“What’s it like to be pretty?” Marmalade asks me, her black hair coiled all over her skull, her eyes milky and her fingers carrying a drive-through-movie popcorn kernel towards her mouth. The nails on her fingers are red and black, ‘but what colors are her toenails?’ I wonder absently. I suck down the remains of my soda, which hisses and slurps at me emptily.

“Boring” I say finally, and she ‘Hmmmm’s. I bite at my nails and the pink glossy coating tastes chemical. “What’s it like to have a personality?” I ask, almost guiltily. She cracks into a smile, before realizing I’m serious and shrinking into herself again.

“Shut it Elizabeth.” She says inattentively, which means she’s concentrating very hard.

“I’m serious.” I counter with the skill of someone who lives off of putting herself down.

“You have a personality.”

“Not a real one.”

We are quiet, for a moment, because it’s true. I learned my personality from television and movies and the backs of cereal boxes. I bite my nails a little more.

‘Oh Daniel…’ The girl in the movie with the dead-looking black eyes and the unrealistically yellow hair purrs. Daniel grips her by the waist, and she pretends to look innocent while taking a drag from her cigarette. Marmalade tilts her head back and exhales laboriously.

“Oh God this movie is bad.” I laugh a little bit, and I don’t know exactly why. She checks her watch in the filtered moonlight. “You should be getting back to them.” I choke on my soda, because I really don’t want to go back to them, with their movie star eating disorders and matching personalities. I don’t want to go back to the people who are exactly like me. Marmalade smiles at me awkwardly.

“I don’t want to go…” The words sound way too loud on the crowded parking lot. I want to return to when we were little. I want to go back to when Marmalade and Elizabeth played in their backyards together and dug up worms and made pinky swears and didn’t know about makeup or hair dye or the importance of hating other people. She looks over at me, and I look over at her. We could kiss, if I leaned a little closer. But I don’t, and neither does she. We stare for the longest time.

“So, what is it like to have a personality.” She looks disappointed at my question, as if she expected something else.

“It’s hell. Every single day of it, it’s hell.”

“…oh.” I say simply, going back to the movie.

‘Oh Daniel my love!’

“But it’s better than boring.” I look back over at her, and she smirks miserably. “It’s much better than boring.” I bite at my nails, and she watches me as if I’m a documentary.

Fin.