The Waitress

The waitress is in love with him. Boy Kelsey, from her work.

They’re at sushi lunch ($12.99) and Cassie is texting. Cassie doesn’t understand about love.

The waitress thinks about Boy Kelsey: his arms, which are big, and his hair, which is blond. They call him Boy Kelsey at the restaurant because there was a girl named Kelsey who used to work there.

“Holy fuck,” Cassie says. Someone’s brother overdosed. Cassie just got a text about it. Cassie waves her hand through the air and the shimmer in her nails catches the sun. Some boys drive past in a Jeep and their music blares so loud that, for a moment, it’s the only audible thing.

“That’s sad,” says the waitress. “What did he OD on?”

The girls are on the patio and exhaust from passing cars lifts strands of Cassie’s moon-blonde hair. The waitress looks away from Cassie, who is beautiful.

“He poked his little brother’s eye out with an umbrella,” Cassie says. “When they were kids.” Another car full of boys drives by, and this time they honk. The waitress salutes at the back of the car and tries to memorize the license plate number for fun, but it’s too hot out to focus.

“It’s still sad he ODed,” she says.

“No,” Cassie says. “That guy Kelsey. Cami used to date his brother.”

“No way,” says the waitress. She thinks that’s kind of hot.

“You’re crazy,” says Cassie, who is scandalized but delighted. Beautiful people always secretly crave the details of the waitress’ sex life, because the waitress is ugly enough to see sex for what it is. Cassie pushes her mostly untouched sushi over to the waitress. “I feel nauseous,” she says. The waitress eats her sushi without tasting it, looking into Cassie’s black, unfocused eyes.

~

At work Boy Kelsey is eating a white pizza with fontina cheese and truffle oil and mushrooms. “If you’re nice to the guys in the kitchen…” he trails off. The waitress wanders into the service hallway, where the pizza is cooling on a metal rack. A few cooks are vaping out back. The smoke clouds the propped-open doorway and makes it look like the portal to another world. The cooks’ faces are obscured but she can tell it’s Dave and José because of the way they’re holding themselves. 

“What’s up, José,” she says. She grabs a piece of pizza and rolls it like a taco. She shoves it in her mouth quickly, before Dave or José or Boy Kelsey can watch her eat. Ryan the line cook walks by.

“What’s good,” Ryan asks.

She can’t respond because her mouth is stuffed with hot fontina, her body curled against the counter. Right now, everything is good. She can see Boy Kelsey out of the corner of her eye, hear the low hum of his voice. 

Ryan picks up the soda gun and shoots Fanta into a cloudy glass. Ryan is always stoned and drinking Fanta. He never gets the appetizers out on time. The waitress swallows without chewing properly and the food hurts her throat. 

Two families walk in and the waitress has orders to take. Someone’s kid gets chocolate milk that’s expired and the mom yells at her. She lets her eyes cross. She can smell Boy Kelsey, or maybe it’s just that he smells like the restaurant. Someone is rushing behind her with a tray of craft beer. She offers free craft beer to the mother, who accepts graciously. She brings beer for the mother and Fanta for the daughter.

She hides in the hallway and tries to breathe, but it’s hot in there and people are squeezing past her.

“Fucking shit,” Dave says. He runs past her holding a jug of Poland Spring. José sprints after him with serviettes spilling from his arms. She follows them slowly, moving without urgency. In the kitchen, Ryan is obscured by a plume of fire. No one is shouting. Everyone is quiet. Ryan’s arm is consumed by the blaze. He waves it around, and then he starts to yell. Boy Kelsey was in the refrigerator, and he bursts out and drops an industrial-size tub of salad dressing, which explodes on the floor. Ryan runs backwards, then slips in the dressing. Nothing unfolds in slow-motion. It all happens quickly, the way real things always do. The waitress almost laughs, but then she sees that José is frowning with concentration. He’s trying to figure out what to do. The manager went to the bank. They’re on their own. Boy Kelsey helps Ryan up from the dressing and pats the flames out on his arm. He suffocates the fire with his giant hands, which are calloused and strong. Ryan is dazed and stoned. José takes the Poland Spring from Dave and dumps it on Ryan’s head.

Everything is normal again and Ryan’s arm is red but not black. Ryan laughs and Boy Kelsey gets a mop for the spilled dressing. The waitress wanders back onto the floor, where nothing has changed.

Boy Kelsey drives her home. She tells him she lives around the corner, and that her legs work, don’t they. He says he can’t let a lady walk home alone at night. He says lady ironically, as though she’s maybe not a lady.

The waitress gets on the back of his bike and it’s vibrating. She’s worried it’s going to make her come. She wraps her arms around him. He smells like parmesan cheese. They start moving and she shouts directions into his ear. The night air is hot but fresh and it whips her sticky hair back from her face. Boy Kelsey’s upper stomach is hard and clenched with the suggestion of violence. She feels an erotic thrill at the thought of him brandishing an umbrella, unaware of his own awesome power.

She wants the ride to last forever but of course it doesn’t. Boy Kelsey pulls up at the top of her driveway and cuts the engine. She can hear the cicadas. 

“I think my friend Cami used to date your brother,” the waitress says.

Boy Kelsey smiles knowingly and drives away, into the milky dark.

~

Tuesday is Trivia Night and Cassie always comes for Trivia Night, sometimes with Cami. Tonight they come early and drink free gin and tonics from the waitress and Boy Kelsey.

The waitress brings them their pizzas, plain cheese and white with ricotta, mozzarella, fontina, and hot honey. They eat the pizza in small bites that they tear with their white teeth. The waitress stops by between her other tables, smiling and whispering secrets. She sends Trivia Joe over to their table to give them hints about hard questions.

“Your friends are fun,” Boy Kelsey says when they brush past each other in the service hallway. She feels him everywhere. He puts his hand on her hip, gently, before he walks by her.

“They’re not, really,” she says.

Ryan walks over to her, looking stressed. “Did you need a Caesar salad?” he asks. She needed the Caesar salad twenty minutes ago.

“Yeah,” she says. “With shrimp.”

She can see the burn marks on Ryan’s arm.

Cassie doesn’t smoke, the waitress knows that for a fact, but she comes out back with her and Boy Kelsey when he makes eyes and hand motions that he’s going to go smoke. They leave Cami drooling at the table, writing names of celebrities underneath pictures of their faces as babies.

Cassie smokes a whole cigarette, tip to taint, and she blows the smoke directly in Boy Kelsey’s face. She tosses her moon-blonde hair and rolls her shoulders back in his general direction. He’s laughing at something she’s saying. The waitress can’t hear their voices over the whirr of the AC unit. They lurch closer to each other, their movements clumsy but full of life and intention.

Cassie’s drunk but he’s the one who’s acting drunk. His mouth won’t close all the way. He’s falling for Cassie’s little dog and pony show. They always do. 

Look at me, the waitress thinks, wants to scream. Look at me. He won’t do it. She doesn’t even finish her cigarette. She goes back inside and tells Cami the names of the baby celebrities. Every single one.

~

She doesn’t want to but she lets Eric pick her up and take her to his sister’s apartment two towns over. His sister lives above a bubble tea place and it smells like tapioca starch and sugar. She can never get the smell out of her skin afterwards.

Eric is in medical school. He tells her she shouldn’t smoke. He listens to her lungs with his stethoscope and then he tells her, again, that she shouldn’t smoke.

His Fitbit tracks them having sex and afterwards she can’t move. He goes downstairs to get them bubble tea and when he comes back he smells like melon and brings the wet heat of outside back on his skin.

They drink bubble tea until they feel sick and then they kiss until they feel even sicker. He starts going down on her and she feels too hot and then too cold. She can’t focus, can’t relax. She thinks of Boy Kelsey with the umbrella, but it’s her eye he’s poking out. It hurts at first, but then something pours out of her eyehole, something that had been festering inside her for a long time. She comes; Eric emerges, grinning.

~

Friday night Cami drives the waitress forty-five minutes to an outdoor tiki bar. Cassie is in New York for the weekend for someone’s birthday party, so she isn’t there. Beautiful people are always invited to birthday parties. The tiki bar is thick with bodies and steam rises from people’s skin. Laser outlines of dancing people are projected on the wall by a middle-aged DJ. The waitress stands a few feet away from Cami and waves her arms in an ironic imitation of the wall dancers.

“Cassie’s a cunt,” she says. Cami isn’t listening to her. She’s talking to two guys at the bar who are drinking vodka red bulls.

All the boys here look the same, with red faces and pastel polos and white golf hats. They look like they stay inside all day and then burn themselves in the weekend sunlight. There’s a quiet desperation to the heat that radiates from their skin. They take out wads of cash or shiny credit cards to pay for their drinks. The waitress buys herself a Heineken with all singles, then tips the bartendress two more singles, one of them ripped so badly it’s almost halved.

“That’s hot,” says a guy from behind her.

“Why, because I seem like a stripper?”

“No.” He laughs. “Because you’re drinking Heineken.”

She looks around the bar. Everyone else is drinking vodka red bull, except for Cami, who has a Black Cherry White Claw.

The waitress turns around and the boy doesn’t look like any other boy she knows. He puts his hands on her shoulders.

“Let me buy you a drink,” he says.

“I just bought a drink.”

“Let me buy you another one.”

She shrugs. This boy doesn’t have the quiet savagery of someone who could poke out her eye. He’s also probably not in medical school. “So what do you do,” asks the waitress.

“I work for Enterprise Rent-a-car,” he says.

She has sex with him in the bathroom while Cami sobs hysterically on the phone to her ex. The waitress lies and tells him her name is Kelsey. She’s gone numb below the waist, probably because she’s drunk off Heinekens and vodka red bulls.

“You’re bleeding,” he tells her at one point.

She doesn’t believe him until he holds his fingers up and they’re slick and dark with blood. “That’s okay,” she says. She twines her hand with his so that their fingers are indistinguishable, animals devouring one another, and then she takes the blood on her hands and smears it around his eyes while he comes.

~

A recurring fantasy: the waitress is in the restaurant when a gunman comes in and opens fire. Shrapnel hits her in the eye and she runs for cover into the kitchen, then the walk-in refrigerator. It’s cold in there but she finds a wood beam to jam across the door. She’s safe. Boy Kelsey is already in there. They’re afraid but it’s cool and quiet. He sees her eye and makes her a bandage from cheesecloth. He dabs the blood from her face and she can smell the parmesan cheese on his skin. She’s sick with how badly she wants him. He kisses her. Her blood smears on his lips and tastes bitter and rusty in her mouth. She opens her eye and everything is distorted. She can’t see as fully as she could before.

~

Tuesday again, the only way the waitress marks time. Trivia Joe is by the bar with his box of branded merchandise. He puts a Corona baseball hat on her head. She smiles and takes it off once she’s in the kitchen. She gives it to Dave, who grins. Sweat has turned Dave’s shirt transparent and the waitress can see his nipples.

She pours Ryan a Fanta in a clean glass, then brings it to him. He thanks her with two shrimps. She starts sweating from the heat and the shrimp. The back of her neck is wet and her body feels wrung-out, like she’s been running or having sex. She smiles as she walks onto the floor and takes drink orders. She returns to the hallway to make four Shirley Temples for a family table.

Cassie and Cami are late tonight but they’ve brought Eric. She doesn’t know why they thought they could bring Eric to her restaurant. Part of her is happy that he’s here, that someone who desires her is here. She watches them sit down from the hallway. Boy Kelsey brings them to the same booth they sat at last week. Cassie leans on Boy Kelsey’s arm and whispers something to him. She slides into the booth next to Eric, who is searching around the restaurant with his eyes, maybe for the waitress. She realizes that from this distance she can’t tell what color Eric’s eyes are, but she can see that Cassie’s are black.

Trivia night is busy, far busier than usual, and the waitress barely has time to bring Eric and the girls their free gin and tonics. Eric would probably rather drink beer, but she doesn’t have time to think about that either. The family table sends back a pizza for having too much cheese on it. Another table asks her why their salads came out after their mains.

At one point the waitress slips into the gender-neutral bathroom to splash water on her neck. She hears a whisper from the corner and looks in the mirror. 

Cassie is there, wrapped around Boy Kelsey. Their moon-blonde hair is the same; they look like siblings. Cassie’s eyes are closed but they are still black. The waitress can see them in the mirror. Boy Kelsey’s eyes could be open, she doesn’t know. She leaves the bathroom and slides into the booth next to Eric, who puts his arm around her back. He kisses the side of her face, near the corner of her eye. She closes the eye and thinks about having sex with the stranger in the bathroom at the bar with the lasers on the wall. She thinks about Ryan’s arm, beautifully engulfed in flames. She thinks about Boy Kelsey and the freezer, the umbrella, the salad dressing. She thinks about Angie’s brother who overdosed. None of it seems to matter as much as seeing Cassie and Kelsey together in the gender-neutral bathroom.

She runs out to the parking lot, where the sky is black and glittering with stars. She climbs onto Kelsey’s bike and starts it easily. She drives off towards her house, closing one eye as she does so. Everything moves slightly to the left, but otherwise it’s all the same.

Nicole Sellew is a writer and PhD student at the University of St. Andrews. Her work has appeared in Hobart, SPAM and Ambit, among other places. Her debut novel, Lover Girl, will be published by Clash Books in 2025.