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To add insult to injury, they’ll probably spread my fucking ashes outside of this old, rundown café. Or even better, over the lake, and I’ll get to become the pond scum stuck to this bitch’s ass when she comes home to visit in the summer.
She turns to Lisa and says, “I heard the parties during move-in week are sick; we are going to have the best time. You should come up sometime, Mel, if you can afford it.”
I meet my best friend Lisa’s eyes, and she shoots me a sympathetic look, silently pleading for me to let it go. Unfortunately, I’m not exactly known for my even temperament.
I picture myself grabbing her by the hair and slamming her face into the table however many times it takes to wipe the damn smile off of it, and then I smile, too.
“I’m excited for you, Heather,” I tell her. “University of Oregon is a huge school—no one gives a shit about you here, and even more people won’t give a shit about you there. That must be really freeing.”
A few of them laugh.
“You’re a bitch, Amelia,” she sneers.
“You should have thought about that before you opened your mouth. You’re a bitch, too, Heather, but a mediocre one. You’ll always be mediocre.”
“Mel!” Aaron shouts, a little more impatient this time.
“And you’ll always be here—cleaning up after me!” she shouts at my back. “What does that make you?”
A criminal. It makes me a criminal. Because I’m going to murder this bitch.
“You come back here after my shift ends, and I’ll tell you what that makes me,” I challenge.
“Heather isn’t going to college next week because Mel is going to kill her,” Russell says, and they all erupt in laughter.
“You had it coming,” I hear Lisa tell her.
But the sad part is I know she’s right. My days of being on top are over. High school might deal in currency like looks and charisma, talent and popularity, but real life deals in currency currency. And I don’t have that.
“I had five minutes left,” I tell Aaron when I reach him.
“You can leave five minutes early,” he says. “We’re slammed.”
He’s not wrong. Tourist season has been in full swing for a couple of months now. When I was younger, it was something that almost went unnoticed, and the lake was ours and ours alone. But Lost Hollow is changing. It’s growing, expanding. More houses are being converted into rentals. More California license plates line the side of the road in our small downtown. Ty thinks that we won’t be able to recognize the place in ten years.
I just hope that in ten years, we aren’t here to see it.
“That’s not the same thing. I get thirty minutes—it’s the law.”
He shakes his head and pinches the bridge of his nose as if I'm giving him a headache. I swear this adult man is more dramatic than my nine-year-old sister.
“You see that guy in the back?” he says, pointing to a man sitting in the corner booth, leaning over a laptop computer. Between that and the tie, he looks completely out of place.
“You mean Bill Gates over there? Yeah, I see him.”
“He’s a big real estate developer,” he tells me. “He’s trying to get a permit to build an entire luxury neighborhood up by the falls.”
I shrug. “And?”
“And…he thinks I should convert the upstairs of this place into condos. He wants to help me. And he’s been waiting a long time, so…go.”
I grab my order pad and walk over to that last booth in the back. When I stop in front of the table, he doesn’t even look up.
Looks like he wasn’t so anxious to order after all. I didn’t need to give up my five minutes for this.
“Welcome to The Lilac Café,” I say. “Can I get you anything?”
“Yeah, coffee,” he says. He barely looks up from his laptop, then does a double take.
