Brooklyn Girls

by Gemma Burgess

  I know Angie is giving me this as a good luck card, but as a truck design, it’s perfect. Silly and charming and cool—the ideal antidote to the hyper-glamorous logos of all the food trucks I saw at the Brooklyn Flea.

  She’s so talented. I wish she still took art seriously.

  Then I see my phone. I left it on my bed all day, which is completely unlike me. I have three texts.

  From Jonah: Hey, princess, wanna come join us at Seersucker? Bianca and I are here!

  Urgh.

  From Mike: How’s your weekend treated you? How’s that pink truck? How about that drink? x

  Double urgh.

  From a mystery number: Hey. I’ll be over at 7 pm next Sunday night for the first collection. Look forward to catching up! Cosmo.

  Isn’t Cosmo friendly! Imagine if I end up buddies with my moneylender, how about that?

  I don’t have the energy to shower, or brush my teeth, or anything. I have never, ever been this tired but I still need to paint Toto with the new SkinnyWheels name and heart designs.

  Mentally counting backward I figure I probably need to be on the road by 9:30 A.M. in order to find a good spot, so I need the paint job to be done and drying by 8:30 A.M., and I need to load the truck, and I really need to shower because I don’t think I did today though I can’t even remember, and that means forty minutes to blow-dry my hair, and I haven’t done any laundry, and I don’t have any clean panties, and I need to pick up napkins and maybe some bottled water and diet soda, and I need to get change for the cash register, and oh, damnit, I don’t even have a cash register so I need to leave Rookhaven by 8:00 A.M.

  I set my alarm for 5:30. And then fall—no, crash—to sleep.

  CHAPTER 10

  “Would you buy a low-fat, low-carb, high-protein salad from a pink truck called Toto?” I shout through the truck window at eight the next morning.

  “I so would!” calls Coco, waving at me from the front stoop. “Good luck!”

  “Go, ladybitch, go!” shouts Angie, lighting a cigarette. “Give me a woo!”

  “Uh … woo!” I shout, trying to put Toto in gear. She grumbles for a few extra seconds, and for a moment I worry my career is over before it’s even started, then coughs to life.

  “Woo!” I say again, more authoritatively this time, throwing a fist punch out the window as I drive down Union Street. It’s Monday morning, and I am ready to work!

  Toto looks great. I wrote “SkinnyWheels” on her sides in bright red paint, and dotted her with hearts just like Angie’s drawing. She looks girly and funny, but not schmaltzy. Sort of dilapidated and effortlessly cool. How Brooklyn.

  The radio kicks on, and finds one of my favorite songs, “Here It Goes Again” by OK Go. I kind of like not being able to tune Toto’s radio: it’s like leaving my musical choices in the hands of fate. Or maybe Toto chooses for me.

  I’ve missed driving. Julia taught me at Brown (a serious test of our friendship) and then let me borrow her car. She had a little brown VW Beetle we called the Poomeister. It died, tragically, in a confusing diesel-versus-unleaded accident last year. (Hey. It could have happened to anyone.) Anyway, I can’t wait to sell my salads and—

  Bang!

  What the hell was that? I screech to a halt. That was a damn loud bang, it sounded like a gunshot. I think. Like I would know.

  “Did you hear that, Toto?”

  Everything is silent.

  I start driving again. What’s that whiffle-whiffle sound? It sounds like—

  “You blew a tire!” shouts a voice.

  I slam on the brakes again. On the sidewalk is a woman walking with a little girl and boy. The little boy is crying, probably because of that banging sound. I wonder what it was.

  “Your back tire is blown!” she shouts again. I look closer. I know them!

  “Lina!” I say. “Hi!” I get out of the car and cross over to them. “Hi, Pia! Hi, Gabe!” Lina is the woman who tipped me that two hundred dollars at the restaurant! It seems like forever since I met them at Bartolo’s, but it was only Friday.

  “You’re moonlighting as a food trucker now?” she says, laughing. “Look guys! It’s Pia from our pizza place!”

  “Is there a gun?” The boy is still crying. Pia is shyly hiding behind her mom, peeking out at me. I wink at her as Lina comforts Gabe.

  “No, honey, it was the tire on the truck! It popped, like a really big balloon.”

  Finally, it sinks in. “Sh … ish kebabs! My tire!” I say, remembering the kids. “I don’t know how to change a tire!”

  “There’s probably a spare in the truck, right?” says Lina. I make an anguished search-me face, and she laughs. We all walk to the back of the truck, and I remember something Francie, the former owner, mentioned: everything “else” is in a trapdoor underneath the floor of the food truck.

  “I’ll help you,” Lina says ten minutes later, when we have the tire and jack lying next to the truck on the road. “It can’t be that hard.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, I’m sure you have better things to do.”

  “Hey, I’m free all day. I’m taking a Mommy Day from work,” she says cheerfully. “Kids, you want to help Pia with her truck for a little while?”

  “Yeaaah!”

  Lina seems to be the kind of mom who can say anything in an excited voice and her kids will squeal with enthusiasm.

  For a second, I stare at the bedraggled blown tire, and the huge spare one (seriously, what do those things weigh? A hundred pounds?) next to it. The jack looks like a torture contraption. I have no idea what to do.

  Then, a lightbulb moment. I take out my phone, go to YouTube, type in “how to change a truck tire,” and watch the video. It’s pretty straightforward. Hubcaps, lug nuts (heehee), jack …

  “I would never have thought of that,” Lina says, gesturing to the phone. “Seriously, that’s impressive work.”

  I can’t help laughing. Nothing I’ve ever done has ever been called “impressive work.”

  “So, why are you driving a food truck, anyway?”

  As I change the tire, I tell her about my food truck idea, leaving out the fired-for-naked-table-dancing-with-Captain-Morgan and borrowing-money-from-a-guy-in-a-pawnshop bits. I say, instead, that I wanted to do it because I can’t get a job as I’m only a graduate.

  “Ah, the no experience, no job/no job, no experience catch-twenty-two,” she says. “I remember that.”

  “Yeah, it seems bananas that after four years at college, I’m not even qualified to do Starbucks runs … but there you have it.”

  “I remember that stage,” she says. “It’s really hard. Starting adult life is tough, but everyone tells you it’s going to be so easy after college.”

  “Exactly!” I say. She’s being so nice to me that I want to cry. Typical.

  “SkinnyWheels. It’s a great idea, killer USP.”

  I have no idea what a USP is. “Thanks!”

  “So, you must be passionate about food, huh?”

  “Not really,” I say. “I mean, I love to eat and I love going to restaurants and everything, but cooking has never been my thing. But I’m passionate about this idea, because it’s mine, and no one else is doing it. And I think people want it.”

  “Spoken like a true entrepreneur.”

  Once the tire is changed, I offer them each a free pumpkin brownie, on the house (uh … truck). Pia and Gabe have been singing made-up songs to us for the past half hour, which is pretty damn adorable.

  “Listen,” says Lina as I climb back into the truck. “If you need anything, you should call me. I mean it.” She hands over her business card. “Good luck today. I have a feeling you’ll be a big success. And if you happen to be outside my office one day, text me. I’ll make sure everyone in my building knows about it.”

  “I will, thank you!” I say. I’m elated. “And thank you, again, for the amazing tip last week.”

  She smiles and shakes her head. “Anytime.”

  This is it, I think, as I cruise over t
he Brooklyn Bridge. Me. Going to Manhattan with my food truck. I’m too excited to even be nervous about driving in the city. My city. I see girls my age walking to work, all carrying coffees and gym bags, all of us starting our adult lives with an adult job.… It’s kind of funny to think that we were all babies at the same time, we all went through the childhood stages of Elmo and American Girl and American Idol and training bras and Twilight and first kisses and first waxes, and now we’re all finally hitting adulthood.

  Go us.

  I text Julia on the way to Manhattan and reach her midtown office by 12:30. After I park down the street with surprisingly little difficulty (Ha! Suck it, Madeleine), Julia bounds over, shouting at the top of her lungs.

  “Oh, golly! SkinnyWheels! This is the best food truck in the whole world!”

  Glaring at her, I put the hand brake on, and head around the back of the truck to open up.

  “Line up!” Julia is bossing someone. “Behind me. Go! Go!”

  I place ten of each salad on one side of the counter, stack the dressings next to them and the brownies on the other side, and then open up the serving window.

  Julia reaches up and helps me arrange the knives and forks, keeping up her running commentary the whole time.

  “I can’t believe I’m helping SkinnyWheels set up for the day! This is the coolest thing I’ve ever done! I am so psyched! Someone high-five me!”

  I try to smile, but I’m suddenly so nervous, I can hardly breathe. I have no idea what I’m doing. I can’t run a food truck. What if this doesn’t work? What next? And how the hell will I pay back ten thousand dollars plus another thousand every Sunday for the next six weeks?

  “May I take your order, ma’am?” I ask Julia, my voice tiny and high. I look behind her and see a line of two people patiently waiting. A line? Customers!

  I can do this.

  “I’ll have one chicken salad with Julia dressing because it looks uh-mazing, and a low-fat brownie, please!” Julia is practically shouting. God, she’s a bad actress. “Wow! This is gonna be the best lunch, ever!”

  “That’ll be six dollars for the salad, fifty cents for the dressing, and two dollars for the brownie, making a total of”—I pause, silently counting as fast as I can, yes, I know it’s pathetic but I’m shit at math—“eight fifty, ma’am.”

  Julia hands me a twenty dollar bill. “Keep the change.”

  “No, I can’t do that,” I say firmly. “You need change.”

  “Thank you!” she says, sashaying away before I can force the money on her. I hear her shouting at the top of her voice again, “A salad from SkinnyWheels! Holy moly! This is super-awesome!”

  “Hey,” I say to the next guy in line, a spectacled geek. “What can I get you?”

  “I’ll have the turkey salad, the Kim dressing, and three string cheeses,” he says.

  I see two other people join the line, and stifle the urge to punch the air.

  “What’s the calorie count on the chicken salad?” asks a pinched-looking woman with frizzy hair.

  “Uh, I, um—I’m getting them tonight. I’ll have them this time tomorrow.”

  “Then I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  The next person asks for a chicken salad and a low-fat brownie. Then I sell a turkey salad. Then two brownies and a turkey. Suddenly, the line is five people long.

  “What’s the fat count in the dressing?”

  “What’s your Twitter account?”

  “Are you on Facebook?”

  “What’s your Web site?”

  “Do you take requests?”

  “Can I get a salad with no cheese?”

  “Why is this brown?” says one large redheaded woman, pointing at something in her salad box.

  I peer in. “It’s avocado.”

  “You should put lemon juice on it. Then it won’t go brown. That’s disgusting.”

  “Okay…” (Rude!) “Would you like to swap it?”

  “No. This is still a better value than the deli across the street.”

  “Thank you, ma’am!” I say. “Next customer!”

  “Where is the nearest Chop’t?”

  “Seriously?” I say to the guy who asked that. He’s a banker in a suit, mid-twenties, an ex-jock I’d guess, the kind who stopped playing sports in sophomore year of college and put on fifty pounds and now tries to keep his weight down by eating “clean.” I know his type.

  “Yeah,” he says, smirking at me.

  “I don’t know that. And if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. Their salad dressings are loaded with hidden fats and calories and sugar, anyway.”

  “They are?”

  I have no idea. “Yes.”

  “Your salads are kind of boring.”

  “Well, they dance if you ask nicely.”

  “How do you make the low-fat brownies?”

  “That’s a secret.” He raises an eyebrow. “Okay. It’s made with pumpkin.”

  “Seriously? Explain to me how pumpkin can possibly substitute for good old-fashioned butter.” Is he flirting with me? I don’t have time for this. “Where are you from?”

  “I’m from Brooklyn. If you’re not going to order anything, step aside, hungry customers are waiting.”

  “Feisty.” The guy smirks and ambles away. My words are echoing in my head. I’m from Brooklyn. Well, I am.

  By 2:20, I’ve sold thirty chicken salads, thirty turkey salads, forty-eight brownies (well, forty-five, if you don’t include the three I gave to Lina and her kids), and sixty-four string cheeses. I forgot to get water and diet soda, but I’ll have it tomorrow. And I’ve taken requests for vegetarian salads, and more kinds of low-fat desserts, and I’ll get a URL and start a Facebook page and Twitter account tonight. Easy.

  Best of all, I’ve got six hundred dollars in cash in my cash register (okay, it’s an old Barbie lunchbox that I found in the kitchen in Rookhaven).

  That night, inspired by my successes of the day, I write a little something for the Facebook page to explain to customers why SkinnyWheels is so special.

  WELCOME TO SKINNYWHEELS

  Everything we make is baked, never fried. We try not to add sugar, we never add sweeteners, and we would not touch corn syrup with a ten-foot pole. We also don’t add salt unless absolutely necessary, and we avoid gluten. So when you eat our salads and snacks, you know you’re getting just what you ordered.

  The bottom line? We love food. But we also love our bodies. And we don’t want to choose between them.

  And lastly, I have to do the calorie counts. It seems like every damn person in Manhattan counts calories. So I am going to weigh and measure all the salad ingredients for tomorrow, estimate the calories with the help of good ol’ Google, and then add them all up.

  The only problem is that I can’t do it.

  My numbers aren’t working out. Only 78 calories for the chicken salad, though awesome to imagine, just can’t be right.

  I do the numbers again. This time I get 743 calories. That can’t be right, either.… That would have to be a deep-fried chicken breast, stuffed with lard and then rolled in chocolate.

  I place my forehead on the kitchen table and make a moaning sound for a few seconds. Then I bang my forehead against the table.

  This kind of cheers me up, so I do it again.

  And then one more time for luck.

  “Well, that looks normal,” says a voice. I look up. It’s Madeleine. “What’s going on?”

  “I can’t do math,” I say quietly.

  “Well, we knew that,” she says, grabbing some leftover chicken and broccoli stir-fry from the fridge. I sigh. Typical bitchy Madeleine comment. “Why don’t I do it for you? Math is my thing.”

  I’m stunned. “Are you sure? It’s calorie counting.”

  “Oh, that’s totally my thing.” Madeleine sits opposite me, doling out the stir-fry into two bowls, and hands me a fork with the kind of easy familiarity that people have when they’re, you know, friends. “I calorie count whenever I’m bored.”

>   “That sounds … fun?” I’m dubious. Not to mention stunned that she’s talking to me. “I’m trying to work out the chicken salad.”

  “Four ounces of chicken breast? A hundred and twenty calories. No skin, baked, right?”

  “Right.”

  “That’s one-twenty.…”

  “Okay…” I start scribbling it down.

  “The vegetables, plus the reduced-fat feta, plus … okay, that’s one-ninety-four.”

  I’m staring at her, openmouthed. “How do you know all this?”

  “I don’t know.… I learned them in high school. It’s like riding a bike, you never forget.”

  “But you never diet.”

  She pauses. “I guess my mom—our home life—is a bit, uh, dramatic. When I was a kid I did times tables in my head to keep myself calm. Calories were just a step up. Counting is calming.”

  “I can honestly say I have never thought that,” I say. Madeleine looks at me and cracks up, and I start laughing, too. This is the first time we’ve laughed together since freshman year. Since the night of I Hate You, Pia.

  “Okay, okay, enough messing around. Hand me the next salad,” she says, forking some broccoli into her mouth.

  By the time we’ve finished, I’m almost tearful with gratitude.

  “This would have taken me all night. Thank you so, so much,” I say.

  “No problem,” she says. “I actually came in here to see if you needed help with your numbers. Profits and losses and all that. It’s not hard, but there’s a knack to it.”

  “Can you figure out a way for me to make more money without cloning myself and Toto?”

  Madeleine thinks for a second. “Put your prices up by a dollar. Charge seven dollars for the salads, one dollar for the dressing, and three dollars for the desserts. And make the sides three dollars, too.”

  “But what if people who bought from me today come back tomorrow?”

  “Launch special. It’s time to get serious.” She shrugs. “People can put up or shut up.”

  I write everything down as we finish the stir-fry.

  “Why are you being so nice to me?” The words are out before I can stop myself. “You’re never nice to me. Not since…”