Sleepless by Cyn Balog

a raspberry one. It was cold, so I pulled my jacket tighter over my Sweetie Pi’s T-shirt and tried to walk past him. He stood up as I did and said, “Your name is Julia. You’re a freshman, right?”
    I turned to him, thinking, Oh my God! My vocal cords froze up. Luckily, my facial muscles were too damn tired and cold to react in surprise, so I must have looked noncommittal and bored, like Yeah, and who the hell are you?
    “Do you speak anything other than the language of ice cream?” he finally asked.
    I was thinking he would go into the whole thing that some insensitive jerks would approach me with: You were that girl. The one from the papers. Right? But he didn’t, and he didn’t look like he wanted to satisfy his morbid curiosity by getting the inside scoop on it. Still, I was suspicious, so I said, “Darth Vader?”
    He laughed. “So, you going to the fair tomorrow?”
    My mind kicked into overdrive. Fair … fair … fair. What fair? This was cruel and unusual punishment for a girl who had just worked a mind-numbing eight-hour shift at a restaurant that combined food and geometry.
    “The Brighton Christmas Tree Fair?” he finally said.
    “Oh. I don’t know,” I said, still frozen, because oh my God, was he asking me out?
    “Julia,” he said in his Darth Vader voice, “I am not your father. That means we can go to the Brighton fair together and nobody will look at us funny.”
    I couldn’t help it: I burst out laughing. After that, I realized that if I ever wanted to look calm, cool, and collected, all I had to do was pretend to be bored and tired and just keep my mouth shut. Easy. It didn’t matter what I was feeling on the inside; it was all about what I showed on the outside. From that day on, I was officially Griffin’s shadow. We were always together. He hated it when I rolled my eyes and looked away, but he also couldn’t get enough of it. Most girls would pout or complain … but I had found the thing that made him weakest—pretending not to care, even when I did. Griffin always spoke in slogans from television commercials, and one of his favorites was “Never let ’em see you sweat.” After a little practice, I was a pro at that.
    Now I pour some milk into a cup, squirt in some seltzer, and drizzle on some chocolate syrup, then take a sip. Still gross.
    “You eating into the profits, Ippie?” a voice calls over the counter. “Mr. Pi would not be pleased.”
    I take another sip and roll my eyes. Bret works at Gyro Hut, across the food court, but the food there is borderline inedible. He’s constantly coming over here to eat into Mr. Pi’s profits. I scoop a cone full of rocky road, his favorite, and hand it to him. “Don’t you have a lamb to slaughter or something?”
    “Oh, my little tzatziki ,” he says, grinning. He usually uses the word “tzatziki” a hundred times in one conversation at the food court, because he likes it, which makes food court conversations with him especially annoying. “You know I don’t slaughter lambs after noon.”
    “How can I forget?”
    He stands there idly in his white paper hat and hummus-stained apron, reading the menu, I guess. It appears he has forgotten his ice cream, because chocolate trickles down his wrist, and he doesn’t seem to care. I find myself wishing I had a customer, but the mall is pretty dead today. “So … what’s up?” he finally says.
    “Um … not much.” Scintillating conversation. Only then does it strike me just how weird things are with Griffin gone. Like Griffin was the central link in the chain that held us all together.
    “Ippie … you’re like a ghost now.” His voice is playful.
    I stare at him as he licks the ice cream. “Huh?”
    “Like, I rarely see you.”
    I have no idea what he’s talking about. I saw him at school two days ago, and at the track meet yesterday, and here today. Does he want to hang with me when I use the bathroom, too? Okay, so our interactions have been kind of short