Free Smart Mouth Waitress by Dalya Moon Page A

for a gag. Furthermore, I had not minded the close, physical contact with him. He was much more fit than you'd expect an artist to be. Thinking about pressing my face in the spot between his shoulder blades put a Mona Lisa smile on my lips and a tilt to my head.
    Courtney asked, “What's your next move?”
    “Marc likes girls who look normal, so I'm going to be normal.”
    “Normal?”
    “He called it something else. Authentic.”
    Courtney frowned as she pulled at her row of false eyelashes and adjusted the edge. “Don't ever change for a guy.”
    “Easy for you to say.”
    The train whistle blew with an order for a table on Courtney's side.
    While she was finishing up with her table, I got my phone out and googled Marc to see what else I could find out. With just his first name, however, that proved impossible. His friend, Chris Cooper, was far easier to find.
    I located Cooper on Facebook, where he had a completely unsecured profile. Through his friend list, I found Marc, but I didn't send a friend request to either. Marc only had one photo visible to the public, but it was a good one.
    I went back to Cooper's page, hunting for more photos of his friends. I guessed he kept it open for his art career, as there were a lot of posts about his paintings. His abstract, large-scale art was growing on me. None of the paintings were of anything in particular, but they were enjoyable to look at and admire, like the mountains, or the ocean, or your own freshly-manicured fingernails.
    The blue-haired girl was in many of the pictures, and her name was revealed to be … Sunshine Cooper.
    A wave of nausea washed over me. Speaking as someone with a weird name, I have to say people with odd names are so much more trouble than people with normal names. Maybe they're spoiled rotten growing up, or maybe their parents are narcissists and it's genetic, or maybe the whole world treats them like one-of-a-kinds and it goes to their heads.
    I know I'm not an easy person. I try to be good, and kind, and moral, but I am not easy.
    Sunshine, how easy are you?
    I was imagining blue-haired Sunshine with her little paws all over Marc when Courtney came by and laughed at the wretched look on my face.
    Courtney said, “You must be looking at that photo of your mom with Adam Levine.”
    “How did you know about that?”
    “It was on a bunch of blogs. I'm sure it's nothing. From what I read, she was just down at a taping for The Voice and went backstage to meet some people.”
    I grumpily put my phone away. “She could have told her own daughter the whole story.”
    Donny, who was listening at the window, stuck his head through and said, “I have a man-crush on Adam Levine.”
    “He's a handsome man,” Courtney said.
    “Does that make me bisexual?” Donny asked Courtney.
    “If you have to ask, it means yes, you are.” Courtney grabbed a clean butter knife from the utensil bin and gently touched it to Donny's left shoulder, then his right. “I hereby knight you a bisexual,” she said.
    They carried on for a few more minutes, making jokes about different grades of bi-curiosity, but I wasn't paying attention.
    Courtney waved her hand in front of my face and asked me why I was so quiet.
    I told her I was thinking about my overdue library books, but the truth was, I'd been having a little fantasy about Adam Levine, Marc, and Cooper fighting over me, all of them wearing nothing but pajama bottoms.
    What can I say? I'm a sick girl.

    At home, my family was not impressed with dinner that night. We were out of peanut sauce for the stir-fry, so I made my own, using peanut butter and the other things typically listed on the side of salad dressing: oil, vinegar, mustard, sugar, and salt.
    Garnet pushed his still-full plate away. “Bro, I'm not gonna say it's the worst thing I ever ate, because at least there's no eggplant in here.”
    My father grabbed the salt shaker and gave his plate a liberal coat. “It's fine for tonight, but I think I'll buy