“You like it down there?”
“Better than up here sometimes,” Wilkes said. “Are we bonding like true BZRK sisters?”
Ophelia put her fork down and pushed her food away. “I don’t seem to have much appetite.”
“Hey, the condemned person is supposed to have a choice of meal. Right? Like guys on death row? They always order a steak.”
“I don’t think they grill steaks here.”
The light, that’s what was so desperate about the scene. The glaring fluorescent light that turned their flesh to some color between bathroom grout and paper pulp. And the wobbly round tables and the terminally bored cafeteria workers.
A hell of a place to get your nerve up for a suicide mission.
“I always wanted to go to one of those fancy steak places,” Wilkes said. “It’s not about loving the steak all that much. It’s just you see those places in movies, and you think, wow, that must be kind of cool—to be one of those people who don’t really give a damn about anything but a fat, juicy steak. Maybe a martini, even, you know. Or those other ones? I forget their name?”
“Margaritas?”
“No, I know margaritas,” Wilkes said, suddenly cranky.
Ophelia smiled tolerantly. “I don’t eat meat. But I would join you in a margarita.”
“You’re a vegetarian? I tried that for a while. It didn’t take. Is it a Hindu thing?”
Ophelia shrugged. “For some of us. For me it’s more of a health thing. Also my parents are vegetarians. I don’t want to disappoint them.”
“Me, I worry I’ll disappoint Vincent. That’s stupid, isn’t it? Why the hell should I care? He’s not offering me heaven and a bunch of hot guy virgins, or whatever. That’s what you guys get in heaven, right?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
>
“I would remember that. I’m Hindu: we just get reborn. Although I think I like your idea better.”
“A couple girls, too, maybe, just because life is short and try everything, right?”
Ophelia chose not to answer that directly. “Vincent does generate a certain degree of loyalty, doesn’t he?”
Wilkes looked at her, very serious, eye to eye, or at least eye to eye-dripping-with-tattoo-ink, and said, “I’d die for him. I don’t think he even likes me, and I would totally fucking die for him.”
Ophelia said, “And I will die because Charles and Benjamin Armstrong are a disease.”
There was venom behind those words. No smile. Anger, quickly covered up, but Wilkes saw it and grinned at it.
“You’re not telling me something,” Wilkes said.
“No time. And this isn’t the place,” Ophelia said, turning stern.
“If we come out of this?”
Ophelia nodded, and surrendered what might be the last of her smiles, a wistful creation tinged with loss. “If we survive, we can play twenty questions, Wilkes.”
“Time to go?” Wilkes asked, and to her intense irritation there was a quiver in her voice.
Ophelia didn’t answer. She reached up and peeled the bindi from her forehead and slid it into the coin pocket of her jeans. Then she stood up and walked out the cafeteria door and into the gift shop.
Plath snatched a just-delivered triple-grande skim cappuccino off the Starbucks counter and smashed it into One-Up’s face.