sticking her nose inside my car, checking out all my stuff, asking me, “Don’t you worry about botulism?”
Tonight—lately—she’s all wrong. She isn’t fine. Not anymore.
And I can’t let it be.
“How come everybody lies when you ask them that?”
“What, how they are?”
“Yeah. You say, Hey, how’s it going? and everybody says, Oh, fine. Their hair could be on fire, and they’d still say, Fine, fine. Nobody ever says, You look like shit, or I don’t have enough money to make rent, or I just picked up a prescription for a really bad case of hemorrhoids. ”
“People don’t like talking about hemorrhoids. It makes them uncomfortable. ”
“But who decided it was the end of the fucking world to be uncomfortable? That’s what I want to know. ”
She shrugs again. “I think it’s supposed to be like lubrication for society. ”
“Lubrication?”
“Grease. ”
I frown at her and toss a loaf down the counter. It’s filling up. I have to throw them down to her end. This one lands with a little pouf of flour that gets her black sweats messy, but she doesn’t brush the flour off.
I know what lubrication is. I just don’t get why we need it.
We didn’t need it at the library, when I was so fucked in the head from hitting Nate that I forgot I was supposed to even try to be polite.
It felt good punching that jackass.
It felt fucking great backing her up against the stacks, smelling her, getting my nose full of Caroline and my leg right up between hers, getting the taste of her on my tongue.
“It’s something my dad says,” she tells me. “Being polite is a form of social lubrication. ”
“I thought that was booze. ”
