Cashews

Rebecca craved cashews, very lightly salted and dry roasted, but not greasy; whole, not broken into halves or, worse yet, pieces. She loved the crunch, the rich, mild sweetness of the nuts. Rebecca never denied herself when it came to food. But NutriMarket, with its discount bulk nut bins, had closed hours ago. They were always closed when she had these cravings.

"Rebecca? I didn't know anyone was here." Beth stumbled into the kitchen, rubbing her eyes. "What's that clock say? Twelve twenty...nine? A.M., right? I need to get ready."

Yawning, Beth yanked open the refrigerator door, disturbing multitudes of newspaper clippings, photos, and recipes. A ceramic parrot magnet and a picture of Beth's old high school boyfriend (Jason, "the one who got away") slid down the front of the fridge, and stopped just short of the grimy yellow linoleum.

"Where are you going?" Rebecca asked.

Beth grunted somewhere deep within the fridge. Jars clanked together, pop cans toppled over and rolled into Rebecca's broccoli. Then Beth emerged, grinning, clutching jars of peanut butter and strawberry jelly to her chest. "I have a date! Can you believe it?"

"Yep." Rebecca realized that she'd been craving peanut butter and jelly all along.

"His name's Steve. He's called me a couple-a times. He's really tall. And he actually likes Chinese food."

"Ah. So where're you guys going so late?" Chinese didn't sound half bad either, now that Rebecca thought of it.

"He doesn't get off work till 12:30 or so. I invited him over here to maybe watch a movie or somethin'. You don't mind, do ya?" Beth fiddled with the twisty-tie on the bread.

Rebecca couldn't stand white bread; she hated how it stuck to her gums. "Not as long as you two behave yourselves," she said. "I'm a light sleeper."

Beth rolled her eyes. "We're not going to do anything." She licked crunchy peanut butter off her fingertips.

"Keep him out of my room," Rebecca said. She didn't mean it. She imagined Steve, a tall guy with long blonde hair--she inferred the hair color--tiptoeing into her room. He carried two steaming Chinese take-out containers and--it was dark; what was that in his other hand? oh--chopsticks. The scent was enough to wake her. She didn't mind, though, 'cause he'd left his shirt in the living room with Beth, apparently, and the zipper on his jeans wasn't working right. His breath smelled of...damn it! Cashews!

"He's a total geek." Beth sighed. She pressed her sandwich together, squirting two drops of bright red jelly onto the counter. "But it's okay. I'm ready to date geeks now, as long as they like Chinese food." Beth's last date--Chaz the Anthropology major--had dared to order a burger and fries at Wok's Up?, and had walked out of the restaurant with chopsticks stuck up his nose.

"If he tries, which he totally won't 'cause he's way too geeky, I won't let him even touch me," Beth said, slashing at a fruit fly with her sticky knife. "Even if it has been nine months since a sober man kissed me."

Nine months was nothing to complain about, Rebecca thought, but she kept her mouth shut.

"What should Steve and me watch? You think he'd be into anything with Hugh Grant? Scratch that, stupid question. Where's Star Wars?" Beth took a huge bite of her sandwich and started digging through the DVDs under the TV.

"Didn't Chaz steal our Star Wars DVD?" Rebecca asked.

Beth swallowed abruptly. "I forgot about that! It wasn't really his fault, though," she said, brushing bread crumbs off her lap. "Crap. My shirt's all crumpled, and I got jelly on my jeans." She darted back to her bedroom.

"You look fine," Rebecca called, eyeing the bread and open jar of peanut butter on the counter. Her battered environmental studies textbook, which had been open to pages 296-297 for the past hour, slid into the crack between the couch cushions. "Of course I'd be delighted to clean up your mess, Beth," she muttered, unpeeling herself from the couch.

"Huh? All my other shirts are dirty," Beth whined. "I need a shower..."

The bathroom door slammed shut.

"Won't he be here soon?" Rebecca screwed the lid onto the peanut butter. It didn't tempt her upon closer inspection--it looked a little too crunchy. And the bread was too dry.

She wiped up the jelly on the counter, cursing Beth under her breath, and smashed a few fruit flies between her palms.

Beth started singing off-key in the shower.

Rebecca cleared a space for the jelly in the refrigerator. A green Tupperware container--wasn't that Beth's beef stew, from two months ago?--oozed thick brown liquid all over her fingers.

"Can I borrow your pink tank top?" Beth yelled, emerging from the shortest shower in the history of nineteen-year-old females' showers.

Hadn't Beth refused to do her laundry with Rebecca at the Eastside Laundromat two days ago? Of course, Beth actually believed the rumors about the female student purportedly murdered there late one night in 1972 or '73. The sophomore's body had (supposedly) been found the next morning, crammed into a dryer with some bloody towels.

Beth joined Rebecca in the kitchen, wrapped in her blue bathrobe. "Can I borrow it?"

"How long's this been in here?" Rebecca held up the dripping green container.

"Oh, yuck. Sorry. I'll get rid of it."

"Don't bother." Rebecca paraded the reeking stew past Beth, and dumped it into the sink. The fruit flies rejoiced, mistaking the brown juice for something sweet. "You need to get ready."

Beth flashed a contrite smile. "What about your tank top?"

Rebecca grimaced. The beef stew was choking up the drain. "Take it."

"Thanks!" Beth rushed off to pillage her roommate's closet.

Rebecca flipped the garbage disposal switch, wincing as a fleck of wet beef splattered her cheek. She dabbed her face with a clean towel, and thought about human flesh. Would it grind up and dissolve just as easily as the cubes of beef? No, her fingernails might clog the disposal. And her bones would have to be removed, maybe fed to the stray dog that hung around the trash receptacle outside their apartment building.

Rebecca had never tasted human meat (she'd been a vegetarian for two years), so she could only speculate as to how juicy or dry, how fatty or lean, how salty or sweet it may taste after slow-cooking in a pot of seasoned broth. She squeezed her hands together tightly, wondering how crunchy her bones were. So many bones, so little flesh. She assumed that she would taste different than her omnivore friends. More chewy and stringy, perhaps. When rich old ladies started eating human flesh, all the skinny vegetarians would probably be ground up together and turned into cat food.

Rebecca didn't want to think about human stew, but if she didn't, who would?

"Did you find it?" she called down the hall, envisioning her favorite clothes strewn all over her bedspread. She swore she could hear Beth gasping for air. "I didn't give you permission to borrow my new jeans, Bethany!"

"Oh, fine," Beth grunted, unzipping rapidly. "You're too freakin' skinny, anyway."

"I know," Rebecca replied, as the last of the stew washed away forever.

Rebecca returned to her favorite couch cushion (the end cushion on the right) and leaned back, commanding herself to stop wondering about rich cannibals and their cats. She still craved cashews. How could she have forgotten?

"Hey, how's this?" Beth sashayed into the living room, barefoot, her least-dirty pair of jeans clinging to her hips, her chest protruding (Rebecca's pink tank top was at least one size too small).

Rebecca snickered.

"Shut up! He'll love it," Beth declared, plopping down on the other side of Rebecca's books. "Doin' homework?"

"I should be," Rebecca said, "but I'm too hungry to study. If I made popcorn, would you eat any?"

Beth shook her head. "We eat too much."

Rebecca kicked her notebooks under the coffee table, and got up to start the popcorn.

"I dunno where Steve is," Beth sighed.

"He'll be here soon," Rebecca said, not really believing it.

Beth busied herself by trying to pick up a glass coaster on the coffee table with her toes. She nearly had it a couple of times. (Rebecca could do it, as she well knew. But Rebecca's toes were longer than hers.)

The kernels popped furiously.

Beth moaned something about geeky men. "I thought he wanted to come! I bet he lied about liking Chinese food, too!"

"He's probably on his way over right--"

"No he isn't!" Beth cried, stomping the coffee table. She sprang up and then flung herself at the couch, smashing Rebecca's paperback Whitman collection. The environmental studies textbook hit the carpet with a muffled thud.

Rebecca emptied the hot bag of popcorn into a blue bowl. The smell of fresh, artificial-butter-flavored carbohydrates was more soothing than anything she could say.

She smiled cautiously and held up the steaming bowl.

"Fine, I'll have some," Beth grumbled. "So why didn't you go out tonight?" She was ready to discuss Rebecca's problems now that her own had become unbearable.

"I have a lot of reading to do," Rebecca said, setting the bowl of popcorn on top of her smashed Whitman book. "I'm behind in all my English classes..."

"Oh, you could've caught up tomorrow. It's Friday night!" Beth munched the popcorn and fixed her dark eyes on Rebecca.

The buttery mush in Rebecca's mouth suddenly tasted stale, like Eddie's kisses (well, he'd really only kissed her once). Shuddering, Rebecca dropped a fistful of malignant popcorn--bumpy, crunchy white and yellow tumors--back into the bowl. "Well," she huffed, "tomorrow I'm going grocery shopping."

Beth sniffed, and may have glanced at Jason's picture on the fridge. Rebecca stared out the window. The bowl of popcorn remained between them, cooling patiently.

Beth was the first to get up.

"Going to bed?" Rebecca asked.

"Yeah," Beth said with another sniff. "Good night."

Rebecca emptied the blue bowl in the trash, despising how lovely the popped and unpopped kernels looked, scattered among the celery leaves, plastic spoons, greasy yellow napkins, coffee grounds, and dried red rose petals (the roses had been Beth's, not hers).

She was thirsty for fruit punch, but couldn't find any in the refrigerator.

Rebecca had nothing: no fruit punch; no cashews; no men delivering Chinese to her bedroom; no popcorn; no meat, except for the flesh on her own bones, and that wasn't much.

But she'd survive without nourishment. She could go to bed now and go to sleep and stop worrying about flesh and bones, and sophomore girls trapped in dryers, hugging bloody towels.

The phone rang. Rebecca closed the fridge (Jason and the parrot magnet held fast to the bottom of the door) and waited for a second ring.

"Hello?"

"Hi. Hope I didn't wake you up. Beth's not answering her cell. Is she there? "

"Steve?" Rebecca asked.

"Yeah? Is this Beth?" He laughed--a geeky laugh.

Rebecca imagined him sitting on his unmade bed, name tag still attached to his white uniform shirt ("Hi, my name is STEVE. How may I help you?").

"No, I'm her roommate. Uh, Beth's in bed." Rebecca made sure Beth's door was still closed. "She was tired of waiting up."

"Oh, that's too bad. I just got home. Uh, can you tell her I'd still like to see her another time? Sorry I called so late. Tell Beth I'm sorry."

Rebecca rolled her eyes. "Wait a sec, Steve." She pounded on Beth's door.

"What?" Beth didn't sound at all groggy. "Is it Steve?"

"Yeah."

Beth opened the door--she was still fully dressed and had applied mascara to one eye--and took the cordless phone. "Hello?...Don't worry about it!...Sure, if you still want to."

Rebecca felt tired, even more tired than hungry. "Nighty-night, Beth," she muttered, heading into her bedroom.

She dropped onto her bed, pretending to faint. The word "listless" came to mind.

"Listless," Rebecca declared under her breath, enjoying the feel of the word in her mouth--how it struggled to escape her lips without that tiny whistle, and failed.

Her stomach growled, demanding cashews, but Rebecca ignored it.