Before You Leave

She was sitting in the employee cafeteria at a plastic white table with a stack of paper napkins next to a salt shaker. The dreary walls were concrete, with signs hung up by HR that read, “Have fun” or “Thankful.” Thankful was the message that hung above the chrome buffet station—a salad bar with different frozen vegetables, wilted lettuce, and different dressings spilled all over the cold, dull counter. Steam rose off greasy cooked vegetables. Today the main course was bow-tie pasta with chunks of chicken and peppers. If there was a sauce, it was so bland that it could not be detected.

She had no food in front of her. She was waiting there to meet her friend. She sat idly, her head resting on one of her hands, studying all the tubes that were hooked up underneath the soda fountain—the mysterious silver tank wrapped in chains with a bright red handle on top. What happens when you pull the handle? Why is it wrapped in chains? Why is no one alarmed by this?

Her hair, which normally was always down, hanging around her face in messy, unbrushed waves like she had gone for a swim in the ocean and let it air dry, was pulled up in a ponytail, revealing her face without any distraction.

He walked in with force, like he had pushed a heavy door open in order to enter the room, and they made eye contact. He looked away from her so fast—so fast that she felt ashamed for looking at him. She quickly averted her eyes as he collected a plate and silverware, turning his back to her.

She wondered, though, if he would be brave. He had looked away from her so fast.

When his plate was full—equally proportioned with salad, pasta, and vegetables—he made his way to her and politely asked, “May I join you?”

She wished her hair was not up in a ponytail, her face so naked, nothing there to nonchalantly shake over herself to slightly hide her eyes, protection from being seen.

“Of course,” she said.

He sat down, and they looked at each other close up, without looking away.

He had brown eyes, but they were different. Large, and looking into them felt familiar, but also thrilling. She noticed tattoos scattered across his arm, like they had not been planned at all. Some looked thoughtful and sentimental, and others seemed careless—a decision both strategic and impulsive. A lightning bolt. A spider.

“Have you always been in sales?” he asked, and she noticed he held his fork and knife very properly for someone with a huge black spider tattooed on his arm.

“No,” she said. “I have never been in… anything very long.”

He looked at her.

“I tend to do a lot of different things,” she shrugged, knowing that this unearned vulnerability could welcome judgment of her—that it had before.

She watched, though, as his face lit up, either in interest or—could it have been recognition?

Does he understand? she wondered.

“Where are you from?” she asked, not wanting to talk about herself and knowing very well that the last question he asked her could be the only thing he learned about who she was during this interaction.

“Texas,” he told her.

“Why did you come to LA?” she asked, watching him methodically cut up a piece of chicken.

Most LA transplants land in this city to become something. LA is the city of becoming something for people who desperately need to be something. I’ll go to LA and be discovered. Too special for this place I didn’t ask to be born in. I belong somewhere like LA, a city that will notice me, wrap its arms around me, and not only validate my specialness, but reward me for being this or that. LA will confirm my worth in an important way that this place or that place never could.

She was wary of transplants for this reason, herself growing up in LA. Knowing the truth of the city, understanding LA in an intimate way one only can by experience—by paying attention to it for many years. Learning its secrets only by promising to keep them secret.

“For music,” he said, almost unsurely, like he was testing out how it sounded.

She raised her eyebrows. “You’re a musician?” she asked. “Are you in a band?”

He looked a little nervous now, like he had when he first entered the room and saw her. Panicky, almost, and she wondered if music was really how he ended up here.

She was stuck on his eyes. They felt so strange to look into—not because they were beautiful, which they were, but because of something else. She wasn’t sure.

He said something about how he was looking to find a band or people to work with in the music industry. She would have been disappointed, bored even, with this whole thing if it was not for his eyes. They were giving him away somehow. She wondered if they always gave him away to everyone. Does everyone see this?

“How do you find a band? Or people in the music industry?” she asked, curious, imagining someone taping an ad for a drummer on a lamppost.

He was quiet before saying, “You know how they say the church is in people?”

She actually did. Also, she was surprised by this response. It felt honest and revealing, like he had dropped a pretense and somehow spilled a fragile piece of himself out for her, a complete stranger. It took the conversation in an unpredictable direction—they were on an adventure now.

“That’s like music too,” he said.

They were locked in, kind of, at this point.

Her friend entered the cafeteria, saw them, and instead of joining, got a drink and left without saying anything. She would ask him later why he did this, and he would say, “You both looked very… close.”

“We were on opposite ends of the table,” she would protest stupidly.

“You looked close without having to be physically close,” he would say.

She was noticing him eating because it felt weirdly choreographed. He used both a knife and fork, moving them around his plate gracefully and with thought, making the person a few seats over look like a blind fisherman stabbing at bow-tie pasta and shoveling it into their mouth like a barbarian.

He noticed her noticing this.

“It’s nice that they serve us food here. I’m thankful for the meal,” he said.

She looked at the slimy vegetables and suspicious-looking chicken—the way he so carefully was eating it.

I think he really is thankful, she thought.

“What kind of music do you like?” he asked.

“I like everything,” she said without thinking.

“Everything, everything—that’s what someone told me yesterday,” he replied, and she imagined him sitting across from another LA transplant, the prettiest blonde in Ohio, here to be snatched up by the stars. Saying vague answers to the handsome Texan transplant with the spider tattoo, both of them happily playing their LA roles.

“It’s a hard question to answer—there’s never just one song or one artist that can define your entire taste in music,” she explained.

“No, no, everything—that’s what I say too when someone asks,” he replied, smiling shyly up at her in a way that felt rehearsed, like he was acting in a movie and the director was shouting, “Do it again, but like how James Dean would!”

“I like Seal, but I also like The Rolling Stones, but I also like Limp Bizkit,” she said.

“And Britney Spears, but also Lauryn Hill,” she added.

“Limp Bizkit?” he laughed, and it came out like he was absolutely not expecting to laugh. Like it was a bodily function he couldn’t control or stop—it had caught him off guard, and all he could do was react truthfully in the moment, with no thought or calculation. She saw his real smile. It made her real smile come out too.

“Doesn’t Pierre look like Seal?” she asked him, referring to the hotel’s doorman, who was tall, bald, and very handsome, like Seal. Pierre always dressed in perfectly tailored, stylish suits in colors that complemented his rich, dark skin. He had star quality—always getting mentioned by guests, how sincere and kind he was, how he welcomed them into the hotel so memorably that they had to mention him by name in their TripAdvisor review.

“He does,” he said, laughing again.

“And have you noticed he never sweats?” she asked. “Even in those fancy suits out in the heat? Never one drop of sweat. Not even a glisten.”

He put his fork down and thought about this, and she couldn’t help but see him as an old man pausing from his meal at the table to contemplate something.

“You’re right. He doesn’t,” he concluded.

A timer went off from his phone, which was in his pocket.

“I have to clock back in,” he told her, silencing his phone and returning it to his pocket.

His plate was empty now, and they just sat there looking at one another. It felt like they were still talking without saying a word. He took a napkin and started cleaning off his fork and knife, which had just become entirely too much for her not to remark on.

“You have very good manners,” she said, hoping this statement didn’t turn her into a high school guidance counselor.

He looked sheepish and said, in the same voice he had used when talking about people belonging to one another—or what church is at its absolute simplest definition, what music is—

“I’ve actually never done this before. I just don’t want to leave.”