Sludge

It has to be her. He's in a diner, about an hour out from his hometown, nursing a cup of ice water, but there's no way it's not her. It's been seven years since graduation, and she looks the same as she did then. The cheerleading outfit has been switched out for a waitressing apron over blue jeans, sure, and there are bags under her eyes, but he'd bet his egg white omlette that it's her.

He could spot those eyes a mile away. He stared at them every day in study hall senior year. It was his first class of the day. It wasn't like he had any homework to do, and he had tried reading a book to keep him occupied.

Four months to read that chapter book. Never found out how it ended either, too busy trying to find the exact color of her eyes. He had a hobby of drawing beautiful people. He himself was not a beautiful person. He accepted this. Some people weren't meant to be pretty.

This girl was born to be gorgeous. She was born to be drawn in the notebook he kept hidden under his pillow, some sort of involuntary model, with butter soft lips and swirls of dark brown hair cascading down her shoulders.

His fingers wanted to comb it. For art, he'd clarify, caught staring in her direction one morning. He had claimed he was studying human characteristics to help improve his life drawing skills. He made a point to study her friend with the non-swirling hair, and the rudest finger gesturing her displeasure at him. 

To be fair, he wasn't the most attractive person to be ogled by. He had a pock marked face, and long, greasy riddled hair that he desperately wished to cut, had his mom not hid the scissors on his brother. They were too poor to get haircuts, and Scott had kept trying to slit his wrists with the ones in the drawer, so they had been locked away, along with the razors.

Sporting a fuzzy upper lip wasn't scoring him any points either.

He was living off a diet of ramen noodles and peanut butter, or whatever his mother would get at the pantry that week. Which was never anything particularly good, and stuck to his gut. 

There was a word for people like him.

Undateable. 

That's what they called him. He had tried to ask the girl to homecoming, hair twisted back by a rubber band stolen off the teacher's desk. She had laughed. 

Is someone pranking me? Good one guys, you can come out now.

That's what she had said. His mother had told him to be optimistic and have faith, and all he had ended up with were gutter dreams and a wet face.

She returns to the table, steaming plate of egg in her hand. He reads her nametag. Melba. What are the chances that a girl with that kind of name could have a doppleganger with the same name an hour from home? 

Slimmer than his new waistline, he'd reckon. 

"Can I get you anything else?" Her hand is on his shoulder. He repeats, her hand is on his shoulder, and he isn't sure if he can speak, let alone breathe in this moment.

His head shakes. 

"Alright, well if you change your mind, holler for Melba, and I'll be right over." She winks at him. He's half convinced that it was a one eyed blink, like the other lid got stuck, because Melba Tate does not wink at him, ever. He is a sludge of a human to her.

Yes, he still remembers that word circling the halls post rejection. Sludge, sludge, he's a pudge.

He picks up a knife and cuts into his omlette. It's full of veggies, and he stops to take a picture. The colors vibrantly contrast against the white of the egg, and he wants to draw this later. He's a comic artist now, and while he has mastered human form, he can never figure out food. Mom never took the time to make it look pretty. 

Mom never had a full fridge either, but he wasn't going to dwell on it. She did the best she could. He was just glad that by the time he had moved out, he had met Charlie, who had let him live rent free, provided he paid for their groceries. With all the extra cash he could finally buy something decent to eat. He had started losing weight. And stocking shelves all night at the store was a lot cheaper than a gym membership, so the weight kept falling off.

He had been living with Charlie for a few months when he woke to find him sitting at the foot of the couch, playing with a pair of scissors. 

"Oh good, you're finally up. Sit down." He pointed to a spread of newspaper on the ground.

"What am I, a puppy? I promise I'm potty trained." 

"I'm fixing that God awful hair of yours. Now sit." Charlie ran a comb through the hair, yanking. Finally satisified, and not nearly as sore as Jonathan was, he pulled it into a ponytail and lopped it off.

He slid it into a bag. 

"You gonna clone me with that? Frame me for some sort of crime?"

"Relax, I'm donating it. Now hold still so I can even your hair out."

His hair was gone, and his weight was gone. His face had even started to clear up, and he could look in the mirror without wanting to cry. He liked the way he looked now.

Judging by the way her elbows were perched on the countertop, staring over at his booth, he wasn't the only one.

Melba grabbed the water pitcher and made her way back to his table to top off his cup. He smiled at her, and she got distracted, the cup overflowing. 

"I'm sorry," she said, water dripping off the table onto his lap. "Let me get you some more napkins."

She ran off, and he moved his eggs over to avoid the migrating puddle. When she came back, he had smiled again, and she slipped, nearly tumbling to the floor. 

His grip was awkward, still half sitting in the booth, and he carefully placed her back upright.

"You alright there?"

"I'll be alright. My ego's just bruised."

That's what he had said when she had rejected him. 

He wonders if she would have rejected him if he looked the way he does now.

With the mess mopped up, she retreats to the kitchen. He can see her peeking through the window to glance embarrassedly at him, and at one point he thinks to wave when he sees her looking with another girl before she ducks down out of sight.

It's the other girl that comes to clear his plate from him.

"What happened to Melba?"

"She's on her break," the girl says, placing a check in front of him. He slaps a ten down on the table and says that the change is her tip. Heading outside, he finds that Melba is sitting on the curb, smoking a cigarette. She's not the same perfect homecoming queen anymore. He's drawn her hundreds of times, the perfect beauty in his long since torched notebook, but he loves the way the smoke billows in the air, with tendrils of hair blowing in the wind. 

He wants to draw her.

"Do you, uh, would you mind if I took your picture?" 

"My picture?" She puffs. "What for, so you can write a negative review on the internet?"

He shakes his head. "No, you just, you fascinate me. You're very beautiful."

She laughs. 

"Honey, you should have seen me in my prime. This is a shadow of what I used to be. I was head cheerleader. Homecoming queen. I could have my pick of the school, and I went for the quarterback who ran off with my best friend." She takes another drag.

Yup, this was the same girl, no doubt. The same one that got the entire school to call him Joe Nathan, because he was big enough to be two people, where not even the teachers would call him Jonathan. This was the girl that made him want to be better, for her. Almost as if by being good enough for her, he could finally be good enough for himself.

Sludge the pudge had become Purdy the sturdy. Someone the girls fawned over. 

She had become one of those girls.

Shouldn't he care more? Yeah, there was that beautiful girl in front of him, crushing her cigarette beneath her foot as she stood, but that's all she was, beautiful. She wouldn't care that he was writing a comic book, or that he got these muscles from working every night at the grocery store. All she'd care is that there were muscles to clutch.

Still, he has to wonder.

"Would you like to go out Thursday night?"

"I work that night. Are you free Friday?"

"'Fraid not."

"I'll give you my number, and you can call me, okay?" She takes her pen and scribbles the number on his hand. 

He washes his hands when he gets home. He scrubs them long and hard, until the ink is gone. 

She may be beautiful, but she will never be his.