Reactions I told this guy that I work with that, if it wasn't for the buzz I had from the caffeine provided by three cups of extra-strong black coffee and two diet Cokes, I'd probably get my wish and be dead right now. I've got so much caffeine in my system that I could be dead for a week before my body would quit functioning. So, you're just living a big chemical reaction, he asked. I told him that really, when you get down to it, that's all life really is - one big chemical reaction. If it's not caffeine, it's food. You eat and your body breaks it down by way of simple organic chemistry, and you keep on living. Not bad for a girl who got a D in chemistry, eh? I just got back from my lunch break an hour ago. I had McDonald's again. I hate to admit that I actually like their food. I pretend that I don't, but I always gravitate there. And I never go inside - I always use the drive-through window and I always eat my meal while I drive. It doesn't count if you don't get out of the car with it. And I always worry what the people working the drive-through think of me. My little cousin works the drive-through at a Taco Bell and she told me that there isn't a single person who goes through the drive-through that she and her co-workers don't make fun of after they leave. So I worry about what the drive-through workers say about me. They probably comment on the number of crumbled bags from fast-food establishments that litter my car. Learn to cook for yourself! That's what they probably yell as I drive away, after they've told me to have a nice day. I never tell them to have a nice day. They work at McDonald's. How nice can their day possibly be? At least I have that on them - I don't work at McDonald's. I work in an office. Doesn't matter what kind, since most offices are pretty much the same. I never planned on working in an office when I was younger. Just five years ago, when I was graduating from high school, I bought a memory book, where you answer questions concerning your happy past and your happy present and your happy future. In the section that asked what I'd be doing in five years, I said that I'd be working for a newspaper in Boston or Atlanta or Minneapolis and I'd be an editor and I'd drive a Miata convertible and I'd live in an upscale townhouse and I'd be hap hap happy. A psychic reader, I am not. I work in an office, just an office. The only things that I do at work that matter are the things I do when I run out of work and still have several hours before I can leave. I read, which is good. I study, or I studied. But I don't have anything to study now, since I'm no longer in school. I voluntarily flunked out. And I don't live in an upscale townhouse. I live in a subterranean apartment, with people walking above me and parking behind my Chevy with the bad alternator. All I want now is a little bungalow like the one I grew up in, so I can grow flowers, just like my mom has done for 25 years, and so I can cook and cook and cook and quit my McDonald's habit. The guy I work with also works at McDonald's. He makes more money than I do in the office, but he still works 30 hours a week at McDonald's. He's a manager and he's proud of it. On Fridays, when we can dress a little bit casual, he always wears a McDonald's sweatshirt. If I worked at McDonald's, I would wear a mask and go incognito and I wouldn't tell anyone. I don't even tell people that I eat there. On Halloween, he joked that he had come to the office in costume as a McDonald's manager - he was wearing his McDonald's manager's tie, with a tiny arch emblem embossed into the fake silk. He told everyone who came in. I should get a night job, too. I got a student loan statement in the mail today. I don't have to pay them just yet, and I'm not worried about it. A little pissed off, since I have to pay back $21,000 and I didn't even hang around to get a degree or two. But I did get my job working in the office, and after two years or so, I'll have earned enough to pay the loans, as long as I don't eat or live inside or anything frivolous like that. The only other thing that was in my mail today was a sweepstakes form from a magazine, which offered a grand prize of $25,000. That would be just enough to get me all out of debt, so I could start all over again. Maybe it's an omen. It probably isn't, but maybe it is. I've had way too much caffeine today. Earlier, I was in my boss' office and he was teasing me about it. He told me that I was tapping my foot so fast that I was going to tap the pennies right out of my loafers. He's my dad's age, mid-forties, with a gut like my dad and a sweet demeanor like my dad. He's from Arkansas, like my grandfather, and they sound alike, except my grandfather never tells me I'm going to tap the pennies out of my loafers. My grandfather just looks at me like I'm from outer space. It's not his fault. He just doesn't get me. I'm a female in my early twenties with too much education, but not enough, who asks her parents for money so she can feed her cat. He's in his early seventies, and he quit school when he failed the eighth grade for the third time. He was dirt poor, but he worked and he worked and he worked and now he's got more money than he knows what to do with, so he takes off with my car and gets the alternator fixed when I'm not paying attention. When I ask him how much it costs, he just ignores me. We might as well be from other planets, as different as we are, even though I took a quarter of his DNA. I look just like my mom and my dad, but I don't look like either of them. When I smile, I favor my dad, even though he's dark and I'm light. We have the same bones. I'm short like my mom, and fair like her. We both tend to our flowers at night, when the sun is gone and we won't burn. I burn. Not just my skin. My stomach burns from the coffee that chews at the delicate lining, releasing the boiling acid into the tender areas where it doesn't belong. It's a burn like dread, and when I drink the coffee I know it's going to scream and punch, but I do it anyway. I sort of like the burn. When it starts, I always wonder what it is that's making me feel sick. Maybe it's stomach cancer, or another ulcer. I have two of them already. Or maybe something's bleeding within me. Maybe I'm pregnant. If I was, I wouldn't know who the father was. There are several possibilities. When I was fourteen, I got really scared because my period was late. I had started exceptionally early, when I was nine, and I'd always been fairly regular, but I was late. I realized I was late, but I didn't realize the ramifications until, one night, I was sitting on my bed, watching MTV and it came to me ... I could be pregnant. Now, I knew that there was no way. I'd never even kissed a boy before. But what else could it be? I panicked, almost in tears, and I worried and worried and worried. I didn't have a religious upbringing, didn't know much about the Bible, but there was only one explaination for my menstrual lateness - I was the next Chosen One, the second virgin mother. I started my period a week after that, and was quite relieved, to say the least. A year later, I had a dream. I usually don't remember my dreams, unless they're really bizarre, and this one was really bizarre. I was fifteen, and we had just moved from the house I'd lived in all my life into a lumbering farmhouse a few miles away. I had weird dreams for the first month we were there. The weirdest one was so vivid that I laid in bed, wide awake afterwards, drenched in sweat, wondering how I would explain my predicament to my parents. It took me twenty minutes of being awake before I realized I had dreamt the whole story. I dreamt that I was pregnant, but I had done nothing to get that way. I really was the Chosen One. And what did I do? I had an abortion. I realized I was carrying Jesus, Jr., and I aborted. It didn't quite hit me until after the procedure what I had done - I had aborted the second miracle child. And I wasn't worried about God's reaction, or burning in hell. I was worried about how to tell my parents, who had always been good, understanding people, who always told me to do whatever I felt was right for me in my life. Somehow, I don't think aborting the second Christ child would have been considered doing the right thing for myself. If I were to have a baby right now, it would almost be like a virgin birth. The father would be a faceless entity, and I wouldn't be able to recall the conception, since sex is always a blur after it's finished. All the encounters and incidents run together, and I forget faces. Sometimes, just to make sure I can still do it, I'll chronologically list every man I've slept with. I can remember all the names, but sometimes I have to stretch my memory. And I can name one good thing and one bad thing about each lover. And I can remember at least one way each lover changed me, good and bad. So it hasn't been wasted. They've all been learning experiences, which is good, I suppose. What I learn from one, I pass on to the next, and so on and so on and so on. My friends don't want to hear about my spasmodic bed-jumping. I wasn't always like this. I lost my virginity late and I consider it making up for lost time. I guess that, when I talk about my escapades, my friends can't see me in such positions, since they've known me for so long, and they remember me and think of me as a virgin, even though I haven't been one for several years now. It just seems out of character for me. I got upset once, after sleeping with two different men in less than a week, gurgling with regret and desperately trying to undo what I had done. I told one of my friends about it. I had held her hand when she went through numerous break-ups, and listened to her curse and curse and curse the names of men long after they disappeared. If she dated him for a week, I heard about how horrid he was for a year. I told her that I was becoming nothing but a slut who couldn't commit to a man, no matter how perfect he was, and I could only relate to men based on sex, and I was so sick of myself and sick of fucking and sick of waiting for the phone to ring when it was supposed to, even though it never did and why should it ring now, because it never does. And she said that she was depressed, too, because her favorite football team had lost. There were fifteen former lovers of mine sitting in the stands, watching that same game, but I didn't care to tell her that. She didn't care to hear it. But I guess I don't deserve sympathy. It's not like I didn't have the power to say no to them and move on, being hard to get instead of playing hard to get. But I wanted pity. At least if you're raped you get pitied, and you can blame someone else. If you're just a slut, it's your own goddam fault when you fuck the wrong person and you regret it. I don't think I could ever be raped. I'd probably just go along with it, taking everything I could get. I need everything that I get. I get bored when I'm at the office, so I hit the caffeine. It keeps me awake in a non-awake sort of way. My body is ultra-sensitive, picking up every sound and vibration and rattle in the universe. But my brain goes lucid from the warmth coursing through me, caressing me from the inside and making me glow. It's a soft buzzing, like the glow of static on a t.v. left on in a dark room after the viewer drifts off to sleep. I could lay my head down on my desk and sleep and sleep and sleep. I don't usually like to sleep, unless I've had lots of coffee. Then, I want to sleep, but I can't. So I just dangle in between sleep and awake, letting the chemicals run their course within me until they tire out, dragging me with them.