A Strange Thing That Happened

This is the story of a strange thing that happened to me a couple of hours ago.

My roommate came home from work and was very upset because work is a place people go to so that other people can make them upset. She wanted me to go out to eat with her so that she could tell me all about what the people at work did to make her upset and also so that she could eat food. All I had in the refrigerator was the second half of a pasta dish that I made last night by pouring a drained can of olives and a drained can of chickpeas over casarecce pasta and adding a tablespoon of olive oil and the juice of an entire lemon (plus salt and pepper), so I told my roommate that I would go out to eat with her, but she should drive.

I probably should have driven instead. I had asked my roommate to drive because she has a fancy luxury car that is ordinarily very comfortable, but I had forgotten that I had hurt my back moving one of her big fancy flowerpots out of a storm a couple of days ago, so I moved like an old and/or pregnant person while I was getting into her low, fancy car. Ouch! Also, and perhaps worse, was the fact that my roommate was still quite upset from having a job, and that did not make her driving very good. Also, it was rush hour. Also, she remembered suddenly that she needed to buy something at a store, so she cut across some different lanes and stuff, which was scary.

By the time my roommate was done buying the thing she had remembered she needed to buy at the store (plus some other things she remembered she needed to buy at the store while we were looking for the first thing she had remembered she needed to buy) she decided we didn't have time to eat a sit-down meal at a restaurant if we were going to get back in time for her favorite television show, so we went to a bakery/restaurant to get some takeout instead. First my roommate ordered herself some food and paid for it. Then I ordered myself a healthy vegetarian meal. Then I saw that there was one last fancy red velvet cupcake in the enormous dessert case next to the cash register. I hadn't had a red velvet cupcake since the grand opening of my grandmother's lesbian neighbors' fancy day care for small, fancy dogs in a fancy far-away town almost four years ago, so I asked if I could please have the red velvet cupcake too. The lady at the cash register said I could! Then she took my credit card and scanned it and told me my receipt would be attached to my bag of food.

I sat down to wait with my roommate at a little marble-topped table. The restaurant was empty except for a family that was made up of a mommy and a daddy and three little girls. The littlest girl was so little that it looked like it might have been a boy instead of a girl, but it was wearing a short blue dress over its blue jeans, so I think it was a little girl (but it might not have been). The mommy and the daddy and the two older girls were eating their food at a table, but the littlest girl was toddling all around the restaurant. I thought about stealing the littlest girl, but the lights were really bright, and my roommate would have had to help me run away with the littlest girl because, remember, my roommate was the one who drove us to the restaurant. So I decided not to steal this particular baby even though it was a really cute baby and kept running up to the dessert case and then walking away and then running back, just like I'd done when my roommate and I first showed up at the bakery/restaurant!

After a couple of minutes, two beautiful Persian-looking ladies came in and ordered some food, and I tried not to stare even though they were very beautiful and I was wondering if you could tell if a lady is Persian just by looking at her beautiful Persian-looking eyes. I decided to look at the baby some more because babies almost never get offended if you stare at them. Sometimes they even giggle and wave! The Persian-looking ladies were looking at the baby too, and they laughed at how the baby would run up to the dessert case and point at all the different desserts as if she wanted to try each and every one! (That's what I do too!) Then a busboy brought the Persian-looking ladies their food, which made me feel kind of left out because my roommate and I had ordered our food at least five minutes before the Persian-looking ladies even came in!

Then some people who looked like they were in their early twenties came in. I didn't pay attention to them because the baby's mommy decided it was time to bring her littlest girl back to the table where her other little girls were sitting with their daddy. The littlest girl saw her mommy coming for her and ran away so that her mommy would chase her. The other little girls got up to help their mommy, but the mommy told them to sit down again. The second littlest one wouldn't, so the mommy took her hand and led her back to the table. The littlest girl saw that and decided it would be a good time to toddle halfway to the table and then lie down on the floor on her front. Her mommy saw this and said, "You silly goose!" and picked up her littlest girl so that the littlest girl's little feet hung down and I could see the dusty bottoms of the littlest girl's little white socks.

Then the cash register lady came out from behind the enormous dessert case with our bags of food. My roommate was already getting into her car when I realized that the cash register lady had forgotten to put the one last fancy red velvet cupcake in my bag even though the receipt stapled to the bag said I'd paid two dollars for it. It wasn't in my roommate's bag either, so I went back in and said to the cash register lady, "I asked if I could have the red velvet cupcake, but it isn't my bag even though the receipt says I paid for it!"

"Oh!" said the cash register lady. "Remember those people who were just in here?" (She meant the people who looked like they were in their early twenties. I hadn't noticed that they had already left because I had been looking at the baby girl who had been toddling around but was now sitting with her family.) The cash register lady said, "Well, they had actually already called ahead to reserve the cupcake, and I forgot to tell you that."

"They reserved the cupcake!" I said. "I've never heard of such a thing!" Have you ever heard of such a thing? It seems like a very strange thing to me, to call ahead to reserve a cupcake.

I could hardly believe what the cash register lady had just told me so I said, "They reserved a cupcake?" (with a question sound at the end). The cash register lady nodded. "But I paid for it!" I said.

"I know," the cash register lady said. "I'm very sorry. I can put the money back on your card, or you can have something else."

I didn't want to give the cash register lady my credit card again in case she was just a crazy person who only wanted to charge me for more delicious treats that other people had already reserved for themselves by special telephone pre-order, so I asked if I could have two cookies instead. "You can have as many as you want 'cuz I feel so bad," the cash register lady said, but I only asked for a snickerdoodle and a cowboy cookie because I don't like to take things I haven't paid for, even if there is a ten cent difference in favor of the establishment, which, in this case, there was.

The cash register lady gave me my snickerdoodle and my cowboy cookie, and I thanked her and went back to my roommate's car. When we got home, my roommate went into what was originally called "the common room" but which my roommate has recently begun calling "my room" in order to watch her favorite television show on my seven-hundred-dollar television, while I set my food on the kitchen table and turned on my roommate's two-hundred-fifty-dollar kitchen television so I could watch "Raising Hope". At that very moment on "Raising Hope", the patriarch of the Chance family, Burt Chance, was devising a plot to free MawMaw from the state-run nursing home that involved seventy-five red velvet cupcakes. The Chance family's imaginary red velvet cupcakes didn't look nearly as delicious as the fancy red velvet cupcake I'd been sold at the bakery/restaurant (but didn't get to take home with me) had looked, but they were still delicious-looking enough to remind me of the aforementioned cupcake that had been so close to being mine. So that was another strange thing.

I ate my healthy vegetarian meal and watched as the Chance family did a lot of silly things to try and get their MawMaw back. My healthy vegetarian meal was pretty good, even if it did cost me almost ten dollars. When it was time for a show called "Ben and Kate", I took the fancy red velvet cupcake-replacing cookies out of their little paper bag. Both the snickerdoodle and the cowboy cookie were very gross and stale. They made me so sad that I couldn't even enjoy the zany new "Ben and Kate" television show, so I turned the TV off and came here to my room to write this story in my blog.

The end.