Lip Gloss: A Short Story

I was sitting in a bustling cafe, drowning in work, caffeine and sleep. I had just graduated from Oxford and landed myself an internship with a highly renowned company near home. I was ecstatic. Up until a week ago, when I realized the only reason they wanted an intern was to dump all the work on
and blame everything on.

Yay. Go, Kayla.

I wanted to order my fifth latte, crawl home, binge-watch The Office and give up. Yes, that was the life. I was sitting at a two-person table by the window, sunlight streaming onto my pinging laptop with an overflowing inbox. I snapped it shut and got ready to go home and write a resignation letter when a twelve-year-old girl plopped herself in front of me. A girl with so much lip gloss, you could see it from another planet, leaned back on her chair and stared deep into my soul. No ‘can I sit here?’ or ‘are you leaving?’. This generation was doomed.

“Hello, old person,” she said, blowing a pink bubble with gum I hadn’t noticed before. I stared at her, flabbergasted. “I’m twenty-four,” I said, offended.

“You just prove my point further,” she said, “Whatcha doing?”

“Working,” I replied, butt stuck on my seat.

“Or dying,” she asked, “You looked like you were dying.”

“I don’t see the difference between the two,” I said.

She laughed. “I like you, old person.”

“I have a name - Kayla,” I snapped.

“I also have a name,” she said, twirling her blonde hair. I waited. “What is it?”

“You’ll have to guess,” she smirked. I stared at her. I was sure I had met her before, like a veil of familiarity separating the two of us. She looked down at my coffee cups and said, “Lattes are outdated. Have water, it’s timeless.” I asked her whether she was joking. She shook her head. She was serious. Tired, defeated and unsure why I was entertaining her in the first place, I ordered water. I took a sip while she looked at my laptop. Within five minutes, she spotted twenty mistakes in a code a coworker sent me and managed to show me easier ways to organise info. I ordered another glass of water. I breezed through my work, sent all my codes (with all credit to me, according to her advice) and cleared my inbox within a span of an hour. After I finished, I wiped away my sweat and asked her, “Would you like ice cream, you know, as a thank you?”

“No, I’m not that small,” she said, applying more lip gloss, using the window as a mirror.

“No one’s too old for ice cream,” I retaliated.

“Then get yourself some,” she smiled, and walked off, her pink pumps moving without a sound on the marble floor, disappearing into the crowd of strangers. I reached my flat, ice cream (mint and choco) in hand, when I opened the door to find my roommate and mum on the couch, looking at an album, along with a stack of other albums on the floor. “Mum?” I asked, setting the ice cream down, “What’re you doing here?’

“Just thought I’d visit, honeybun,” she said, pulling me down to kiss my forehead. 

“Oh, Kayla, your baby photos are the cutest,” said Jessie, my roommate, flipping through an old album of my first few years. I blushed. “Mum!” I exclaimed.

“What?” my mother asked, as if I was an annoying three-year-old getting in the midst of her bonding time with Jessie.

“You can’t just - you can’t just-” I mumbled.

“Ooh, wanna see her in her adolescent days?” Mum asked, grabbing another album, “Ooh, she was so beautiful then. She only broke out in acne when she was fifteen or something. Before then, her face was as smooth as a baby’s butt.” I turned redder. Mum flipped to a page, and my heart nearly stopped. She pointed to the girl in the photo. I’d seen that girl. I’d seen her ten minutes ago, teaching me how to form tables properly.

“Oh, that girl,” said Mum, “She’d get through tubes of lip gloss within weeks. She’d spend all her pocket money on them and then complain she didn’t have any money to spend. But boy was she good at computers. Even the old ones we had then. She’d fix them up, organize our accounts and everythin’! Now she’s a new Oxford Baby, aren’t you hun?” She kissed my cheek again. After excusing myself to the bathroom, I stared at my mirror for what felt like hours. I had dyed my blonde hair brown, was wearing green contacts, mostly for vision, but I liked them better than my boring hazel. Dark brown lipstick. Long stick-on lashes. I was the same person. I was once that carefree, lip-gloss-obsessed, way-too-smart-for-my-age, twelve-year-old. I grabbed my bag, slipped on my shoes and gobbled my last piece of ice cream and went out. 

“Where you going?’ asked Jessie.

“To buy lip gloss”, I said simply.