FIVE TACOS
DOLLY
Tuesday.
I dressed for it the way I always dress for it: red shirt, gold suspenders, the good sneakers.
Colors of the kingdom. Six years, zero missed Tuesdays, and I intended to celebrate three hundred and nine consecutive victories over the concept of weeks the way I celebrate everything — loudly, at the source.
I should have known something was wrong the moment I hit the parking lot. The birds were quiet. The air had that flavor. Gerald-the-wall had said “good luck today” through the wall that morning, which at the time I took as growth.
I saluted the menu board. It did not warn me. We’ll be discussing that.
I pushed through the doors, inhaled the holy air, and opened my mouth to deliver the traditional greeting—
And stopped.
Because standing behind the register, underneath the sacred glow of the menu, wearing the black Twisty Tacos hat — MY Twisty Tacos, MY hat, a hat I have personally saluted — was a tall, tattooed, criminally smug figure with a shiny new name tag that read:
LENNOX ? TRAINEE
The star. They gave him a star.
I have been told, by multiple witnesses and one structural engineer, about the scream.
I don’t remember the scream. I remember my soul briefly leaving my body — I get it now, Kurt, I get it — and I remember the regulars evacuating their tables in the practiced, orderly way of a town that has done its drills.
Someone took their kid’s hand. Someone grabbed the salsa bar’s good spoon. Nobody panicked. I’d trained them well.
When I returned to my body, I was gripping the counter with both hands, and he was smiling at me like Christmas had come early and he was Christmas.
“Welcome to Twisty Tacos,” said Tatty, evenly, professionally, like a man who had rehearsed it in a mirror for a week, which — I would learn much later — he had. “What can I get started for you?”
“WHAT,” I said, “IS THIS.”
“This is a taco restaurant.”
“WHY ARE YOU IN IT.”
“I work here.”
“NO YOU DON’T.”
“I have a hat.”
“THE HAT CAN BE STOLEN. I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE.”
“There’s also paperwork,” he said, and then, leaning in slightly, dropping his voice, twisting the knife with surgical love: “Gus laminated my name tag personally.”
Laminated. LAMINATED. Lamination is FOREVER.
I did what any monarch does when the walls of the palace are breached from within. I went over his head.
“KURT!”
From somewhere below the counter came a sound I can only describe as a man attempting to be a cabinet. I leaned over. Kurt was crouched inside the under-register shelving, knees to chest, holding his smoothie, staring straight ahead at nothing. A man in a bunker of his own making.
“Kurt. KURT. There is a TACO CRIMINAL wearing the COLORS.”
“I know,” Kurt said, to the middle distance.
“You KNEW?”
“I told you. New hire. Labor laws.” He sipped his smoothie without breaking his thousand-yard stare.
“I asked Gus to give him Tuesdays so I could finally be free. Gus said — and I want you to hear this the way I heard it — Gus said Tuesdays need double coverage now. For ‘the surge.’” His eye did the twitch.
“You’re the surge, Polly. They gave the surge a name. It’s you.”
“It’s DOLLY—”
“It’s Wednesday somewhere,” Kurt whispered, like a prayer.
I straightened up to unload the full wrath of the crown upon the usurper — and that’s when I saw it, and everything got so much worse.
Sitting on the counter, under the heat lamp, in the golden spotlight reserved for the freshest of the fresh: a tray.
Twelve tacos. Arranged in the correct formation — crunchier ranks in front, the structurally delicate in back, exactly the way I arrange them, a system I have never explained to a living soul — with a receipt taped to the side, and on the receipt, in confident marker:
12 FOR: DOLLFACE ?
He’d drawn the star himself.
The tray was ready. It had been ready before I walked in. He had memorized my order, my formation, my TIMING, and he’d had it waiting under the lamp so it would hit the counter at peak warmth the moment I arrived, and it was, and I could smell it, and it was perfect.
“YOU DON’T GET TO BE GOOD AT THIS,” I bellowed.
“And yet,” he said, nudging the tray one inch closer.
I stared at the tray. I stared at him. Gears turned. Distant tumblers clicked. A phone rang in my memory — Twisty Tacos, we’re clos—
“Wait.” I pointed at him with the fury of sudden mathematics. “WAIT. Taco emergency services isn’t REAL, is it. There’s no elite division. There was never a division!”
He picked up a rag and began wiping the counter with tremendous serenity. “The division is you-specific.”
“You answered the STORE PHONE.”
“After hours. On my own time. Off the clock.” A pause, and then, quieter, with the audacity of a man saying something true: “Somebody said it was an emergency.”
The unauthorized thing in my chest did the thing again, HARD, and I stomped on it with both metaphorical feet.
“This means nothing,” I announced, snatching the tray. “You’ve infiltrated the palace, but hear me, Tatty: the war continues. Nothing has changed.”
“Your drink,” he said.
I looked down. The cup was already in my other hand. Lemonade. Correct ice ratio. I hadn’t seen it happen.
“THE WAR,” I repeated, with slightly less structural integrity, “CONTINUES.”
I attempted a boycott. I want that on the record.
I marched out those doors with my tray held high, planted myself on the sidewalk, and declared to the parking lot that the Taco Queen does not dine in occupied territory.
I lasted forty-one seconds. It was Tuesday.
The tacos were twenty-five cents and already in my hands and getting colder by the second, and a boycott where you keep the tacos is technically just leaving, and a queen does not leave. A queen repositions.
I came back in. Nobody said anything. Kurt slid me a napkin without eye contact, which from Kurt is a hug.
So I sat in my corner — MY corner — and I ate my perfect, punctual, treasonously warm tacos, and I watched the enemy work.
Here’s the infuriating part. The genuinely, cosmically unfair part.
He was good at it.
He ran the register and the food window at once.
He learned three regulars’ names in an hour.
When old Mrs. Alvarez couldn’t reach her card, he came around the counter and carried her tray to her table and said something that made her do a full church-giggle, and by the time the lunch rush thinned, a table of three women near the window had stopped even pretending to eat.
They just watched him, chins in hands, sighing in unison like a small wind section.
A fangirl table. Day one. DAY ONE.
“He remembered my order,” one of them breathed.
“He remembered MINE FIRST,” I said, loudly, from across the room, before my brain could weigh in on what my mouth was doing.
Every head turned. Lennox’s most of all — slow, delighted, eyebrows on the rise, mouth already loading something unforgivable.
“Don’t,” I warned.
“I didn’t say—”
“You were GOING to.”
“I was,” he agreed, shameless, and went back to work, smiling at the salsa bar like it had told him a secret.
I ate the rest of my tacos with the fierce, wounded dignity of a queen in exile in her own throne room.
When he passed my table with a rag, I curled over the tray on instinct — shoulders up, elbows out, the low warning hiss of the crown — and he didn’t flinch, didn’t laugh, just kept walking and said, without looking:
“Refill’s coming, your majesty.”
The lemonade appeared at my elbow ninety seconds later. Correct ice ratio.
I glared at it.
I drank all of it.
The war, I told my chest firmly, continues.
My chest, once again, declined to comment.