Kristina winced and slammed down the iced coffees and bagged pastries on the table before she dropped them. She ungraciously fell into her chair and pinched the skin between her eyes. Her sinuses slowly gathered congestion.
“Hope I’m not getting your bug,” she said to Julian.
“Eh,” he moaned. He coughed and with a sharp snuck the mucus swiftly fell down his throat. He was a few days into his taxing head cold, and it was getting late and it showed. Even the bush of his beard drooped.
“I feel like I need to get up for class tomorrow,” she said. “Odd not having that responsibility.”
“You mean ‘that burden’?” he said as clarification. She ignored it and he struggled to let a sneeze overtake him. It wasn’t ready to come out.
“Drink your coffee,” she said. “It’ll make you at least feel better.”
He took the advice. “You can always go back. Money will come and astrophysics isn’t going anywhere,” he offered, but she knew it would never happen. “Besides, you know you can entered that silly contest now. The pot is up to a few grand now.”
She thought of asking what the rules were, but the meager sense of validation eked from a prize winning in lieu of a higher education seemed a fool’s consolation.
“The idea is, the most creative ink in the most visible place will win, I think” he explained. He rubbed sense into his face. “Although that’s not really official.”
Kristina reached into her pastry bag absentmindedly and broke off a piece of the Chocolate Coma Bomb cookie tucked inside. She zoned out with assistance from the Groban clone oozing steadily out of the coffeehouse’s corner speakers.
“Not as in, badly executed or conceived, or stupid. It can be really well-done but silly. Like getting ‘Mom’ inside a heart and arrow on your forehead is pretty daring, but hardly original.” He leaned back on the chair and cracked his neck side to side. “On the other hand, getting all your ex’s names written out on a list and tacked onto a target with bullet holes scattered all around as a back piece it is fairly creative, but too work safe. Not to mention it’s a lot of money to front.”
She patiently waited out his exposition. Another crooner came on, introduced by an awfully misplaced woodwind solo. She looked at Julian but past him, his words and gaze passing through the slimmed membrane of her attention and out the back of her head, behind her. Her olefactories had completely redirected her attentive energies to the blitz of oversugared chocolate vehicled into her system by clumps of warmed dough.
But it was all gone. Her hand felt the mocking crumbs inside the thin, loose paper glove of the pastry bag. Kristina glanced down to where her hand was to visually confirm what she already knew but couldn’t see. Something small dropped down into her top. She pressed her chin to her chest and saw scads of blackened crumbs forming a shapely half-ring from shoulder to shoulder.
The scales fell from her eyes. She instantaneously recalled her particularly obsessive studies of accretion disks. There was Janine’s midterm for that throwaway course on Astral Art for which she had picked Kristina’s brain for a week on the electromagnetic spectrum of protostars. Janine wanted to make a reality some ludicrously conceived body art concept, using Kristina’s scapular area as the canvas. Kristina found it initially compelling but distasteful and out of character the more she thought about it.
She stood up quickly in a fireburst of inspiration, scattering the crumbs in every which direction. The feet of the cheap wooden chair made a grating ho-oooonk sound against the floor as it was shoved back. It startled Julian, who had fallen asleep sitting up with his iced coffee in hand.
“Wha—?” he stammered. “You okay? Where you going?”
“Call Janine. I’m winning this stupid contest and going back to school.”
She whipped out some cash from her pocket, and with her eyes filled dreamily with stars she trotted off to the counter to buy another sweetened, flattened round of creativity.