Free The Girls From Corona Del Mar by Rufi Thorpe Page B

fucking liar, waiting tables is awful and you know it. It’s a horrible, killing job that makes you want to hit people in the face. I’ve waited tables before. You can’t fool me.”
    Lorrie Ann guffawed. “You really weren’t suited to it, were you?”
    “No,” I said.
    “Well, I like it. I’m like a plow horse or something. What I do is so physical. All I do is move things through space, but just for really short distances. It’s odd. People think it’s so important too. I can make them happy or sad just by the precise way I move an object, like a plate or a cup, through time and space.”
    Personally I thought she was deluding herself, trying to find metaphysical grandeur in work that was truly unspeakably boring and difficult.
    Arman grunted, packing a new bowl on the bong.
    “Mostly,” she said, “I like it because it’s so impersonal. Nobodyknows what I’m thinking. I don’t have to tell anybody. And so the inside of my head has become this sort of wonderful, private garden almost.”
    Her eyes filled with something then. It was so obvious that she was thinking something, and whatever it was that she was thinking about seemed to be immense and magical and important. It just made you wish you could climb inside her head. As though the inside of Lorrie Ann must be the most interesting place in the world, a veritable Shangri-la. How did she do that? And did she know she was doing it?
    “I don’t really fucking buy it,” I said finally.
    “Good call,” Arman said, and raised his beer to clink with me.
    “Thanks, man. Yeah, I call bullshit, Lorrie Ann. All that just sounds to me like shit you made up to feel better about how awful your job is.”
    Lorrie Ann laughed, wild and loud. “Maybe you’re right.”
    Just then Zach began to make horrible sounds, choking, asphyxiating sounds, and Lorrie Ann scooted over to him on her butt, reached up, and stuck her fingers in his mouth to feel around for anything in there as she kept talking to us. “Still, I don’t have any regrets. I don’t. It’s not worth it to regret any of it.”
    “Eh,” I said, “maybe.”
    “I regret everything,” Arman said. “Almost every single thing I’ve ever done, I regret.”
    “That’s really shitty,” I said.
    Arman nodded. “Well,” he said, “I make really shitty decisions. So they’re worth regretting.”
    “I’m too selfish to make poor decisions,” I offered.
    “So it’s not actually a virtue?” Lorrie Ann asked, having apparently reassured herself that Zach was not choking on anything and now wiping his mouth with a burp cloth. “Your good decision-making power is actually a function of your little, black heart?”
    “Yep, pretty much.”
    “I don’t know, your life sounds so exciting,” Lorrie Ann went on in a gush “I picture you walking around campus, your mind alive with all these ideas and texts and, I mean—I know I don’t really know what youdo, I can’t even imagine it, so you must think I’m so stupid even saying this—but I picture you in, like, this big library, like some library from a Borges story or something, an infinite library of all of human knowledge. It makes me happy thinking that.”
    I was slack-jawed at her generosity of spirit.
    “More beer?” she said, just at the moment that Arman held out the bong to me.

CHAPTER SIX
Accidents Happen
    I got drunker that night than I had in years, and I had more fun than I’d had in even longer. We drank beers, shot the shit, told Arman all about Brittany Slane and her downy hair and constant, preposterous, but probably true, genealogical claims. I noted that Lorrie Ann no longer had any problem laughing at Brittany Slane. She didn’t seem to feel nearly as guilty as she used to. As the night progressed, she and Arman slowly began to act more and more like a couple, laughing at inside jokes, letting their hands rest easily on the other’s thigh or shoulder. There was something about the impropriety of Lorrie Ann’s