Alone in a closed mall, I stared into the unflinching eyes of true human desire… and they stared back. Stale cinnamon rolls, made the day before, lined the wire racks in a shuttered bakery. Their devious and hypnotic swirls held my gaze in a powerful psychological vice. What was the maximum sentence for petty burglary in my county? NO! We were not going down this road again, I ain’t goin back to jail! My plans for a life of crime were halted by the sound of a car pulling into the mall’s parking lot.

 

Jogging out into the night, I was shocked that it wasn’t my coworker’s sensible yellow sedan that had come to my rescue. Stalling and sputtering in front of me was Blue Steel, my incredibly luxurious ride. Yes, Blue Steel, the car was blue, and considering my perpetual passengers must have been a car for ants. I wrenched open the passenger door and climbed into the cabin. “So…” Ralee found it hard to finish her thought as I waited in silence for the inevitable apology. “You hungry?” Not what I expected but after working a breakless double followed by a wild-goose chase I wasn’t gonna argue with getting some grub. I nodded and Ralee drove off.

 

The car ride was silent… like, “holy hell just say something because this is suffocating me and I don’t want to be here” silent. After I texted Cathy to cancel my emergency evac, I quickly ran out of ways to distract myself from the awkwardness afoot. Ralee kept her eyes on the road and I tried to look like I was doing the same while glancing over from time to time. After about ten minutes on the road, Ralee pulled into the parking lot of a twenty-four hour diner and threw the car in park. Neither of us made any move to unbuckle our seatbelts or leave. We both stewed in the stuffy pot of unspoken thoughts that we had seasoned to bitter perfection.

 

“I’m sorry I took your car. I’m used to driving it around in my world… I didn’t mean to leave you up a river without a paddle.” The woman to my left apologized with the sincerity and expression of a man selling eye drops on late night television. “I was just… angry. For a fleeting moment I had hope again, and it was for nothing… I still shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”

 

With the silence killed, my shoulders relaxed and I sunk lower into my seat than I thought possible. “Don’t worry about it… I get it. I spoke too soon and hurt you. Not to mention taking off with you in the backseat without even introducing myself first. That was pretty bad on my end.”

 

Ralee turned to face me, and her seat squealed with protest at the sudden movement. “My name is Ralee, by the way, I figure you might like to know who you’re dealing with.” Oh, don’t you worry. I knew exactly who you were, lady.

 

My mouth opened to introduce myself but immediately clamped shut. My name… I had lent the feminine version of it to Leona. It was probably in my best interest to limit how closely I seemed tied to this whole situation. “I’m Rob, nice to meet you.” The fake name tasted and felt wrong in my mouth, like a bite from overripe fruit. Despite my deception, I still wanted to be cordial and offered her my hand to shake.

 

She looked down at it for a second, taken aback by the audacious normalcy of the gesture considering the situation we found ourselves in. “Heh-- heh heh. Hahaha! Are you serious? That’s amazing.” Ralee lost herself in hysterical laughter before taking my hand and shaking it with a comical vigor. “Why yes, good sir, it is a fine day for meetings and greetings I do say,” Ralee said, putting on a rough imitation of a stiff business person before descending back into laughter. “Dude, I think we’re a bit past handshakes now, don’t you?”

 

Slightly offended by the remorseless roasting of my action, I ripped my hand away from hers. “Well damn, excuse me for trying to be polite.”

 

Refusing to lose the laughter completely, she looked me in the eyes. Her sapphire iris glowed violet with the light of the diner’s neon sign, contrasting the night’s darkness that hung around her like an inverted halo. “You semi-abducted me and I briefly stole your car. I think we can drop the pomp and act casual, don’t you?” She made fair points. “Now come on, I’m starving and have some questions you’re going to answer.” Before I could respond, Ralee was already sliding out of my car.

 

***

 

According to the grimy and creased menus our waitress plopped on the stained and sticky table before us, the diner we had somehow ended up at was called Pancakes. Yup, just Pancakes. It was like Cher, Madonna, or C’thulu, one name was enough to get the point across. Now, take a wild guess as to what they served here. Correctamundo! They served burgers. No breakfast foods, just burgers. Yeah, I didn’t get it either.

 

“I’ll take a double bacon burger with cheese, some barbecue sauce, and no onions please.” It had taken Ralee all of three seconds to choose her meal, a decisiveness I envied greatly.

 

The menu was a page long and described their various sandwich offerings in great detail... all except for one. “I’m sorry, what’s in the Marv Surprise?” I didn’t usually bother asking questions, but the name of the dish raised more than a few red flags.

 

Our waitress, Sandy, who seemed to have a perpetual scowl that showed even through her constant gum-chewing, sighed. “It wouldn’t be a very good surprise if I told you, right?” The annoyance in her voice was palpable so I just mirrored Ralee’s order. As she stomped away from our table, I heard the stern voice of Sandy as she screamed our order through the food window behind the counter.

 

My fearless partner in culinary exploration leaned over the table. “Ten bucks says the Marv Surprise is tetanus.” I choked on the chlorine-tasting water I had been chugging, allowing a couple of streams to roll down my chin and onto the table. Oh, look, now there was actually a clean patch.

 

“Twenty bucks says the surprise is that it comes with every meal.” The two of us shared a laugh at the diner’s expense as a slow fly buzzed around. The small bug rammed into the fluorescent light above us, repeatedly causing a series of soft clinks in the background that seemed almost in time with the country music oldies playing on the jukebox.

 

This was nice. Living alone in a small studio and keeping mostly to myself outside of work, I had forgotten how pleasant it was to just share someone’s company. “So, about Leona.” Well, it was a nice moment while it lasted. “How do you know her?”

 

Well, she was basically the female version of me that I dropped into a story so I could write the whole thing from my perspective without having to actually consider things from another character's point of view. Oh, wait, I needed to come up with something I could actually tell Ralee. Right. “I-- I was--”

 

“Alright, we need to have a no bullshit rule in play here.” Ralee’s playfulness eroded in an instant. She had gone from kindly to all business and now her eyes bore into my own. “I’ll ask again. How do you know Leona?”

Ah, screw it. She was transported here by a funky lightning box after watching her lover be disintegrated by the same machine. If anyone could handle the truth of the situation, it was her. I pulled out my phone again and went back to the posted story. “Here, take a look at this. It was posted to a fiction site on the net a few weeks ago.” I passed my phone to her and she started reading.

 

We sat in that diner for hours as Ralee read through her entire past with Leona leading up to her lover’s disappearance and jaunt at the mall. Ralee’s face shifted through an entire smorgasbord of emotions. She laughed, she cried, she held her legs close to her chest and rocked back and forth, all while constantly scrolling through her own lived adventures. The sun had risen by the time Ralee reached the end. She stared at the screen, unmoving, as her food got cold and the fly above descended to feast on her fries. At long last, she set the phone down. Her face was despondent and exhausted as her lips slowly parted. Her voice had lost its bite as she finally spoke. “You-- you said it was a fiction site?”

 

I couldn’t get a read on how she was taking this. She wasn’t freaking out, which was a good thing, but her subdued response was possibly even more worrying. “Yeah… I’m sorry.”

 

The woman across from me nodded solemnly. “Thanks.” For the first time since we arrived, Ralee plucked a fry from her plate and took a bite. “I don’t get it. Is it possible for someone in this world to see into mine? Have-- Have they been watching us our whole lives?” My blood ran cold, not out of fear but agonizing guilt. Even now, she still didn’t realize that I hadn’t been looking through a window at another world. I had made her up. She had existed for years… I’ve had her and Leona in my daydreams for quite some time… but I didn’t have some innate talent for the supernatural. I wasn’t a master of time and space that could thin the veil between her world and mine. I was a mediocre waiter in a middling chain restaurant that liked to write cheesy stories from time to time. That was it.

 

“Ralee, I--” The phone on the table between us buzzed. Without thinking, I grabbed it and opened the notification. A new chapter had been posted. “There’s more.” In an instant, Ralee had slithered out of her side of the booth and muscled her way into mine, pushing me closer to the window on my right. I opened the new chapter and the two of us read together.

 

Leona had made her way to a therapist's office. Not the first place I’d check out when stranded in a new world but who was I to judge? Strangely enough, there was a date and a time for her visit written into the chapter. Today’s date, and seven hours from now. The therapist's name was Brent but we had nothing else to go on. I pulled up a list of local practices and found one Brent listed. His office was in a mini mall downtown, a short and easy drive to make. There was no guarantee that Leona would be there. Hell, she could be in a different city, state, or even country for all we knew. All we had was thin and flimsy hope, that evil, ugly bitch of a feeling that promised nothing more than disappointment and despair… and somehow Ralee and I both fell for her wicked charms again.

 

The woman, literally of my dreams, who had sidled up close to me looked up at my face with an expression so joyful it melted all of my apprehension and worries. “She’s going to be there... We’re going to find her today!” Her confident declaration was warmer than the sunbeams on my back and I couldn’t help but smile at her. “We gotta hurry up and eat.”

Unhinging her jaw, Ralee managed to finish her massive burger in three bites. This feat was equal parts unnerving, impressive,  and endearing. Honestly, it was cool to see such a sight without having to pay for a cable package that included National Geographic. “You do know that we have hours to burn, right?” My observation was brushed off as she borderline dumped the full plate of fries down her gullet, the poor fly barely escaping her maw as it slammed shut. Either she loved food as much as I did, or she had been personally wronged by a french fry in the past. Seeing her so vividly, acting just the way I’d always envisioned her, I couldn’t help but crack a smile.

 

“Wha-- Ahem, What are you looking at?” She choked down her food to make room for her words as she stared at me incredulously.

 

“It’s nothing, just… you’re exactly how you are in the story. It’s kind of trippy.”

The woman with a penchant for overdramatic flair scoffed as she rested a hand on her chest. “That story described me as crude, boorish, and just a bit of a screwball. I’m offended you would think so highly of me!”

 

I could feel my smile grow wider as I brought my palms together in mock apology. “Oh, how insensitive of me, I should have clarified. I was talking about how the book made you out to be a royal pain in the ass.”

Ralee snapped her fingers and pointed at me, beaming from ear to ear. “Aww, don’t you go flirting like that. I’m spoken for.”

 

The way those words lilted out of her stung like a slap in the face. She was in a relationship… with Leona. For years, I’d assumed that alter-ego in idle fantasies and daydreams. Aside from the stories I had written before, those two dominated my subconscious mind. Hell, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the pair had saved my life. Now I found myself profoundly jealous of a fictional version of myself that had manifested in the physical world. Life had a real fucked up sense of humor sometimes.

 

Hopping out of her seat, Ralee spun on her toe to face me. “Anyway, we should go. We can probably get a bit of rest before this afternoon and I want to make sure I’m in top form for my reunion.” Somehow, I had been drafted into making sure my favorite character got her happily ever after with my fraternal twin. Good times… “Oh, and seeing as how I left my wallet in my other dimension, I kind of sort of need you to cover the bill.” With a Cheshire smile and devious wink, Ralee about-faced and borderline skipped out of the restaurant.

 

A miracle had happened. I was blessed with the impossible opportunity to sit face to face with Ralee Zephyr and to have dinner with her. If you had told me this was going to happen five years ago, I’d have laughed in your face. A literal dream had come true for me... and I couldn’t wait for this whole ordeal to be over. I knew what the Marv Surprise was now: twisted and incomprehensible heartache. It was today’s special and there were no substitutions.