This story was never published anywhere (it boasts over 20 rejections from various literary magazines!), but it is still a personal favorite of mine and I decided to share it here.

“I had to get up from my seat and use the bathroom since there was just like, streams of blood dripping down my leg.”

A waitress came over and poured us more coffee. I noticed that she lingered for longer than necessary, listening in.

“So I went to the bathroom,” Bella continued, “and I pulled down my underwear, and it was just like pools of it. I realized then that I had had a miscarriage. I missed like half the movie just trying to get cleaned up.” She said this as though it was something casual, like a subway delay.

The waitress walked back to the counter. Bella and I were the only costumers in the diner. We sat at a table by the window, the walls around us lined with orange booths. I kept my wool coat on, both because it was cold and because I wanted to be able to leave with ease. I had painted my nails a deep red and put on my mother’s make up the hour before I had come to see her.

“I had to stuff toilet paper in my pants, it was so uncomfortable,” Bella added.

“Did you go to the hospital? Like to check for infections and stuff?” I asked.

“No, no, I felt fine. I mean, I would know if there was something wrong down there.”

“Was that when you first realized you were pregnant?” I tried to make eye contact with her, but she was looking at herself in the mirror that hung above my head. A hot metal ball rolled around inside of me, pressing hard against my lungs and making my breath quick and uneven.

She shifted her gaze to the window. Her eyes were a dark green, sinking deep into her face. Her skin was so tightly stretched over her skull that I could see the sharp outline of her cheekbone. The dim light of the diner made her skin appear opalescent, as though she were a painting.  Her face seemed to be entirely made up of harsh lines, her eyelashes a deep black, extending straight out.

“No. I took a test in late November,” she said.

The ball rolled again. I took another sip of coffee. It was bitter and cold, and I crinkled my nose in disgust. “Do you know who the father was?” I knew I would regret prying, that it would be better to leave the answer unsaid. Unknown. Yet I had some strange desire to torture myself with the truth.

“Hard to say.” Bella looked back into the mirror and took out a small red lipstick, carefully applying it. She used her pinky finger to spread it evenly, brightening her lips against the paleness of her skin.

I sighed, my lungs expanding around the heat of the ball. I felt it press up against the lining of my stomach, an aching pain rising in my throat. “How many other people were you with in November?”

“A few.” She paused, pushing her hair behind her ear. “It wasn’t like I was in love with any of them.”

I stared at her; at the strong curve of her jaw, the light freckles dotting her nose. In that moment I felt as though she could not see me, that she believed herself to be alone in that diner, talking into the air. Everything she did seemed to further reveal to me how I was just a footnote in her life.

It wasn’t like I was in love with any of them.

My relationship with her had been defined by an obsessive need I had to understand her. Not just her hypnotic charisma, but the way she behaved, her endless and seemingly pointless acts of rebellion.

I took another sip of the coffee. “You never told me about any of them.”

“I have to use the loo,” she said abruptly. Swinging her hair back, Bella stood, her skirt riding up a bit. She went to the back of the diner, strutting as though the aisle of empty booths were a catwalk. The waitress stared after her as she walked.

I took another sip of my coffee and looked out the window. It was a cold night, and frost clouded the glass. I watched as parents picked their children up from the taekwondo place next door. I saw a young girl, probably only about four or five, with dark brown pigtails and a pink stripped scarf plant herself in front of the door. Her arms were crossed over her chest. A dark blue puffer jacket was covering the upper half of her dobok, though part of her purple belt was still visible, swaying between her legs. An older woman, most likely the little girl’s mother, was pulling on her arm, begging her to move, the snow falling gently around them. The girl stomped her foot and let out a loud cry. She ripped her arm away from the woman, and then stood with her hands flat, lunging forward, her arms outstretched in a position of attack. Her brows were scrunched, and her lips pursed, as if to say make me. The woman picked her up screaming and kicking and walked away.

Bella took a while in the bathroom, like she always did. When she came back out, her hair was up in a braid. She sat down and scooted her chair forward so aggressively that a loud screech echoed, the waitress once again quickly glancing over. Heedless of the disruption, Bella ripped open a sugar packet and poured it into the coffee, her gaze recentering on the mirror behind me.

“Have you been up to anything?” she asked.

“Just getting through finals. I met someone, too.”

She stirred the sugar into her coffee, looking down. I considered repeating myself, unsure of whether or not she’d heard me. “I don’t think anything will come of it, she said she just wanted to be friends. We slept together once, but I don’t know. I mean, I’m not sure I really liked her, but she was fun, and whatever.”

Bella still didn’t respond.

“It’s more complicated than that though.” I continued, desperate for some reaction. “Because she likes this other girl, and I don’t feel like being the second choice. I met her the night of the ballet; at that party you dropped me off at– remember? The one in Red Hook?”

Bella started taking the braid out, her hair coming down in shiny blond waves. “I started seeing someone too. Actually, part of the reason why I asked you to meet up was to thank you.”

She reapplied her lipstick, placing more of the red on top of her already vivid lips.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“That night at the ballet. Thank you for taking me, really, because I just met this great guy that night. You were in the bathroom when it happened.”

I looked down at my hands and tried to remember the timeline. It had been late November. We had been friends for about a month or two, though the relationship had slowly become romantic. Bella had begun to refer to us as “experimental lovers.” We had gone to see a showcase of different ballets choreographed by Balanchine and Peck. We had these terrible seats and could only see half of the stage. She had sat directly behind me and put her arms around my neck for most of the night. I couldn’t remember any guys sitting near us. That night had been the last time I had spoken to Bella, apart from one text exchange in which she was searching for a sheer black bra she thought she might have left in my bedroom. I had lied and said I hadn’t seen it.

I had been in my biology class when, one month later, she had asked me to meet up: I miss you. Let’s get coffee, my phone had read. My cheeks had become flushed, and rush of pleasure had washed over me. I had a hope that maybe she regretted her decision, that maybe my high school experience would not be painted by the pain of constant rejection.

Bella smiled slightly, her eyes gazing out the window. She began to draw on the cool pane with her fingertip, leaving swirls where the frost once was. “He saw me from across the theater, he was sitting in the back. And when you went to the bathroom, he came up to me and said I was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. He asked for my Instagram. His name is Tony. God he’s gorgeous. A model. The first time we made love it lasted for six hours.”

The ball grew so hot that it boiled the acid in my stomach. I felt like throwing up. “I need to use the restroom.”

I rushed to the back of the diner. The bathroom light was faint and flashing, the bulb about to go out. I opened the toilet lid and kneeled over it, holding my hair up with my hands. The ball spun violently in my stomach; I felt the searing metallic surface crawling up my throat, desperate to escape. But after a moment, nothing came. I splashed some water on my face and waited until my stomach settled.

When I came back out Bella was scrolling on her phone. She handed it to me as I sat down, the waitress coming over and pouring us more lukewarm coffee.

“That’s Tony,” Bella said, smiling. “Isn’t he just beautiful?”

I could feel her watching me as I scrolled through. Tony was older than the both of us. He had a beard. A sharp jawline. Dark brown eyes. He wore lose fitting Carhartt pants and Converses. In most of the photos, he was holding a cigarette.

“He seems nice.” I handed the phone back to her.

She continued scrolling for a few moments.

“I should get going, maybe.” I said finally and began to stand up.

“No.” She quickly put her phone away, her hand gesturing to my chair. “Please, I’ve missed you. Let’s keep talking. Tell me about what you’ve been up to. Have you written anything lately?”

I sat back down and took another sip of the cold, bitter, coffee. “No, nothing new. Just been revising the old stuff.”

Bella placed her hand on the table, her palm facing towards the ceiling. I looked at it for a second, wondering if she expected me to take hold of it. I kept my hands in my lap. After a moment, she gently moved her hand over to her coffee, her fingers curling around the cool ceramic.

“How’s college?” she asked.

I turned towards the window and watched as light snowflakes began to fall, melting quickly once they reached the ground. “Fine. I’m ready to graduate. It’s been nice to see Monica. That’s her name, the girl I met. We’ve been hanging out a lot.”

I glanced back to see if she would accept the challenge.

She smiled, her eyes darting again to the mirror behind my head. She lifted her chin up slightly. “That’s great. That is exactly how I feel about Tony, it’s like, we are just obsessed with each other. It’s almost disgusting. I mean, it’s not in a sexy way, it’s like in an animalistic way.”

Her tone of voice was changing. It was beginning to sound faintly British. I shifted my eyes away in irritation.

“It’s so complicated though,” she continued, her words still strangely accented, “because I know his roommate.”

I looked back at her. “That’s an odd coincidence.”

“What is?”

“Well, you met this guy randomly at the at the ballet. And then he just happens to see you from across the theater.”

Bella looked confused, as though she couldn’t understand what I was asking.

“And then you also happen to know his roommate?”

“I had slept with his roommate before. It’s so awkward because I’ll go over to Tony’s apartment and see Marco, that’s his name, and Marco will just linger around, not giving Tony and me any alone time. It annoys Tony too. Did I tell you that he’s studying archaeology at NYU?”

Glancing out the window, I saw that the snow had begun to stick onto the sidewalk.

“You still need to pay me back for the ballet,” I reminded her. Again, she didn’t seem to have heard me.

“Oh, you know how I was talking about the miscarriage?” She continued. “I was with Tony when it happened. He had taken me to the opera, he goes all the time. He was coming back from one the night we met—”

“I thought he was seeing Balanchine and Peck? In the same theater as us?”

“No, I mean, he was in the theater but at a different performance. He saw me near the ticket booth.”

“Oh.” I suddenly had no energy to argue with this abrupt change in their love story.

“And he got me these three-hundred-dollar opera seats, we were right in the front, could see the whole stage, it was beautiful.”

“I’m happy for you.”

We sat in silence for a bit. Bella looked out onto the sidewalk; I could see her gaze slowly dropping and then rising again as she watched the falling snowflakes. “I hope we can be friends. I’m sorry I treated you the way I did. It’s just that I realized that I was too much for you. I don’t think you could’ve handled it. I did you a favor.”

I couldn’t help rolling my eyes at this. Bella looked down at her lap.

“I have a lot of work to do, with finals and everything. I should go,” I said. Standing up, I took out a crumpled five-dollar bill from my jacket pocket and laid it down on the table.

Bella shifted her gaze to my reflection in the mirror, her eyes a luminous emerald, starkly contrasted against the artificial red of her lips. Her lower eyelids were a deep pink, harshly outlined against the whiteness of her skin.

“Tony texted me when you were in the bathroom,” she said, “if you really have to leave, I’ll just go and meet up with him, he invited me to some art gallery in the Lower East Side. But I wouldn’t mind spending more time with you. Maybe we can go down to Coney or something, like we used to. We can go catch the F train right now, it’s not too far a walk from here.”

“I’m sorry. Tell Tony I say hi.” My tone was terse. Bella fiddled with her fingers.

“Yeah, I will. I think tonight I’m going to tell him I love him.”

I had such a strong desire in that moment to ask her if anything she had told me was true. But Bella never looked up at me, she stayed sitting, her delicate fingers resting on the table, her skin illuminated by the glare of the streetlamp shining through the window. Strangely, I found myself hoping that Tony was real. I left the diner, the glass door opening to a violent wind.

I walked home as the snow beat against my face, tears falling down my cheek. The hot metal ball faded away; my stomach was left empty, hollow. I realized that by leaving I had doomed Bella to a life in which she was forever stuck in that diner, time and staring people slowly passing around her while she remained static, eternally talking to her own reflection.