The woman screams at me, “Is it because I’m a demon and you’re a saint? I’m a demon! You’re a saint!”

 

I am wearing pigtails. Probably look more innocent than I am. Sometimes I feel self-conscious about them because I am worried I’m trying to make up for whatever I lost when I was younger, which Freud would go giddy for, I’m sure. But really, it’s just the easiest style when I’m running late.

 

“No, it’s because you didn’t pay for the last cake,” I reply in a manufactured, soothing tone.

 

“I’m a demon; you’re a saint! I’m a demon; you’re a saint!”

 

“No, it’s because —”

 

“I’m a demon! You’re a saint!”

 

“I mean —”

 

“I’M A DEMON! YOU’RE A SAINT!”

 

And I think, well, thank you.

 

She flails her arms. Then she scurries out of the cafe with a dissolving screech. 

 

At that, I roll my eyes toward the regular in the doorway, so he can know the struggle I have experienced alongside the nonchalant response I have from being my superior’s savior. 

 

He clears his throat. “Can I get two chocolate chip cookies?”

 

It is with that that I feel a lump form in my own.

 

“Is it okay if I put them in the same bag?”

 

I have just embarked on a career as a street artist, but simultaneously I’ve found myself running from the law, it seems, with the minimum-wage job funding the transition and probably food for the rest of my life. But a year before, I had graduated with a master’s degree in international political economy from Kings University. Top of my class. It’s an Emmett Group institution, which is like the Ivy League for England. But I grew up in Ohio where nothing exists if it is not in the US — so to me, no one has heard of the uni.

 

“She was breaking bottles on the terrace by where the skateboarders hang out,” Aggie explains once it’s clear the woman has left for a final time, “I told her she can’t do that, and she picked up her cup and chucked her tea at me. I’m lucky it had been outside long enough to have gone cold.” 

 

Aggie still has milk in her hair. A white clump drips from her short, blonde strands. How lucky she is that the tea was not boiling. 

 

When my dad’s scans showed signs of his cancer spreading, three weeks earlier while I was home in Cleveland for a two-week break, my mom hugged me so tightly as she said, “At least we have health insurance. We are so lucky.” I was wearing a bikini and felt naked as I hugged her back.

 

That sickening Summer afternoon, I had just gone inside for some grapes to snack on while sunbathing on the lawn. But I didn’t have time to carry them outside of the kitchen, where there was nothing less sweet than being 25 and hugging my mother, and feeling her linen shirt and trousers on my bare cleavage and belly button because I was wearing a bikini and black platform sandals, tears in both our eyes. 

 

When I moved to England and found a place to live through a friend of a friend of a friend, how lucky that was, how that worked out; how when it didn’t work out with that boy I was in love with, it was all meant to be. How when my high school exhaustion brought me to the third-tier state school for undergrad, well, that was just where I was supposed to go — and somehow, I still do believe that to be true. But about the tea, it is not, because it had gone cold, but it had been sitting out for so long because not enough people are employed in the cafe to clear it — and the woman does not have enough help for the disease ravaging her mind — and we stare with absent eyes at customers who smile then retreat when we do not show cheer for Flat White With A Brunette Haircut number 63 of the day, and it isn’t even yet close to time for the salvation of the 20-minute break, in an eight-hour shift, five days a week, no chair to sit on, none of us can afford our rents, my roof is leaking, and I touch these paper mâché walls along with five other things I can feel and five more I can see. Just kidding; I am not diagnosed. I should start at the beginning. But I can’t find that anymore. I have read in two different novels now that the beginnings are easy to identify and the endings are not, but I disagree because to me it all blends into one. Yet, and because, the poetry continues, and simultaneously the sandwiches are made, butter, lettuce, tomato, so unsexy, it’s dire, my grotesque body twisted in a bikini, wrapped around my mother. And still the trucks come to deliver the meat. The pigs are slaughtered, but that, we do not see, yet some people rejoice, and others cry depending on if the pig is animal or man, and we make jokes, that Aggie is 100% the tuna melt with pickles, because that is the best one, and Oscar is a chicken pesto because everyone likes him, and I am flattered, and we are lucky. The power shut off in my parents’ home when the storm hit, but they don’t live in the house that floods anymore, and for that, they are so fortunate. I ran away to England.