You'll Get What's Coming To You

Andy, a man in his early twenties with light-brown hair curling in waves above his John Lennon glasses, was sitting in a faded red booth. The booth was shoved in the back of a restaurant that tried to feel like an old diner. What it really felt like, however, due to the food it served and the atmosphere it projected, was exactly what it was: a downtown hipster hangout.

Like the restaurant’s atmosphere, the seat of the booth Andy sat in was slightly off. It was just barely too long, meaning he could sit one of two ways, each uncomfortable. One option was to square his shoulders against the cushion and let his butt sink into the crack between the seat and its back and let his feet swing above the polished concrete floor like a child’s. Instead, he was sitting with with his feet flat on the floor (like a man) and his spine curved over the table. He was also eating soup, and, between slurps, he was talking.

“The problem,” he said, “with you falling in love—”

“Whoa, hold up.” Across the table Kate was pointing an accusatory fork at him. The lettuce speared on it drooped shyly, as if afraid of being caught in the crossfire.

Kate was taller and thinner than Andy, with straw-colored hair and sharp eyes that he was surprised to see were flashing at him.

“Why is there a problem with me falling in love?” she asked.

Oh-kay, so that was what had her annoyed. Well he could fix this; just power through, distract her, cheer her up, get her mind off of it. He twirled his spoon in the air like he was stirring sugar in an upside-down cup of coffee. “Not you, not you-you.”

“Okay.”

“A general you.”

“Okay.”

“A hypothetical you.”

Kate patted her lips with a napkin. “Do you want to make your point, or do you want to keep talking pronouns?”

Andy pulled his spoon down from the invisible cup, by now the coffee must have all poured out, and gave her a look over his glasses. “Okay, okay. The problem with... Someone—hey, don’t roll your eyes at me—the problem with someone falling in love, is the media.”

She chewed this over with a bite of Caesar salad, “What, like tabloids?”

“No. Well, yes. But that’s not what I mean. That’s a different beast entirely.”

“The same phylum though,” Kate suggested, “or genus, maybe.”

Now it was Andy’s turn to roll his eyes. “You’re not letting anything go tonight, are you?”

He wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about the smile she flashed at him, but before he could decide, she said, “Would you?”

Andy didn’t dignify that with a response; not because he was offended, but because they both already knew the answer.

“So anyway,” He started, “love—”

“And media,” She added.

Andy sighed, “Are you going to let me finish?”

She considered this over her drink, something tall, something skinny, something red, something fizzy and flashed that smile again, saying, “Anything’s possible.”

Now Andy was sure; he hated that smile. It was his smile, the one he flashed when he was being clever. It was unfair that she’d adopted it to use against him.

“So anyways, the problem with love,” he paused but there was no interruption, “is that the media controls it.”

Kate’s fork scratched against her plate as she marshaled the remaining lettuce together, “This isn’t going to turn out to be one of those conspiracy theories, like, ‘the media controls the elections’, right?”

His chuckle was real as he said, “No, no, I’m not crazy.”

She opened her mouth but he held up his hand and gave a deferential nod, adding, “Not that crazy.”

“Okay,” she said, “that I can accept. So how do they control it, and why is that a problem?”

“Well, to get there we have to rewind a little.”

Kate returned the sigh he’d given her earlier, “Why didn’t you just start there then?”

Andy shrugged, “In media res. You have to draw the audience in.”

Now that accusatory fork was back. “Deus ex machina. I can do meaningless Latin too, but that’s not getting us anywhere.”

Andy touched a hand to his heart and his voice dripped with mock hurt, “Mine wasn’t meaningless...”

“If you stay off topic I’m just going to keep interrupting you.”

Andy looked in his soup bowl, hoping the soggy piece of broccoli marooned at the bottom would tell him what to do, but it stayed mute.

“I think I’ll get back to the point,” he decided.

“Good,” Kate said. She had finished her salad and could focus all her attention on him and her drink. He wondered which of them received more of it.

Andy sipped his water, “There’s this theory people have that says everything in life is socially constructed. Your, not specifically you-you, but your personality, your politics, your ideas about gender or social norms, your sexuality, all that was created by the culture you grew up in.”

“What people?” she asked.

“What?” he replied.

“What people?” she repeated.

He tossed the sigh back again. “Ya know, when someone says ‘what’, you should probably change something about how you ask the question.”

Kate spoke slowly, like she was addressing a lost child, “What people came up with this theory?”

“The ones who had the idea for it,” he said, flashing the smile while watching her. So she didn’t like it either. Well, that’s okay then. Mutual dislike was what friendship was all about. Or was that something else?

Andy noticed the look of annoyance that was passing over Kate’s sharp eyes. Uh oh, maybe he was going too far again. He gave her a shrug as a peace offering. “Honestly? I don’t remember. I think maybe Foucault was involved.”

She gave him one of the smiles he liked: her peace offering. “Okay, I’ll accept that, if only for the rarity of you actually admitting there’s something you don’t know.”

“Ha. Ha,” he said, monotone, “So now we’re back where we started. “No,” Kate said quickly, “we’re not.”

His eyebrows rolled together, forming a fuzzy caterpillar, “We’re not?”

“Nope, we’re at dessert.”

And, wouldn’t you know it, the waiter was oiling up over Andy’s right shoulder with a slimy smile plastered under his long, greasy hair. His smooth voice rolled between Kate and Andy. “Are we thinking about dessert?”

They beamed up at him with that smile that’s specially reserved for waiters, “Oh we certainly are.”

“Well then what can I get for you two?”

Andy let out a deep chuckle. “Oh, sorry, nothing. We were only thinking about dessert.”

The waiter’s face took on that glassy, thousand-yard stare that every service-industry worker saves for people who think they’re funny. But before he could leave, Kate waved her hand lazily at Andy and said, “I’m sorry about him; he thinks he’s funny.”

She said this with a smile, though, so she thought he was funny too. Alright, Andy thought, we’re on the right track then. Just keep her laughing and everything will be okay. He felt a tension he hadn’t noticed before melting away from his lower back like snow in spring.

The waiter dialed his smile back up to ooze and slapped Kate with it. “What can I get for you?”

She tapped her half-empty cup with a pinkie. “Another of these? And apple pie a la mode?”

“Of course.” The waiter turned to slip away.

“Oh, um, wait,” Andy muttered down into the tabletop, “I actually do want dessert.”

The waiter was actually quite good; Andy could barely see the dislike in his watery eyes. “

Yes?” he asked.

“Could I get a cup of decaf with a scoop of vanilla in it?”

“We don’t actually have that on the menu.”

“That’s okay, I don’t want it on the menu. I want it on the table in front of me.”

Behind the waiter’s profile, Kate hid a laugh. The waiter, however, didn’t enjoy the joke nearly as much. Between tight, thin lips he said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

Then he gathered their dishes and melted away into the dark restaurant with a huff. Kate turned her sharp eyes toward Andy, “You really are an asshole. You know that, right?”

He shrugged, “Yeah, but a funny one. You enjoyed it and I won’t see him again, so it was worthwhile.”

“Yeah, that’s a healthy outlook. Someday you’re going to pay for what you put these people through.”

Shrugging worked once, so Andy tried it again, “But not today.”

She nodded, “Not today.”

“So, the media.”

“And love,” Kate added.

“And love,” Andy agreed, “They go hand in hand.”

“Like peanut butter and jelly?”

Andy picked his teeth with a thumbnail, “More like smoking and cancer.”

Kate almost snorted. If girls could snort, she would have, but everyone knows girls don’t snort, so this must have been something else. “This took a dark turn.”

“Baby, where we’re going, things get very dark indeed.”

Kate set down her drink. (How was it still so fizzy?) “Don’t call me baby.”

“Sorry babe,” he said, “the sentence just sounded better that way.”

She took a deep breath, let the air out slowly, and then pointed directly at Andy’s nose; he struggled to keep his eyes from crossing.

“You’re getting distracted again,” Kate said.

Andy tilted his head to the side. “Whose fault is that?”

She waved her hand in front of her face as if pushing away a bad smell. “Semantics. Let’s get back to your theory.”

“Okay, so, I don’t know how much I believe in this whole ‘social construction’ thingy, but I think it definitely has some merits.”

Kate clapped her hands together like an excited seal. “Oh! I see where you’re going.”

Andy scratched the stubble on his chin. “Well it can’t be to hell, I only have bad intentions.”

She scrunched her lips together. “No, no, I mean I know where you’re taking this.”

Andy turned both palms toward the ceiling and looked around. “I’m not taking this anywhere. I’m keeping it right here so I can tell you about it.”

“You think you’re so funny.” Kate stretched out the word ‘so’ like silly putty.

He smiled a Ferris Bueller smile around the ice he was chewing, “I really do.”

He paused, but Kate seemed to be biting her tongue (although he couldn’t imagine why) so Andy kept talking. “Now love, prison, high school, obviously all of these—”

“No, hold on. I’m sorry, I’m really not trying to be difficult, but high school?”

“I haven’t talked to you about that before? I feel like I’ve tried to.”

Kate looked down at Andy, almost piteously, like he was a puppy who didn’t know peeing on the floor was bad. “You’re trying to tell me a theory right now,” she pointed out, “how well is that working?”

He tipped his water toward her. “Touché.” She tipped her head back toward him and sparked a sly smile.

Andy shifted himself to the left, wedging himself into the corner between the wall and the booth and stretching his legs out along the seat. “Okay; so before you went to high school you’d seen a million high school movies, right?”

“Right,” Kate allowed.

“And these movies have more misconceptions than you can even count, right?”

Kate rolled her hand in front of her chest as a “keep-going” gesture. Maybe she couldn’t bring herself to agree with Andy twice in a row in case it made him cocky.

“An easy example is the students themselves. I’m guessing the kids in your school looked less like Hitler’s idea of the master race and more like greasy, awkward, pimpled, collections of too-long limbs.”

Andy couldn’t deny it any longer, that time Kate definitely snorted. When she was finished laughing, Kate nodded and stuck out her lower lip. “Okay, that’s true.”

“And how many times did a nerd find out his childhood friend grew up to be a super hot cheerleader who needed to be saved from her douche-y, cheating boyfriend?”

Kate made a show of checking her pockets as if she was looking for her keys. “I mean... I don’t have the exact statistics on me...”

“Mhm,” Andy nodded, “and how many parties seemed professionally catered? Or how many times did that goofy kid find out he was great at football just in time to win the big game? Or—”

“Okay, okay,” She gently patted the air in front of him. “I get it.”

“I’m just saying,” he pointed out defensively.

Kate waved her napkin like a white flag. “I know, and you’re right, so I don’t need anymore examples.”

He threw her a cocky grin, “Can I hear that again?”

“I know?” She asked with that same damn smile.

“No, I wanted to hear the part after that.”

“Well you can’t,” She said pointedly, “Now let’s get back to love.”

Before Andy could reply the waiter dripped down from somewhere with their orders in his sweaty hands, which was probably a good thing. Andy didn’t know what, exactly, he’d been about to say, but he knew it had involved the word “baby”, and he wasn’t sure how many times he could get away with that right now. Kate was already a little testy about everything after having just dumped her boyfriend.

In fact, this was probably an awful time to bring up a theory about love. But, then, Andy wasn’t known for his ability to think ahead.

Andy and Kate traded insincere thank-you’s for their desserts and Andy slid back into his corner, mixing the ice cream into his drink. His gaze dropped from Kate to the plate in front of her.

“You know,” he said around sips, “I don’t understand pie.”

Kate stared down, stirring her new drink with a skinny straw, and gave a non-committal grunt.

“Aren’t you going to ask why?”

“No,” she said. Now that Kate had food again the accusatory fork had also made a return. “Because that was clearly a set-up for a joke, and I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of saying it.”

Andy thought about that for minute. “Fair enough,” he decided.

Kate tapped the handle of her fork on the table. “So, you had finally gotten to your point.”

“I had,” Andy agreed.

“You were going to talk about love.”

“I was,” Andy agreed, and stared at her with a bland smile on his face.

Kate leaned forward and crossed her ankles under the table. “So...”

“Oh!” Andy smiled. “Were you trying to prompt me? You just had to ask...”

“I’m sure,” Kate muttered dryly.

The two settled themselves back into their seats.

“Alright,” Andy said, his smile fading, “so my whole thing about love is that we have these narratives that we’ve seen and read and we’re convinced that real life has to conform to them.”

Kate held up her forefinger and swallowed a bite of pie. “Give me a for instance,” she said.

“Okay,” Andy took a sip of coffee, thinking, “Okay, take us.”

Kate arched an eyebrow (now there was an expression Andy wished he could adopt! You could say so much with it). “Andy, there is no us.”

“I know, I know, I’m just saying let’s take you and me and throw us in a story.”

She was interested again, “What story?”

Andy gestured around them. “This; this is the story.”

“Huh, boring story.”

“Says you. Seinfeld made inane conversations work for nine years.”

“Seinfeld wasn’t a love story, though, and according to you, we are.”

“Okay, first off... Not really what I’m saying about us, but I’ll get back to that because you’re just so wrong about Seinfeld. It was definitely a love story. What do you think that was between Jerry and Elaine?”

Kate tapped her cheek with an index finger. “The table at the coffee shop?”

But Andy wasn’t listening. His head was tilted to the right and his eyes were glazed over. “Dear Boy,” he mumbled.

“What?”

Andy blinked at her and shook his head. The glaze in his eyes drifted away like a dandelion puff.

“Sorry, I got distracted by this song,” he pointed toward the ceiling, “I think it’s my favorite Paul McCartney song: Dear Boy.”

Now it was Kate’s turn to tilt her head, making it a mirror image of Andy’s. Unfortunately, this restaurant was one of those places that played their music just loud enough to be distracting but not loud enough to hear well, so she frowned and looked back at Andy.

“I don’t think I’ve heard this one, but I can’t really tell.”

“Remind me in the car, I’ll play it for you.”

“I will,” She promised.

Andy spoke slowly and carefully, “Did you notice how when you said ‘what’ I changed what I said and how I said it so that you could—”

“I know you’re smart enough,” Kate said firmly, “to not point out another thing you were right about right now.”

Andy wasn’t sure he was that smart, but he could definitely read her cues, so he looked down at the white iceberg rotating slowly in his drink. When he spoke again his voice was bright and cheerful. “Okay, so, I said I’d get back to us as a love story.”

“Right,” Kate agreed skeptically.

Andy nodded, “So we’re friends, right?”

“We were,” she said, “But I’m starting to rethink that.”

“Funny. So we’re friends and that’s that, in real life at least, but if this was a story, we wouldn’t be.”

“We wouldn’t?”

“Nope. At the very least we would be a will-they-or-won’t-they. More likely, though, we would spend most of a movie figuring out that all we really needed was each other.”

Kate mulled that over with another bite of pie, she still didn’t look sold.

“Let me ask you this then,” Andy said, “when your friends meet me they ask if we’re dating, don’t they?”

She nodded, “Yeah, okay, they do.”

Andy took a victory sip and smacked his lips happily. “I thought so. Mine do the same thing. It’s because the narratives say that we can’t just be friends. That’s not the way things work. And according to these narratives, things always work out the same way.”

Kate put down her fork and let her head wobble back and forth uncertainly. “We could be in, like, a buddy comedy or something.”

Andy shook his head. “That won’t fly because you’ve already bought into the narratives too. When I said we were in a story you immediately said we were too boring, remember?”

Kate crossed her arms. “Hmph, I don’t like this.”

“It gets worse,” he said.

“It gets worse?” she asked.

“When we deal with my thoughts,” he said, “it always gets worse.”

“Alright,” she said, “Let’s hear it.”

“Well, the worst thing about these narratives is that they make us sexist. Like, it’s always the guy’s decision about whether or not he and the girl date.”

She was watching him closely now, and seemed actually interested. “Example,” Kate said.

“Okay, let’s imagine we’re in a love story and we’re going to date.”

So they both did. The pause that stretched between them wasn’t exactly pregnant, but it was definitely a few weeks late. Andy scooted out of the corner and sat straight up again, saying, “In these stories, if I like you but we’re not dating, it’s because I haven’t told you yet, but that’s all it’d take to get the ball rolling. It’s always the same message: just tell her how you feel. They never consider the girls’ opinions.”

While Kate considered what he’d said, Andy looked at his coffee mug and hummed “Dear Boy” to himself. He gently stirred his drink and watched the white specks dance and twirl together. For the first time since coming up with his theory about narratives, Andy wondered if even he could escape their control.

Kate sipped at her half-full drink and set it down next to Andy’s open hand. “Okay,” She said, “You have me on narratives. I’ll give you that, but I’m not so sure about the sexism thing. I mean, there are a bunch of romantic comedies about girls choosing between two guys.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “but they always pick their soul mate, so we’re back to no choice.”

“The inevitability of fate is different than sexism, men don’t get a choice there either,” Kate pointed out, “We can have that conversation, but you’ll lose.”

He had just decided she was right when the waiter appeared to drop off the check. Andy rat-a-tat-tapped his fingers on the little leather book. “Whose turn is it?” he asked.

“You know what,” she said, “I’m really not sure.

“No worries then,” Andy replied. “I’ll pay.”

“Well, if it’s not your turn I don’t want you—”

But he was already pulling the check toward himself. “Katie, seriously, it’s not a big deal. I’ll get this.”

“Okay,” Kate gave him a piercing look that would serve her very well if she ever became a teacher, and repeated herself more slowly. “Okay.”

Kate looked down at her wrist and fingered the silver band there, not seeming to notice the way it would catch the light and reflect it straight into her eyes. While she was doing this, Andy opened the book and looked at the check.

“Oh, come on!” He grumbled.

Kate was still frowning down at her wrist. “What?”

“Your pie was five-fifty, but somehow my coffee was seven.”

Kate laughed, her distraction melting away. “They must include tax for douches here. I told you you’d get what’s coming to you.”

Andy shoved bills into the book. “Yeah, yeah.”

“Honestly,” She said, “do you really think you’ll ever get anything good by being a dick?”

“I don’t know.” Andy looked over the rims of his glasses and into the eyes sparkling above her smile. “We’ll see.”

And together they stood up and walked through the restaurant’s glass doors and into the bright, clear night.