Page 181 of Summer Love

With one finger, he pushes the plate toward me.

“I said over easy. It’s not that complicated.”

I check my pad—sunny side up. I can still hear him saying it.

“Of course. I’ll fix that.”

I don’t blink. He goes back to his phone without a word. I take the plate back.

Don’t look at Mavis, who’s followed the whole thing from the counter and whose raised eyebrow I can feel. Don’t limp as I move between the tables.

At the pass, I just tell the cook, “Refire. Over easy.” He looks up at me, gets it, says nothing, cracks two eggs into the pan.

I give myself a three-minute break. I step out the service door and lean against the wall. The brick is still warm from the day.

The air reeks of fryer grease and garbage. Across the alley, above the door of a sex shop you’d swear had been closed for ten years, a LIVE NUDES sign blinks red—the letter N stutters, twice a second, never quite deciding to die.

I pull out my phone and find a message from Lena.

Second time I’ve heard from her in twenty-four hours.

Last night, I left here at ten. My foot hurt so bad my vision blurred. I missed Jace so much it was hard to breathe. I’d put my apron in my locker with my eyes burning.

My phone rang at the corner.

I froze in the middle of the sidewalk. A guy plowed into my shoulder and swore at me. On the screen: Lena.

Three years. Three years since she and I had spoken. Three years since she left for Montreal with Mom and I stayed in New York. The thread between us snapped without either of us really knowing who cut it first.

Two or three tears fell anyway. I wiped them with the back of my hand and picked up on the fourth ring.

We started with three too-polite sentences, small talk that didn’t quite fit.

“You doing okay out there?” she asked.

I said yes. She didn’t answer right away, and I understood she knew I was lying.

We talked for fifteen minutes on the sidewalk. I don’t remember half of what we said. She told me about Montreal, her rink, her new program. She asked me about the diner and the internship. At one point we floated Thanksgiving as a possibility, without pinning anything down.

I wonder why that call came last night, after three years of silence. Maybe she sensed, from four hundred miles away, that I was barely standing.

That’s the version I’m sticking with. My eighteen-year-old little sister, stuck in her world of ice and training, somehow felt I wasn’t okay when she walked out of the rink. Probably not true, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the only bright spot since I came back to New York.

I open the message.

A photo of a cappuccino from above. Some unidentifiable shape, drawn in the milk foam.

Lena

Looks like a cockroach. The waiter swore it was a heart. He slipped his number under the saucer.

I laugh—my first real laugh of the day.

Me

I’m guessing you left a bad tip.

I hesitate a second, then my thumb scrolls through the message threads. Jace’s is still there. I haven’t deleted it. I should have; I couldn’t.