Personal Statement by Williams Jason Odell

Author:Williams, Jason Odell [Williams, Jason Odell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: In This Together Media
Published: 2013-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

RANI

“I’ll have a double burger, medium well, no cheese, no mayo, no onions and hold the bun. Sweet potato fries instead of regular fries and a side of steamed kale.”

The heavyset waitress, her nametag that reads “HEY, I’M PEARL” slowly rising and falling with each breath, just blinks at Emily.

“We don’t have sweet potato fries or… what was that other thing you said?”

“Kale?” Emily asks incredulously.

“I don’t know what that is, but we don’t got it.”

“What kind of greens do you have as a side?”

Pearl thinks for a moment and then suggests enthusiastically, “I could put extra lettuce on your burger?”

Emily sighs and hands the menu back. “That’ll be fine. And a Diet Coke with lemon.”

Pearl the waitress scribbles on her pad and then looks at me.

“Oh. Uh. Grilled cheese on wheat toast, please, and the tomato soup.”

She seems relieved by my order, takes my menu quickly, and waddles off to the kitchen before I can change my mind.

Emily and I are the only two people in this small diner, which is a few blocks from the town center. She insisted we ditch the last hour of volunteer work to “get some real food.” If we’d stuck around the levees till sunset at 7:45, we’d have been forced to go with the group for bad pizza or eat more of the lame offerings from lunch, which consisted mostly of PB&J’s on white bread.

“Thanks for coming here,” Emily says, fiddling with the sweetener packets. “My stomach just can’t digest bleached flour anymore.”

I nod and gaze out the window. The sun is going down over the treetops and it looks almost peaceful outside. Other than the blisters on my hands and the throbbing ache in my shoulders from lifting sandbags all day, it feels almost like I’m back home, hanging out with Emily at a crappy diner instead of our usual Pinkberry. I sort of wish we were back home, but I don’t confess that to Emily.

We’re ostensibly here not only to eat but to talk about our Empty Rooms, Full Hearts plan—iron out the details for the presentations tomorrow morning.

“You realize our acronym is ERFH,” Emily says. “Sounds like a cartoon character getting hit in the nuts. Erfh!”

“Okay,” I say smiling. “So we add some letters. Like Soho or Tribeca. Make it… EMROFUHS.”

Emily laughs. “That’s too close to MOFOS.”

I laugh too and tell her not to stress about the acronym. “We can’t choose our own nickname. The public chooses it for us. And maybe they’ll just shorten it to, like, ‘Empty Rooms’ or something.”

Emily ponders this for a moment. “Hm. That doesn’t completely suck…” She puts down the sweetener packets and says, all business, “Okay. I’ve got my cousin in San Francisco. He’s a computer genius at a Mac store out there? He’s working on a web design for us. Not an actual working website yet, just like templates for the landing pages that we can present in a slide show tomorrow.”

“Cool,” I say, absently sliding the ketchup bottle back and forth between my hands.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.