Read Online Sad Desk Salad by Jessica Grose - Free Book Online Page A

the only customer in the store, save for the deli cat that is lazily stretching in his oval bed. Manuel makes me the platonic ideal of a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich: The egg is fluffy and glistening with oil; the bacon is freshly cooked, its fatty edges still extant; the cheese is that gorgeous neon orange color. I watch as it melts evenly into a thin layer of film over the egg. He even toasts the bun, which is not hard and stale but soft and pliable—I can see how pliable—in his large, latex-covered hands. I watch, nearly drooling, as he wraps the sandwich in wax paper and then again in tinfoil, then sticks it, along with about forty-five napkins, more napkins than any one girl could need, into a plastic bag. He hands the bag over to the counterman and smiles at me.
    “Thanks,” I say, grateful for the easy interaction. I pay for my sandwich and head back home, but the second I step outside my myriad anxieties hit me along with a blast of truck exhaust and hot air. “Shit shit shit shit shit,” I chant quietly as I dart back into the street.
    As quickly as possible I open the door and throw my canvas bag onto the Saarinen chair my grandparents gave us. That chair is the one nice thing in our apartment, and instead of using it to actually sit in, Peter and I have turned it into a crap receptacle. The second we enter the apartment we dump all the day’s detritus directly onto the chair. I slump back onto the crusty couch and flip my laptop open again.
    There’s an IM waiting for me from Jane.
     
JaneRivera (12:47:11): Hey gurl.
     
    Jane and I met during the second week of our freshman year at Wesleyan. A friend of hers from boarding school lived down the hall from me, and Jane came with us to a white-trash party that was being thrown by a French Canadian hockey player who lived in our dorm. We all wore gleaming white wife-beaters and multicolored bras without even coordinating. I don’t remember much from that night (blame the Everclear punch) but I do recall Jane making a really viciously funny joke about our truly dumb Canuck host and his unformed “fetus face.”
    After that Jane and I were fast friends. We lived together the summer between our sophomore and junior years and continued to be roomies when we moved to New York. When my dad died, Jane was the one who made me get out of bed every morning even when I was plastered to the sheets with tears still crusted to my face. My mom has decreed that Jane is an honorary Lyons, and she has come home with me every Thanksgiving since we were nineteen—her family lives in Iowa so the trek was always too long and expensive to make just for a few days.
    The thing about Jane is that she isn’t all biting humor. She’s also got a very strong sense of character. She’s a social worker who works with teenage girls, and she cares about her adolescent charges with her entire being. Which is not to say she’s smug or preachy about what she’s doing for a living—just sincere. Since I started working at Chick Habit I’ve seen less of Jane than I used to—at the end of the day I’m so tired I just want to couch-melt. We try to see each other on weekends but now that she lives with her boyfriend, too, our shared tendency is to hole up in our respective apartments.
     
Alex182 (1:05:27): Hey, hon.
     
JaneRivera (1:05:33): What’s going on?
     
Alex182 (1:05:42): Merrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
     
JaneRivera (1:05:49): ???
     
Alex182 (1:06:02): http://www.breakingthechickhabit.com And that’s not all! I had a huge fight with Peter this morning, which was probably my fault.
     
JaneRivera (1:09:21): Are you around tonight? We should hang out. I haven’t seen you in forever! You can tell me all about it.
     
Alex182 (1:10:14): Let me check with Peter. If he’s working, I definitely want to play. But if he’s going to be home I should really be here with him. I need to weasel my way back into his good graces.
     
JaneRivera (1:11:46): K.
     
    I am actually desperate to see