Breakfast Sandwiches
By Althea Champion | @ackchamp
We order breakfast sandwiches when we are hungover. We eat them out of their respective foils in front of a television screen that plays either Bob's Burgers or Letterkenny—a show that mocks life in a Canadian rural town that we think we understand better than anyone else because we live in New Hampshire, and we went to high school with hicks, and we think it's creator is probably gay, but nobody's checked yet. On the couch and on the floor, we are hardly distinguishable from each other, aside from the nuances of our breakfast sandwich order. But we are testing how long our empty stomachs and good humors last, so we blend together here on the floral-printed couch in the meantime, on a rug peppered with wax and ineradicable dirt. The television we are opposite from sits atop a shabby bookcase, which is next to a newly-decorated Christmas tree. The morning sun shines in through a tall window, filling the room with an orange glow that unveils flecks of bronze in our hair, which was cut in similar styles by each other under streetlights.
When we finally do arrive at the little counter where we place our orders, David and Hanna will ask for a sausage, egg, and cheese on an everything bagel; Rowan will substitute the default cheese for Pepper Jack; Emery will ask for cream cheese on a poppy seed bagel and if they have tomatoes and sprouts; and Judith will think that sounds good, but for now we wait at Rowan's apartment. It's small and temporary, they say—a place to stay in the limbo between college graduation and our entrance into the real world. Till when, we're unsure.
For now, we go to the farmers market that sells things for prices far higher than what we have in our pockets, but we still buy flowers and lemonade and make up for it some way later; maybe we go without mouthwash or don't do laundry for a few weeks. Emery, who likes tomatoes and sprouts, once passed a cinnamon roll that had fallen on the ground. We bemoaned the devastation, there on the dirt perfectly plump and upright, paid for but uneaten, its glaze peppered with granules of dust that could transform into brown sugar if you believed hard enough. Emery did something about it because they were especially hungry, and the treat looked especially good. They plucked the discarded result of someone else's labor and started eating around the dirt. When we all screamed in horror, they said they were building immunity—introducing new germs into their microbiome to cultivate a more accepting environment, regardless of their gut's predispositions or preferences. They said everyone should be doing the same in every way. And they're a senior at Smith College studying biochemistry so all we did was laugh as they pecked their way into its tightly rolled center, brushing dirt and the germs of its first owner back onto the ground with little to no avail. The rest of us wouldn't admit to our jealousy as we watched them sink their teeth into its gooey nucleus.
When we want Doritos or Cheetos or Gatorade, we go without because we don't feel comfortable in the grocery store. David preemptively sheds his poppy-colored coat decorated with beautifully effeminate buttons and belting because he can't stand to wear it near conservative rural Americans doing their weekly food shop. And Judith doesn't like how people stare when her shoes with the wooden soles clop like hooves on the linoleum floor. She feels like the sound echoes off the carts and the signs and the price tags and draws every shopper's attention to her, like an overhead announcement saying look at that fool with the clogs. But she likes to wear them, and the coat makes David happy, so we avoid the grocery store all together. And that's why we've grown to resent Doritos and Cheetos and Gatorade, and why we go to the overpriced farmers market and the co-op. Because there is no linoleum there. And because there we can wear our tank tops and our trench coats and our piercings and our skin. At the co-op, we order our breakfast sandwiches and aren't looked up and down.
About half of us like the yolk to run. About half of us had it cooked that way by our mothers all of our lives. About half of us are only children.
None of our parents are divorced, but David's parents were never married at all. So he knows how God smote bastards and children of divorce by creating a seven-day week that is unable to be divided evenly without conflict.
"I plan to confront Him, y'know," David says, standing up and pointing at the unassuming Christmas tree, an apparent reminder of his plan. We sit and watch him, our stomachs only now starting to crave breakfast.
"Only to plead for the evenness of the week?" one of us says, eyebrows raised.
"The tree never did anything to you."
"I think He will have more important things to do on the fucking day he wakes the dead," another one of us says.
"You guys aren't believers," he says, dismissing us with a wave of his hand. Now positioned in the center of the room, the sun's rays hit him like a spotlight.
"I think you'll have bigger problems on that day, babe," Rowan says, getting off of the couch and going into the kitchen for a second cup of coffee.
We laugh in agreement.
"It would be the solution to ALL of my problems," he says, spinning and smiling, before falling back down on the rest of us, off of the stage and onto his safety net.
We spend a lot of time outside where we sleep and strip and imagine all the ways our environment can kill us. We conquer rocks that can crush us and swim in waters that can steal us. We sleep in temperatures that can suffocate us and skate on ice that can plunge us into freezing floods. And we lament that one day none of it will be the same. One of us, Hanna, who likes her sandwich just as it is described on the menu, spends her days outside on a bike no matter the season, considering trails like the puzzles she completes after dinner. We call her apartment "the adult apartment," because for some reason it feels more grown-up than any of us are ready to be. Maybe because the walls are dark blue, and the neighborhood is unfamiliar, even though we all live about a mile away in each direction.
"I'm no adult," she said. "I don't have a job. Adults have jobs."
"But they don't anymore," said the one who likes Pepper Jack cheese.
We all laughed until we got jobs.
Hanna was only temporarily jobless after graduating. She had to grow up in order to foot the bill, and she stayed laughing for our sake.
We considered puzzles together at night and in the morning we walked home because the "adult apartment" didn't have spare parking for our Subarus and station wagons. Most of the time we walked, but sometimes our fathers picked us up if they were around, and we waited in the cold for them to arrive because they'd get mad at us if we made them wait too long. I'm not your chauffeur, they'd say. And we'd say that we're sorry. And suddenly we'd become middle schoolers again at 20-something, waiting at the street corner for a bus that never prioritized punctuality. We stood still, watching our breath move in and out of our warm bodies in clouds of steam or smoke or something, sometimes eating a breakfast sandwich if we were lucky, and feeling our hair freeze like the stalagmites we learned about in our generalized science classes.
Last summer was no different than those before it, except that about half of us owned pieces of paper that made us more employable—the other half was still working toward that piece of paper. We still cut each other's hair, and Rowan still cooked all of our meals. They like to cook but only at night, so we ironically poured Pabst Blue Ribbons into our rumbling stomachs to kill time. They still bought the wine because we still couldn't. We ate whipped cream out of our palms and went on long walks because we had nothing else to do. We played frisbee in grassy fields. And we laughed. We didn't really have sex, except for David who has had sex with the same guy since high school. A guy who speaks Russian now and is going to graduate with a piece of paper that says anthropology—a topic he couldn't be less interested in, but figured he'd pursue because that's what you need to do nowadays.
We hid bags of wine in our towels and lit our cigarettes with candles that punctured our birthday cakes. We tried not to talk like the hicks we went to high school with. Even so, we never got away from qualifying things with wicked and calling each other gay, but instead of it being underlined with hate, we accompany the word with a kiss. And we ate breakfast sandwiches when we were hungover in anticipation of the day we would all have to pack up and leave and go somewhere else after college. We didn't know that about half of us would end up where we started, at least so far.
We spent a lot of time outside, where we got our Christmas tree yesterday and some of its decorations, like the dog bone we found on the forest floor (similar to the cinnamon roll except we weren't the ones putting it in our mouths). Rowan said it would work great as a tree-topper and they studied poetry at Dartmouth College, so we said okay. After we carried the tree out of the woods, which were next to one of our parents' houses, and down the highway they lived on, we stuck it in the trunk of one of our Subarus. One of our mothers offered us fresh apple pie, and we each took a slice, cleaning off the dish as she anticipated.
She remarked that we were all humming the same tune, like Snow White's dwarfs. We hadn't even noticed, as one of us picked up a verse, another the chorus, and so on.
"I don't think the dwarfs were familiar with Dua Lipa's work," Judith said, laughing.
"A crying shame.
"That's a funny name," mother chimed. We laughed.
"Isn't Grumpy a funny name?"
"Touché, darling," she said after careful consideration. "But Duel Eep is not a feeling."
"It is," Judith said, obviously a fan. "Dua means love."
"Well, I didn't know that," she said. "That would have been a lovely name for a dwarf."
When we brought the tree home, we tied the bone to its skinny crown with twine and hung our keys and our underwear and our hair elastics up on the branches below it; proper ornaments weren't in the budget, nor were they at the farmers market. We thought it looked great and tears almost welled in our eyes as we saw our creation take shape.
Maybe this is what the poet who likes Pepper Jack feels when they write, we thought, but they cried too and danced underneath the bone to Patsy Cline with a glass of wine in their hand and a cowboy hat on their head. So we put on our hats and grabbed our glasses and all danced together. And then we resolved to go to the grocery store the next day and said fuck what people think.
We were drunk then. But now it's the next morning and we are finally hungry for our breakfast sandwiches. Some of our stomachs grumble and some of our attitudes are sour. David is no longer performing, and we still think it's a good idea, going to the grocery store. We think we need to do it while we still have each other. In truth, we would rather eat our Doritos and Cheetos and Gatorade than the overpriced lemonade we get at the farmers market. So we go to the grocery store together; our shoulders are tense and our jaws are clenched. And people keep looking but we poke the palms of each other's hands near the eggs and whisper I Dua you near the cereal to make sure each of us knows we aren't alone. And suddenly it is easy. We yell at each other across the granola aisle to get peanut butter and carrots and bread, and we yell back at each other that we're on it or that the mission is already accomplished. Hanna says we should purchase walkie-talkies, but we figure we like yelling better.
And we still go to the co-op after. We sit outside on the curb despite the weather and eat our breakfast sandwiches, wearing our shoes with the wooden soles and our poppy-colored coats, and our tank tops and our trench coats, and our piercings and our skin. And everyone sees us, and we don't seem to care.