12. Sam
Sam
The most beautiful Taco Bell on the planet stood at the edge of the beach in the town of Pacifica.
Unlike the cookie-cutter, plaster-and-stucco drive-throughs in most cities, this Taco Bell was a wood-shingled restaurant overlooking white-crested waves—waves so tall and majestic that surfers flocked from all over the world here, despite the chilly water.
In fact, there were surfboards propped outside the Taco Bell.
Anywhere else, this would have been prime real estate for a billionaire’s home.
But Pacifica was still an artist’s and surfer’s town despite being close to the wealth of San Francisco and Silicon Valley, because the ocean wind was frigid and a salt fog blanketed this part of the coast every morning and evening, rusting bicycles and buildings alike.
Tech tycoons didn’t want to live where their mansions and Ferraris would be slowly corroded and eaten away by the sea.
Sam and Talia had first found this Taco Bell when they were college students. They hadn’t had enough money to afford Palo Alto restaurants, but they’d still wanted to get off campus, to eat something that wasn’t from the dining hall. One-dollar tacos and burritos with an ocean view seemed perfect.
Later, when Talia was in grad school and after Sam had bought Lighthouse Books just ten minutes down Highway 1 from Taco Bell, they had resumed meeting here.
This Taco Bell was also where Talia had come up with the concept for Ideal Life, and where she eventually decided to drop out of her PhD program to pursue the startup.
The two of them had been coming here almost every Sunday for fifteen years now (other than a short break in time when Sam had been working at Nowhere Cat).
The “Sunday Lunch” routine would have long ago fallen by the wayside, however, if Sam hadn’t insisted that it was a near-sacred tradition.
It was the only way he could pry Talia from her computer, and she needed someone to make her step away from work from time to time.
He was pretty sure she’d live at the office if she could.
(Although he saw the irony that his apartment was literally the top floor of his bookstore.
But then again, Sam wasn’t the workaholic.
When Lighthouse Books was closed, he didn’t go into the shop.)
“Hi, can I take your order?” the cashier at Taco Bell said.
“Want to go first?” Sam asked Talia. She always got the same thing.
But she squinted through her Omni 3Ds at the illuminated menu on the wall. “Um… no, you go ahead.”
Sam cleared his throat.
She touched the glasses. “I—”
“Tal, come on. You know the rule. No tech when we have lunch.” Sam generally let Talia call the shots in their friendship, but this was one thing he was a stickler for. Devices had to be put away during Sunday Lunch.
“I just…” She darted another glance at the menu.
“Talia. Seriously. You can make your own decisions about what to eat.” Her Ideal Life Friend, Queen Elizabeth, was probably making suggestions about what to order.
It’s not that Sam disliked Ideal Life as a concept.
After all, his best friend was the founder.
But he didn’t own Omni 3Ds, and his iPhone was a basic model from the mid-2010s.
After the crash and burn of Nowhere Cat, he’d just never recovered the ability to put so much faith into software and hardware.
Sam did believe in Talia’s dedication to ethical innovation, though. He also knew that Ideal Life could be great at helping people with certain decisions, like whether to have a second pastry or go work out instead.
Still, Talia sometimes got carried away with wanting to be the best possible version of herself, even when the details didn’t matter—like what she ate from Taco Bell.
Honestly, it was all terrible for you. It’s not like swapping a Doritos taco for a bean burrito was going to add an extra year of health to your life.
“You’re right—sorry.” She folded the Omni 3Ds and tucked them into her purse. “I just want what I get every time anyway.” She turned to the cashier. “One beef soft taco, a side of chips and nacho cheese, and cinnamon twists, please.”
Sam ordered one of the combo meals. He didn’t even know what was in it, just that it was a good amount of food, and that’s what he wanted. He pulled out his wallet to pay.
The cashier furrowed her brow at the twenty-dollar bill he handed over, as if she had never seen cash before.
Talia shrugged at the cashier. “He’s very dedicated to his no-tech-at-lunch rule.”
After paying and getting their tray of food, Sam gathered a handful of hot sauce packets, and they sat down at one of the tables next to the huge windows looking out at the ocean.
“Crazy that the waves we’re looking at could be the same ones that Libby saw, huh?”
Talia frowned. “Not the same ocean. She’s in the Maldives.”
“Not anymore. She and Jacob are in Japan now.”
“Sheesh.” Talia rolled her eyes at herself. “I really ought to keep better track of my own sister. Is she still texting you photos of her favorite snack foods in each country they visit?”
Sam grinned. He and Libby had always bonded over ultraprocessed junk, going all the way back to when she’d sneak into Talia’s dorm room and spend long hours there with them, powering through her high school homework while Sam and Talia did problem sets.
He’d known their parents weren’t great about stocking their pantry, so Sam had contributed what he could by slipping Libby vending machine snacks whenever she came over.
“She sent me a picture of a can of sweet potato drink this morning,” Sam said.
“A sweet potato what?” Talia asked.
“It was like a soda, but potato flavored. Libby said it tasted like drinking Thanksgiving candied yams. I’d show you the photo, but it’s on my phone, and you know… no tech at Sunday Lunch.”
Talia punched his arm playfully. “You’re such a jerk.” She reached for her food from the tray.
Sam watched, amused, as she began her routine of reconstructing what she called the perfect Taco Bell meal.
First, she unwrapped the soft taco, spreading the waxed paper flat into a smoothed-out square.
Then she opened up the taco itself. She took her side of chips and crumbled them evenly across the taco filling, then drizzled nacho cheese across it all. Finally, she refolded the taco.
“Satisfactory?” Sam said.
Talia took a bite and moaned. “You know this is the optimal combination of flavor, variation of texture—soft and crunchy—and cost efficiency. Definitely more than satisfactory.”
Sam laughed and examined his own meal. They’d given him a Chalupa Supreme deep-fried taco, a five-layer beef burrito, a chicken soft taco, fries with nacho cheese to dip in, and a Coke.
“You sure you can afford to pay for lunch?” Talia asked between bites of her carefully constructed taco. “I mean, forty-eighth place at the tournament…”
He threw a packet of hot sauce at her. “Just for that, you have to buy me lunch for the next three Sundays.”
Talia grinned. “Wow, if I knew I’d be punished financially, I would have rewound time while you were still at the tournament and given you another shot at that hand.
Maybe you would’ve made a different choice.
Then I wouldn’t have to worry about you buying me tacos, because you would’ve won a bigger prize. ”
Sam’s smile fell off his face. He’d forgotten all about that strange watch, partly because he’d just assumed that once Talia had undone the night of the Omni party, the watch thing would be over. Like, maybe it would disappear as easily and mysteriously as it had come.
He stared at her wrist. The watch was just peeking out from under the sleeve of her sweater.
“I didn’t do it, Sam.”
“But you thought about it. You considered rewinding time in order to change something about my life.”
“Yes, but I promised you I wouldn’t. And I didn’t.”
Sam’s eyes met Talia’s. She bit her lip, but she didn’t look away. “I swear, Sam.”
He held her gaze for a long moment. Then he shook his head.
“Okay, yeah, I know you didn’t. If you had used the watch, you would never have left it at me losing before the final table.
” He tried to say it like it was a joke, because he didn’t want to ruin the limited time he had with Talia.
But part of him knew there was some truth to it.
Talia truly wanted the best for everybody—that’s why she’d invented Ideal Life—and that desire certainly extended to Sam. He was, after all, her best friend.
“But you know,” he said, “even if you’d used the watch, maybe I still would have made the same choice on those cards, over and over, and you would have been stuck rewinding for eternity with nothing ever changing, yet feeling like you had to keep trying, just in case the next time worked.”
Talia laughed awkwardly. “I guess that would serve me right.”
He smiled. Not quite normal, but getting there. “Yeah.”
She looked out the window toward the water, and Sam took in her profile, silhouetted against the sunlight outside.
It was the same face he’d fallen in love with seventeen years ago—round cheeks and small pink mouth and long, straight eyelashes that made her crazy because they refused to take a curl (she’d vented to him and Libby many times in college).
But even when Talia was a hundred years old and covered in wrinkles, he would feel the same way about her, because it wasn’t really the outside that he loved.
It was her intelligence and passion and the deep empathy she felt for others.
And those hazel eyes lit golden from the ever-optimistic, idealistic flame that burned within.
Most people didn’t have a purpose for the greater good like Talia did, and that was okay. But it was wonderful to get to bask in the secondary glow of someone who did.
She turned back toward him. “I’m sorry I even considered using the watch.”
“It’s okay. We’re good, Tal. I know you meant well.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Okay, then I can bug you about what—or who—was in your apartment when I showed up that made you close the door so fast behind you?” Talia smirked.
Sam groaned. “If I had known where this was going, I wouldn’t have agreed that we’re good.”
“Was it the caterer again? Is it getting serious? You’ve gone out with her a few times now…” Talia took a big bite of her taco.
Sam rubbed his hands over his face. He didn’t want to talk about Kayla.
Yes, they’d gone on a few dates and she’d spent the night.
But it was only because he knew Talia didn’t feel that way about him, so after pining for too many years, Sam had told himself it was time to stop being pathetic and move on.
It didn’t mean he wanted to talk about other women with Talia, though.
“Well?”
Sam sighed. “Yes, it was Kayla from the local catering shop, but no, it’s not serious. And that’s all I’m going to say because gentlemen don’t kiss and tell. Now, I’m going to eat some of this food that has gotten cold, okay?”
Talia laughed. “You’re so old-fashioned sometimes, Sam. But I love you, you big weirdo.”
He threw another hot sauce packet at her. “I love you, too.”