Free Butterface by Gwen Hayes Page A

couldn’t take on all four. Unless they stood in line and took turns.
     
    Thankfully, the morons left quietly. They weren’t afraid of him as much as they were bored. They forgot to tip of course, but at least there wasn’t a big scene. Still, he didn’t feel it was safe to leave Liz alone. The cook never even came out of the kitchen. Who knows what would have happened if he hadn’t been there.
     
    “That was pretty dumb,” she said.
     
    “Yeah, he was.”
     
    “I was talking about you, dreamboat.”
     
    “Excuse me?” Lucky hadn’t expected her to gush “my hero” at him, but insulting him was rude. “I saved your ass.”
     
    “You provoked them. Plus you jilted me out of my tip.”
     
    “You know, you shouldn’t work by yourself this late. And it’s not my fault they were jerks. You could thank me.”
     
    “Thank you.”
     
    “You’re welcome.”
     
    “For making things worse and making sure I lost a tip. I really appreciate it, soccer god.”
     
    “Liz, you are a real—”
     
    “Beth.”
     
    “That wasn’t the B word I was going for.”
     
    “That’s my name, genius. My real name. Liz is my waitress name.”
     
    Lucky wasn’t always clear on girlspeak , but he thought she was trying to tell him something important. So he shut up. Because that is what smart guys do when a girl is winding up to talk about something important. If you interrupt with what you think might be a reasonable question like, Do all waitresses have pen names? She will shut down and say, Nevermind . And that word is the kiss of death to any make-out session you’d been hoping to have later that night.
     
    At all costs, when it comes to girls, avoid being told nevermind . Even if you weren’t planning on kissing them. It’s just good sense.
     
    “When I’m not here, I go by Beth. It’s kind of dumb, really.” She gestured to the baggy polyester dress she wore. “I just don’t want this to be who I am. So, when I’m slinging hash, I’m Liz. But my family and my friends…they call me Beth.”
     
    Lucky wasn’t dense. She’d never thank him for playing the hero because she wanted to believe she didn’t need one. But sharing her real name meant she didn’t just think of him as some clown who ate pancakes every night.
     
    And so they became friends.
     
     
     
    * * *
     
     
     
    Beth Anderson wished she were a lesbian.
     
    So many things would make more sense.
     
    If she were into girls, she’d have a niche, a label, something that wrapped up all the things that made her different and put a rainbow-colored bow on her life. She already had the right wardrobe, for God’s sake.
     
    It was just a shame, really.
     
    Most of the time, she was completely asexual anyway. Most of the time. But she was human and she did have hormones, and when those hormones got busy they were usually fueled by Channing Tatum and sometimes, to her dismay, the smell of the cologne they sprayed on the clothes at Hollister in the mall.
     
    Pathetic.
     
    Moving to a college town didn’t help Beth’s confusion much. She’d just finish talking herself into thinking the entire male species needed to go back to the primordial swamp when a really cute one would walk by and she’d get hot flashes. And in a college town, there were really cute ones everywhere. All the time.
     
    And she could look all she wanted, but they would never look back.
     
    You see, that was the other thing.
     
    Beth wasn’t pretty. Not even a little bit. Part of it was her messy hair. A real lesbian would have chopped it off into to an easy to manage butch crew cut. Alas, life wasn’t that simple.
     
    The messy hair, while being annoying and hard to manage, was a curtain. It hid things. Things like scars. Scars from surgeries that almost, but not quite made her normal.
     
    She was lucky, they used to say. A lot of babies born with hemifacial microsamia had more distinct deformities. It was a stupid thing to say to a child. Lucky people