leiascully

She sips her milkshake, her feet swinging above the rung of the stool, and watches Michael Sandero clean the kitchen until the gleaming steel counters have an extra shine. A little part of her wishes she'd brought a book, but she's kind of enjoying not-reading. The sunlight glides across the floor. The spoon shifts in the metal cup as the ice cream starts to melt. Tamika waits for her friend, and the afternoon is just as pretty as a brand new book, the kind you can't wait to open because it's going to be so good, but you do wait, holding it in your hand, because right now it's whole and beautiful and you don't want the good to be over. So you just hold it and feel the texture of the cover and the weight of the smooth, unripped, uncrumpled, unstained pages and you take a deep-breath of new book smell and you hold it as long as you can so the good just lasts and lasts. That's what sitting at the Moonlight All-Night (and All-Day) Diner waiting for a friend with a frosty mint chocolate chip milkshake just starting to melt around the edges and a high school kid who thinks you're cool singing into the handle of the mop he's using on the floor is like. It's a simile, not a metaphor, but Tamika's going to extend it just as long as she can.