Don Henley is singing our life over the shitty speakers from the jukebox in the diner. My eighteen-year-old self believes in Don, believes this truly will be the last worthless evening, and that the life ahead of me is full of promise, stability and excitement. That everything would soon change and become wonderful, as if Don was about to just snap his fingers and fix it all with one single catchy ballad tonight.
I took Don at his word. I was a hopeless romantic, sitting there ignoring the french fries left on my plate, staring at the window watching our reflections while a twenty-three-year-old Lochlan smoked a cigarette and wrote out our midway working hours in his notebook with a pen that was almost out of ink. All of this provided by the last round of pickpocketing I did while he did teardown last night, zigzagging through the dispersing crowd, bumping into people, trying to squeeze around people, thinking I had three wallets when I zagged away from the crowd again, only to find out one of them was a soft leather cigarette-pack holder with a fresh unopened pack of Player's Light inside.
I wish he wouldn't smoke before my milkshake is finished.
We can leave after this, he says suddenly, putting out his cigarette in the clear glass ashtray by the window. Don starts a new song, singing about how he's learning to live without her now, but he misses her, baby.
The only person who calls me baby is Caleb and he can't find us now. We've only been staying with a show for a few weeks at a time now. We don't use the camper, we rent motel rooms in town. We call home more and lie better than ever, and our friends are fed a constant stream of benign disinformation in order to make it work.
But it doesn't change the fact that I am not the person I used to be. Lochlan used to tell me to eat my vegetables and to not be afraid of the dark, and that he would love me forever. Eighteen-year-old me now knows the world is different. That vegetables aren't important. The dark is something that one should be afraid of, for that's where the monsters hide. And that love is fickle and difficult and hard to make consistently, especially when those monsters get in the goddamned way.
I go back to the jukebox at the end of the diner and feed another few quarters in, hitting the same numbers I hit twenty minutes ago. I come back to the booth and fish out a cigarette. Lochlan's eyebrows go up but he lights it for me and I sit back against the glitter vinyl and take a long drag as I stare at the strangers in the reflection.
Someday I'm going to buy a piano and learn to play this song, I think to myself. Poisoned by fairy tales? Me? Never. Now I want to believe in them more than ever.