Harper is waiting outside the restaurant when I get there, waving at me with her small hand, which is disproportionate to the rest of her body. I’m cradling my head to my shoulder because a worm is coming out of my ear.
It emerges segment by segment. I put my hand up as if scratching the side of my scalp, camouflaging the motion of palming the worm and depositing it in my purse. I know what you’re thinking: a purse isn’t a very butch accessory, maybe not a good look for a first date. But I need the purse to put the worms in. There’s already a few in there from my ride here on the Metro. Some crushed, leaking their mealy guts, some still squirming.
“You’re Eliza,” Harper says. “From the app.”
She’s perched on the curb, her toes around the sidewalk’s edge, like a bird on a telephone wire. Her waves becomes a request for a handshake. I wave her off because I have worm grease on both hands.
“I’m Eliza. From the app.”
“You’re on time and you look like your picture.”
“Which one?”
Harper has seen two pictures of me: the one on my profile, which has my bare tits, the hair around my nipples dark against my pale skin, and is angeled to show the dusting of my happy trail cascading from my navel into my boxers, and the one I gave her of my face. The second one was edited to mask a blemish between my eyebrows which had been fat and yellow but has since sunk away.
“Both pictures,” she says.
The picture on Harper’s profile had been a closeup on the birdlike curve of her broad throat with a meander of purple hickeys down the side, the other a selfie she took eating an ice cream cone with two scoops of strawberry.
We go inside the restaurant. The ceilings are high with exposed bulbs raindropping down and art from local artists, most of it abstract and not very good, is displayed on the wood-paneled walls. Harper is ordering from the man at the counter and I’m trying to read the menu, which is on a chalkboard on the wall, but I feel a worm emerging between my big toe and the next one over. It curls up in that space, bulging my sock, squirming. I’m trying to crush it under the ball of my foot when the waiter at the counter turns to me.
“Can I get you anything to drink tonight?”
The worm is slipping away, tickling the arch of my foot. “A pretzel.”
“To drink?”
“With pesto, please.”
“To drink?”
At last, I crush it under my heel. Its guts bloom out, sliming into cracks of my calluses. I only wear black socks for a reason.
“Do you have any IPAs on tap?”
He rattles of the list. I choose one with mango in the title because even though no beer will ever taste like fruit, I keep trying.
Harper hasn’t noticed my struggle. She’s sat down on the booth side of a table for two. I admire her confidence in taking the better side for herself. The canvas above her heavily features dismembered pieces of a plastic baby doll. She gazes at it.
“Dismembered pieces a plastic baby doll,” I say, as she says, “What do you do for work?”
She says, “I think I know the thrift store where the artist gets the dolls,” as I say, “I’m a product selection specialist.”
“That doesn’t sound real.”
“It is. I scroll social media all day and see what objects people are talking about buying and email the things I see to another girl and she makes lists of them and optimizes key words like MOISTURIZE and BLOWING MY MIND and I DIDN’T REALIZE HOW DIRTY MY CAT’S BED WAS UNTIL…” As I speak, I scrub my hands with the paper napkins to clean off the worm grease. I’ve mostly tuned out the dead one in my sock.
“I thought it was an AI that did that.”
“Everyone else I work with could be a robot. I wouldn’t know.”
“I go through the books that come into the secondhand socialist bookstore and throw out the ones that are missing pages or have stains on them. Stains that are too suspicious to sell.”
“The bookstore buys any book people want to sell it? Even the ones you have to throw out?”
“That’s what makes it socialist. All of the books are donated. But we still don’t make any money. I think the building we run out of it is owned by my boss’s parents.”
“Huh. I’ve gotta come there sometime.” A worm is coming out of my vagina. I feel its useless feelers on my inner thighs.
“Don’t,” Harper says, “Unless you’re into hardcover copies of poorly known Steven King novels and royalty-themed soft core porn.”
I attempt to extract myself from the table too quickly and collide with the waiter, who has our drinks. A slosh of Harper’s drink, which looks like a hard lemonade, claps to the floor. The waiter is apologizing even though this clearly isn’t her fault and I feel bad for all three of us. I dash to the bathroom.
Hiding in the big stall, bathed in the yellow light reflecting off scuffed metal door and peach pink walls, I jam my hand into my boxers and take out the worm.
It lashes around in my palm, unusually animated. I want to crush it up with intention, thinking take that, infernal creature, assfuck, reasonless thing, to take relish, to have a brief measure of revenge, but I don’t know if they actually can feel anything and I tell myself over and over that it’s my best victory to be a kind of person who denies their interest in causing pain.
I wash my hands really really well and go back to the table.
My pretzel and IPA and Harper’s hard lemonade and spinach and tofu salad are laid out, lush and steaming. My embarrassment contrasting the ease of this modern tableau must be tangible, but Harper doesn’t seem to notice. I negotiate a bite-sized piece of pretzel with my fork and knife, dip it in pesto, then set it down and take a sip of my beer.
“Hard lemonade?” I ask her.
“Soft lemonade.”
I pick up the fork again, eating the bite of pretzel this time. “Are you driving?”
“Drive in LA? Never. I’d never drive in LA. What kind of person would work for pennies at a socialist secondhand bookstore and own a car. It wouldn’t go with my character.”
“Your character as in your honor? Your principles?”
“More like, I have to be some sort of character. Positioned in a specific type of story. Or I get scared I don’t know what genre I’m in and think maybe I’m in a horror movie and something really scary is about to happen. Like the girl from The Ring showing up.”
“Is the not drinking like that too? A matter of maintaining a character?”
Apparently missing the rhythm of the conversation, she takes a big forkful of salad. She looks directly at me while she chews, which isn’t polite but makes me feel wanted.
She swallows. “The not drinking is really, actually personal. My cousin who was like my sister was killed in a drunk driving accident.”
“Did the drunk driver die too?”
“She was the drunk driver.”
“Fuck.” Another worm is coming out of my ear. My other ear this time. It feels like it’s touching my spinal chord, making my whole body want to twitch. I scratch at my thigh through my jeans under the table, trying to distract myself with another sensation. It’s so fucking endless.
“On my first night of college, this girl I met who I thought was cool— handsome, in a butch way—took me to a frat party. I’d held off all of college, but I took a few shots. Figured it was a new stage of life, one my cousin would never be in, so I might as well try being a different person. I got drunk and went outside and laid down on the grass and while I was lying there I got sure I was about to get in the car and kill someone. It felt inevitable, like the next moment I’d be accelerating on to the highway.
The worm is nearing the exit of my ear. Its head presses out.
“So I was crying out there on the front lawn of the frat house, which is a terrible look. The girl came out and laid my head in her lap until I calmed down, but probably just because she was embarrassed for me and for herself for coming to the party with me, because I never saw her again after that night.”
I move like I’m rubbing my head thoughtfully, but pluck the worm from my ear on the way. It’s a good maneuver, but now I’m holding a worm, and my purse is under my seat in a way I can’t reach it. I can’t really crawl under the table after she was telling me all of that. I don’t want her to see my discomfort and think it’s because of her.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “That must be a strange memory, especially when everyone talks about the beginning of college as this beautiful mythology.”
Harper shrugs. “I don’t think anyone actually had a good first night of college.”
There’s a trash can on the other side of the room. I’ll go over there and make like I’m throwing out a piece of trash from my pocket.
As I rise, I jostle the table with my thigh and her lemonade, her nonalcoholic lemonade, her soft lemonade, which she drinks because her cousin died, which she drinks because of her charming and complicated story about crying on the first night of college, and intricacy I like, a specificity I find attractive, a tenderness I want to respond to, an intimacy I want to reciprocate, so for one fucking second I forget about the worm in my hand and grab her lemonade to steady it, and the worm goes flying into her salad, the fucking worm, the fucking salad, the worm as pale as the tofu, the worm stunned by falling, the metal bird of her fork diving for the worm, spearing it, bringing it to her beautiful, endearing mouth, the crush of her teeth around the worm, another in the endless stream of worms made by my endless failing body, her chewing, chewing, her beautiful lips, her disproportionately small hands.
“Wow,” she says. “This is the best tofu I’ve ever had.”
I nod like everything is unremarkable. I feel a light in my eyes and hope I don’t look uncanny.
We could start a small business selling tofu made of the worms. We could sell a variety of soy-free products: a new meat alternative, a worm-sauce that tastes like teriyaki, candy with worm grease coatings, and on and on, all in attractive packaging. We could make a thousand million dollars and have a beautiful wedding. We could move in together and she could eat all the worms my body makes as much as she wants or just not care that they’re there. We could be in love. I could still get laid tonight.
She chews, and chews, and swallows.