Food Time

We found a bench near the dodgems and Chloe went to get chips, leaving me alone for a minute with my own thoughts, which was rarely a good idea.

I watched her at the food stall, laughing with the boy serving her, tossing her hair back, entirely at ease in her own skin. People looked at her all the time — I'd noticed it all evening, the way heads turned when she walked, the way she never seemed to notice or mind. It must be nice, I thought, and immediately felt small for thinking it.

It wasn't that I wanted the boys from earlier looking at *me*, not exactly. Or not only that. It was something harder to name — the ease of it, maybe. Chloe got to have moments like the Star Flyer, like the bra strap, and by the time she'd fixed it she'd already moved on, already laughing about chips, already fine. I was the one still turning it over an hour later, cataloguing who'd looked and for how long, carrying the whole evening's worth of almost-embarrassment on both our behalves.

I thought about the way the ride operator's eyes had flicked over her without her even clocking it. I thought about my own skirt on the Star Flyer, and how instead of forgetting it the way she seemed to forget everything, I'd spent the last hour replaying it, wondering how it looked, half-mortified and half — something else. Something I didn't have a clean word for.

*I wish I could do that*, I thought, watching her laugh at something the food stall boy said. *Not the thing itself. Just — not caring afterward.*

She came back balancing two trays of chips, oblivious to the fact I'd been quietly resenting her for the last ninety seconds. "You have to try the cheese sauce, it's disgusting, I love it."

I took the tray and said nothing about any of it, the same way I hadn't said anything about the rest of the day. It was becoming a habit.