Hey
everybody! This is a short story that I've been working on. It's not
entirely edited yet, so I'll be posting them as they are written and
processed.
Pancake Diner, by JD Galuardi
The
blinking fluorescent lights hummed in the 24-hour diner as the waitress put our
pancakes on our table. She stood with her arms crossed, hip shifted, and
weathered face contorted into a scrutinizing gaze. It was somewhere around
three in the morning, so I didn’t blame her for staring at four teenagers
ordering pancakes in the predawn hours. I would probably scrutinize us, too,
given how my friends and I must have looked. Mark probably looked the worst out
of us four. His thick and curly hair was all disheveled, his shirt covered in
dirt and motor oil, and a line or two of blood running down the front of it.
His face didn’t look too good, either. I’m not saying that he’s ugly or
anything, but his face was pretty marred by the grapefruit-sized black eye he
was sporting. He was sitting next to me, and he had begun to pick at his food.
The
waitress, Marge (I gathered this from the name tag attached to the pink and
white uniform she wore), looked expectantly at Mark. He looked back up at her,
and after several seconds she broke the silence.
“Anything
else?” Marge drawled in the most apathetic, non-committal voice I have ever
heard from someone who wasn’t nineteen years old.
“No,
thanks. We’re good,” Mark replied in a tone a little too cheerful for a guy
who, only a couple of hours ago, had been socked in the face by a
Schwarzenegger-sized hype man. Marge made some sound close to a grunt, and walked
away from us.
“Dude,
are you okay?” I asked Mark, eyeing the black and blue fist print stretched
across his face.
“Are
you kidding? Mark’s a man now!” Cheered Dan, drawing the eye of Marge back to
our table. Dan was a scrapper, wiry and compact. He still wore the shirt from
the school carnival, despite it being at least two sizes too big for him. “I
mean, how else can you explain him taking that kind of hit and not getting
knocked out? He’s a man now!”
“If
being a man means getting pummeled, then why didn’t you fight George the Hype
Man?”
“Because,
Nate, I’ve got asthma. If I fought him, I’d have probably had an asthma attack.
I would’ve died if he went after me!”
“I’m
not sure if a reflexive punch counts as ‘going after’ someone, Dan,” chimed in
Amber, who was giving the apparent majority of her attention to the food in
front of her, dancing her fork around the edge of the plate. “And you didn’t
seem too concerned with your asthma when you hit George in the first place.”
“Well,
I had to. If I didn’t, we were gonna lose the crowd, so I got the hype man.”
“We
still lost, though!” I replied. Dan just looked back at me as if I had simply
agreed with him. That was kind of just the way that Dan worked, really. He
didn’t hear things that went against him, and trying to get him to agree with
you could be chalked up to a miracle. That’s something I learned quickly, so I
didn’t press the issue. Instead, I shook my head and looked over at Mark.
“I
still can’t believe you can freestyle,” I commented, making a necessary topic
change. Besides, it was still on my mind. Before today, Mark was a little
quiet, but obviously an intelligent guy. He always had his homework done, and
he was a big poetry buff, often filling his conversations with quotes from
poets and philosophers. After the rap battle, I wasn’t all too sure what to
think of Mark. For one thing, I’m pretty sure that I had never heard him curse
before tonight, and I definitely had never seen him drink before tonight.
“When
were you going to tell us that you were so hood?” Dan chirped in.
“I
don’t think ‘hood’ is the right word for that statement,” added in Amber.
“Well, I’d
personally use certifiable badass, but I think you get that title tonight,
Amber.”
She looked back
down at her pancakes. “Yeah, where did that come from?” Mark asked. We all
leaned in, looking at Amber as if we expected her to actually accept that kind
of direct prodding for personal information. It isn’t like she would never talk
about herself or anything, she just never seemed to do it directly. She’d
always slip bits of her background into casual conversation, leaving it up to
the rest of us to piece together who exactly the red-haired, green-eyed girl we
all hung out with really was. So, when we had confronted her so directly, we
were all thrown for a loop when she blushed and barely murmured, “I used to
take Judo classes in middle school.” As if realizing she had just explicitly
given away her own exposition, Amber quickly went back to focusing on her
pancakes. The rest of us just sat in silence as the significance of her words
settled in.
See y'all next time!
DFTBA
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