ash wednesday

i'll be storyposting through lent

to repent for the overindulgence of the night before she had the idea of heading to the health-conscious white-walled brunch place. her younger brother, the only other person up yet in their airbnb, was a good sport & agreed to come with her. when they arrived, on the early side, it was already crowded with other penitents.

she wore what she considered to be the ideal brunch outfit: last night’s party dress, pristine & unrumpled; sneakers; damp hair & a fresh face; a trace of anais anais to make her smell like a clean french teenager from the 70s.¹ this outfit existed in contrast to (in her opinion) the worst brunch outfit: athleisure & dull hungover skin, which shaded w repetition into rough & reddened skin; she had seen this combination on certain friends’ moms when she was in high school. he was wearing the kind of shorts that clean cut young men wear & an event t shirt.

she ordered a japanese iced coffee with lavender syrup & also a house-brewed kombucha. he asked kind of awkwardly if they had lemonade & they said they had rosewater lemonade. when it came out it was the color of rose quartz even though rosewater is colorless. she ordered some kind of salmon toast with lots of avocado & everything bagel seasoning. he ordered a crab scramble that came with home fries & he also ordered a biscuit with egg & cheese smothered in crawfish sauce. when their food came out she gave in & ordered a pineapple ginger mimosa.

she tried, sisterly, to bully him into telling her his secrets: “today’s a day for feeling sorry, what are you sorry for?” but although he told her cheerfully about his movements of the day before he wouldn’t give up anything juicy except his wallet to pay.

on their way out she wanted a picture. there was a line to the little wall covered in fake mosses where a pink neon sign said the name of the restaurant. but there was also a passage where an east-facing window poured light for just an hour onto the big glass containers where the iced coffee & iced tea & kombucha brewed away.

she had barely pulled out her phone before a girl detached herself from a nearby table to offer help. this stranger knelt on the ground, showing her devotion to their angles, weaving a little bit as she videoed them so they could choose any frame they wanted. our heroine adopted a contrapposto with one foot closer to the camera than the other, like a woman in a 50s advertisement, then stood pigeon-toed touching her neck a little. her brother stood straight with an unnatural gummy smile like he had never in his life pictured how he looked.

still kneeling, the stranger asked, “are you two related? because you’re both so tall.”

our heroine felt a shock of scandal pass over her, as if her brother was still the kid she’d left when she went to college, not a recent grad himself, bigger than her, with a job & an apartment. her brother, on the other hand, said “yeah, siblings,” with no trace of change of expression.

the little stranger was dark-haired, our heroine noticed, wearing a cargo skirt she remembered from brandy melville & an ambiguous smile she recognized as one she had often worn herself. remembering smiling like that called up the faces that she had smiled at like that. people stronger than her, who scared her sufficiently to make her feel guiltless toying with them.

the two were on their way to the car² before she collected herself enough to think to say, “i think that she was hoping you might flirt with her."

“why d’you say that?” he asked, in total innocence. maybe he hadn’t been being secretive earlier.

“well, she was checking if we were related. & then she said you were tall.”

“huh. i never got why people say stuff like that.”

she thought about boymom stereotypes, & then about her various boyfriends’ moms, suspicious of her. maybe this morning would vaccinate her against being a crazy mother to sons. then she thought about how badly they took breakups—even mutual ones, even ones they started, even when they weren’t really breakups because they’d just been talking—& felt an unfamiliar pity.

1. she liked doing this so much that she never bought a party dress without thinking of how it would look in morning light.

2. she had already, on autopilot, selected & posted the most flattering frame from their video, something she was very used to doing; & already neglected to ask the stranger if she wanted to be tagged or to follow each other.