She wrapped her olive-drab chenille blanket tighter around her shoulders like she was Beth from Little Women dying. I guess maybe it wasn’t a blanket; it was probably a shawl. She spoke in a whispery lisp. It made me want to give her things. While I was filling up her water glass she asked her friends, ‘Are you going to come watch me do my Spice Girls thing?’ They said nothing. ‘I’m going to be Ginger,’ she went on. ‘Ginger’s my favourite,’ I said— nah, interjected. ‘Do you think I could pull it off?’ she asked, ‘The red hair?’ I wondered why she was asking me that. I was a stranger. I said ‘Yes,’ and brought her some tea. 6 I do feel like she oddly clung to me. ‘I’m so weird,’ she said, as I was waiting for the one with the nasal voice to finish paying up. Her friends, again, ignored her. She ignored their ignoring her, and held up her phone to show them something. It was an iPhone, set to the program ‘Notes.’ That awful yellow picture of a page and that font. She looked up at me. Her eyebrows were thin and short. I thought: ‘Her eyebrows are thin and short.’ ‘I make these lists,’ she said, ‘These weird lists.’ ‘That’s cool,’ I said, ‘I make lists on Notes too.’ (I thought about the last list I’d made on Notes. It was a list of the more whimsical CAPTCHAs I’d been offered while illegally streaming episodes of 30 Rock on vidxden. com last February— Lucille 2 Never give up Sandy beach Abra cadabra Dark horse She sells Star wars kid Him with her Chicken soup Worship nothing) ‘I make lists of, like, all the things I want to do,’ she said. ‘That’s normal,’ said her friend, ‘To-do lists.’ ‘I make to-do lists!’ I piped up. (I thought about the last to-do list I’d made:
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tender • one