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People read well-worn paperbacks and thick textbooks and type away at old laptops while they sip beers and bat away fruit flies.
Our group has already commandeered three tables and shoved them together along a back wall with a long booth. A man from the study, Trey—with brown skin and his hair shorn close to his head, he’s tall and built, handsome, andnotthe type of person I ever thought would have trouble making friends—starts collecting orders.
“Do you want a curry?” Lulu asks.
I blink. “That’s a very specific order.”
She frowns, sticking her lips out. She’s mirroring me, my face. She wears it better than me. “It’s the only thing they make here. If you order nine, you get your tenth curry free.”
“Are you getting one?”
She nods. “It’s good.”
“Then yeah,” I say. “Me, too.”
She beams and, yeah, I’ll risk the heartburn for that smile.
“Hey, big guy,” Trey says, clapping a hand on my shoulder. “You want to help me carry some of the drinks back?”
He doesn’t mean anything by it, I know, but my shoulders still reach for my ears. I cringe. What about my size says I have the skills to balance a tray of drinks?
“I can help,” Lulu chimes.
We both slowly look from her face to her arm bound in a tensor bandage and the purple bloom of bruising on the back of her hand. “It’s fine,” I say. “I can help.”
“I was a server in grad school,” she says. “I can carry a tray.”
Before I can argue further, she walks past Trey and me to the bar. He shrugs and follows her, and I guess that’s that. I find an open spot on the end of the booth to squeeze into. The group chatters around me. About their jobs, their dogs, their favorite video games. And I can feel it, like a creeping fog. It’s not just a loss for what to say, a social awkwardness I never grew out of. It’s like one of those witch torture devices Lulu told me about the other night; a bridle forcing my mouth shut, filling my tongue with the taste of iron. I could say something, interject, offer a morsel of my life. But it’s a skill I’ve never fully mastered. Maybe it’s my size that makes me feel like a Kool-Aid man bursting through the delicately built walls of other people’s conversations, but by the time I’m ready to talk, the conversation has always moved on.
Lulu returns, a tray loaded up with pints of foaming beer balanced on one hand, to the applause of the rest of the group. Trey helps her hand out drinks and when they’re done, she hovers near the edge of the table, her own drink in her hand. The image of her hand wrapped around the pint of amber liquid reminds me of the night we met, reminds me of kissing her with the toffee taste of the ale on her tongue.
I stand to let her have my seat, and she sits close to the woman next to her, patting the scant inches of booth left for me. I sit for my leg, and not for the chance to feel her thigh pressed up beside mine.
Because, friend. Lulu is a friend. And just a friend. God knows I need one.
Lulu does what I can’t. She talks, chatters. The sound of her laugh moves through her into me, a soothing low hum. She turns to me every few moments to ask me a question, to say, “Isn’t that silly?”, her tongue held between her teeth, the kind of carefree smile people make when they feel truly happy. She looks truly happy.
A server drops off our food, the table laden with steaming plates of yellow curry, potatoes, chicken, and rice, a separate tray of garlic naan. Lulu watches me as I scoop my first bite and blow on the scalding food. She raises her eyebrows. “Well?”
“I think I burned my tongue.”
She frowns.
“But it tastes great.” And it does. Comforting. Warm. Everyone tucks into their food with the same energy, the table quieting to more stilted conversations.
“Hey,” Lulu says, bumping her shoulder to mine. “Thanks for coming.”
I swallow too quickly, the burn following down my esophagus. “Yeah.”
The bar is dark, the walls wood paneled; the booths are an old, faded rust color. It’s populated with people who look, whoare, far smarter than me.
“Hi, Dr. Banks.” She smiles, waving across the bar at a tall, reed-thin white man with white hair and a white beard. He wears suspenders and his pants are a couple inches too short for his legs.
He nods as he sits with a table of other old, white men.
“Aren’t you Dr. Banks?” I ask.
“We both are. That’s my dad.”
