FIFTEEN TACOS
DOLLY
I fled the scene.
Not immediately — a queen finishes her tray, that’s constitutional — but the moment the last taco fell, so did my composure, and I made for the taco-mobile at a pace I will describe as “regal” and every witness described as “scrambling.”
Because I had KISSED him. With my MOUTH.
In FRONT of the PYRAMID. Article Eight had been drafted in a moment of coronation fever and I had not read the fine print of my own treaty and the cabinet with the lock was not just rattling now, the cabinet was OPEN, the cabinet was EMPTYING ITSELF ONTO THE FLOOR OF MY ENTIRE PERSONALITY—
I threw the taco-mobile into reverse with the decisive confidence of a woman in total control.
CRUNCH.
Not the good crunch.
I closed my eyes. I did the breathing. I looked in the mirror.
I had backed directly into his car. His actual parked car. The only other car in the lot. A full lot’s worth of empty spaces, an entire ocean of asphalt, and the taco-mobile had homed in on the enemy flagship like the world’s most humiliating compass needle.
I got out. He was already jogging over — he’d followed me out, of course he’d followed me out, probably to say something devastating and calm — and we both stood there in the pink neon smear surveying the damage: his door, gently caved, wearing the taco-mobile’s bumper print like a kiss. A second kiss. From my CAR.
Silence.
“So,” Lennox said, “your vehicle also—”
“DON’T.”
“—couldn’t resist—”
“I WILL LEAVE YOU BOTH HERE.”
“—Article Nine,” he finished, and lost it completely, doubled over his own dented door, and the horrible dam-break sound that came out of me was not laughing, it was a STRATEGIC RELEASE OF PRESSURE, and we stood in the empty rain-washed parking lot at 8 p.m. wheezing at each other over the wreckage of two cars and one war, and Kurt watched from the window with the expression of a man triple-checking the countdown math he’d already gotten right.
We exchanged insurance information. It took forty-five minutes. Neither of our hands worked and neither of us mentioned why.
At home, I paced. Gerald banged the wall at minute five.
“I KISSED THE ENEMY, GERALD.”
A pause. Then, muffled, resigned, the voice of a man who has heard six years of one-sided kingdom updates through drywall:
“…The taco one or the tattoo one?”
“THE TATTOO ONE.”
“FINALLY,” said the wall, and went back to its television.
I got out the corkboard. Don’t judge me — great minds use corkboards, detectives use corkboards, and I needed to establish a TIMELINE, because somewhere between April and my mouth, something had gone catastrophically off-plan and I intended to locate the failure point with pins and string.
The board, when I stepped back, read as follows:
APRIL: taco stolen. War declared. NORMAL.
ALSO APRIL: broken taco. He came at 9 p.m. Aftershock rations.
(suspicious — flagged) MAY: he works here now?
! Order pre-memorized. Ice ratio correct.
(HOW — flagged) THE WOODEN SEA: best day of year.
Filed under combat. (review filing system) THE QUESADILLA VERDICT: “what’s your number.
” (cabinet damaged) RAIN TAX: told him about Dad.
HE DIDN’T FLINCH. (cabinet breached) THE PYRAMID: vault.
spatula. capstone. MOUTH. (cabinet destroyed. total loss. see insurance, ha ha)
I stood in front of it for a long time, holding my string, following my own red yarn from the stolen taco to the kiss, and the yarn told the truth the way yarn does:
There was no failure point.
Every pin was load-bearing. Every flag was the same flag. The man had been standing in my weather since April, grinning, checking zero exits, planning for aftershocks, paying rain tax, learning my formation, defending the crown in open court, and vaulting counters for capstones, and I —
“HOLY GUACAMOLE,” I announced to the corkboard, to Gerald, to the ceiling fan of the gods. “IS THIS A THING?”
“IT’S BEEN A THING SINCE APRIL,” said the wall. “SOME OF US SLEEP.”
We did not define it. I want to be clear about that, for the historians.
The next Tuesday I walked in at noon — saluted the General, per protocol, everything in its place — and he was behind the register with my tray already under the lamp, and the receipt said 12 FOR: ARTICLE EIGHT ? and I said “THAT’S NOT RATIFIED” and he said “the fangirl table ratified it” and the fangirl table WAVED, and I discovered they were running a BETTING POOL, an actual pool, with a bracket, and Mrs. Alvarez had apparently cleaned up on “before June” and bought everyone churros with her winnings.
“This is a professional establishment,” said Kurt, counting the pool money, because he was HOLDING the pool money, because he was apparently the BOOKKEEPER.
“KURT.”
“I don’t make the odds, Polly. I just enforce payouts.” He slid Mrs. Alvarez her churro dividend. “For the record, I had six weeks. I was off by four days.” A pause. The flattest, driest, most infuriating pause in six years of professionally infuriating pauses. “Nobody ever listens.”
So no. We didn’t define it. There was a war on, technically, still, somewhere, in an archive.
He called me Dollface and I called him Tatty and the tacos were twenty-five cents and the yarn on my corkboard stayed up, and if he walked me to the taco-mobile at close and we stood there being unbearable at each other for twenty extra minutes in the pink neon while both our dented cars watched —
— that’s between me, him, and Article Eight.
Pending ratification.
Ratification pending REALLY well.