“Yeah,” I say, and try to swallow the gluey wad of white bread in my mouth. It hurts all the way down.

When Carly comes back from her smoke break her hair is messy and she looks like she just woke up from the kind of thick nap where you drool all over the pillow. She hums to herself and it’s either a totally different song from the one playing on the sound system or she’s tone deaf. It’s hard to tell with the shit music she listens to. Most of it doesn’t even sound like music, just noise and screaming.

She wipes down the espresso machine and checks the paper roll on the register.

“April, May, June,” she says, smiling at me when she looks up. “July, August, September.” She reaches over and pushes hair from my face. She’s a little shorter than me, so she rocks up on her toes to tuck the strand behind my ear.

I don’t really know how I’m supposed to react, but since she’s being so friendly, I ask her about Adam. “What’s he all about?” I say, using words I heard from a girl chatting with her friend at a table by the counter this morning. “I told him, point-blank,” the girl said, “that is not what I’m all about.”

“Adam? He’s a townie,” Carly says, waving her hand with a flick of her wrist. She stares at me and sighs. It’s a long stare and I’m not sure what it means, but it doesn’t make me feel better about Adam.

“Can you work all day tomorrow?” she asks.

“Uh huh,” I say, looking past her, out the window. The dark seems so much darker than it did yesterday. I wonder if maybe I should ask Carly if she knows a place I could stay. I try to think of the right words. Maybe I could ask her to let me sleep on her couch. Maybe that would be the easiest thing. Just one night. More time to think and another day of earning money. If I had a couch and she asked, I would say yes, so it’s not the craziest thing.

“Don’t you ever have class?” Carly asks.

“I’m not in school,” I say.

She scrunches her eyebrows so they almost meet. “I thought you went to IC.”

I shake my head and it feels like the wad of white bread is still stuck in my throat.

“Huh,” she says. “Huh.”

I worry I’ve done something wrong even though I never said I was in school. I worry she’ll ask more questions, but she stares into my eyes and says, “I’m going to get a sandwich,” as if she’s making a major confession. She turns on the toe of her boot and stomps to the kitchen like she’s about to conquer food.