Lunch Break

“I ran away.”

                He looked up from whatever he was eating in the can—he couldn’t tell exactly what it was, but it looked like it had passed its expiration date far longer than he cared to know—and frowned at her from his seat on the barstool at the opposite end of the island. She wasn’t looking at him, despite her sudden declaration. Instead, she was stirring the contents of her can, looking as though she hadn’t said anything at all.

“What?” he finally managed to blurt out through his confusion. She raised her eyebrows slightly, but didn’t look towards him.

“Every time we’re alone together like this, you start asking questions about me, so this time I answered the question you always ask first: namely, how I got here.” She stabbed a piece of fruit from the can and bit it in half. “And the answer is that I ran away.”

After a moment, he felt his usual grin spread over his face. Here she was, offering him a carrot for the first time, a carrot he had been reaching for since he had met her. A carrot he was beginning to think didn’t exist. “And what did a pretty girl like you have to run away from?”

“I wasn’t running from anything.” Her head snapped up as her grip on her fork tightened. He kept his smug smile, knowing that he had pushed a barrier but not caring. She had opened the locked door, and he knew that there was a reason. If she opened up to him, the one who routinely and intentionally pushed her boundaries, then it was because she needed it. Sure enough, her head swung back to her can and her fork resumed its circling. “I was raised on a farm,” she continued as if nothing had happened. “That’s probably something a city boy like you wouldn’t understand. Raised in seclusion like that, every word your parents say to you is the gospel truth. Values and morals are deeper and stronger because who’s there to contradict you? I loved my home and I would have stayed if the border disputes hadn’t reached us.”

“You were involved in the disputes.” It wasn’t so much a question as it was a statement. He felt the confusion and hurt form lines on his face, streaks of disbelief and horror. The border disputes were infamous for death. It was a cruel death and an even crueler life for the survivors. And here was a survivor, battle-worn and just as bloodthirsty as one would expect.

She shrugged, her eyes still not on him. “It wasn’t much, at least not when I was there, but there were a few incidents. And I decided that I couldn’t stick around to watch it escalate. So I left home and joined the Republic.”

Something surged through him then, the dominant emotion being rage. “You walked from one barrel to the next,” he said bitterly. She looked at him then, rage creeping into her eyes just as they were entering his.

“People were dying. All around me, people that I had known my whole life were being killed because they were alive. There’s no justice in that.” The cans sat forgotten in their hands as their eyes locked. It felt like a battle of wills in that moment, as though sheer force could have changed the outcome of the girl’s steps all those years ago, steps that took her away from home and into the unknown. He knew this was the moment to resist everything he wanted to say—the moment to congratulate her and remark on how well she had done. But the words left his lips faster than he could stop them.

“That doesn’t mean that you have to provide it.”

She snorted and dropped her can on the table, some of the juice splashing out, as she shouldered the rifle she had left on the chrome island. “Someone has to.” And she left, calling out the name of their superior and leaving him in the kitchen alone with his can and his fork.