Escape From Norriswood

CHAPTER EIGHT

Inside, Rosalyn found the guy hunched over a newspaper, sitting at a booth in the corner, away from the wide, front windows of the dining room.

"So you decided you were hungry after all," he said, as Rosalyn approached him. "Here, let me know what you two want, and I'll go up and order for us." He slipped a menu onto the table between where Rosalyn and Tara sat.

Rosalyn ran her eyes down the familiar specials she thought now she had been addicted to as a kid. When she told the guy she wanted the onion rings, extra Parmesan, and the deluxe Barney's homemade bacon and mushroom burger, with the locally foraged mushrooms, she felt her eye begin to twitch – how was it possible to be ordering a meal she grew up on in a place that couldn't possibly exist?

Terry left them for a couple of moments, and Rosalyn watched from the booth as he handed the waitress behind the front counter their orders on a napkin he'd doodled them on. He came back to them grinning, some joke passed between him and the waitress.

"You haven't told us your name yet," Tara said.

Rosalyn noticed the way his cheekbones creeped out from behind his mouth when he grinned. "You can call me Terry," he said.

Then Rosalyn spied the tattoo poked into the skin of his hand. Just below the knuckles, a snail shell spiraled, and beneath that a single word imprinted in dark green.

"Not one of those people who hates tattoos, are ya?" Terry said.

Rosalyn snapped her head up. She noticed how his irises seemed to fade into that same shade of green, as Tara's did. She wondered if he knew she noticed this.

"You're just shy then," Terry said.

"She's just hungry," Tara said.

The smells of the grease-laden food lay heavy on the air now, and Rosalyn thought she could hear her burger sizzling on the frying pan in the kitchen. Her head felt light, like it might float away from her body if she didn't put any calories into it soon.

The waitress emerged from the swinging double doors of the kitchen, plates propped up on her open palms, plates tucked into the crevices of her elbows, and onto her forearms. "Tuck your heads down, girls," Terry said. "No eye contact."

"Bacon and mushroom?" she asked, and Terry took the plate from her and slid it along the table towards Rosalyn.

When all the food was on the table, and the waitress had gone back to the kitchen, Terry said he needed some tartar sauce, and got up and walked up to the counter.

Next to Rosalyn, Tara squirted a line of ketchup onto her fries. Rosalyn watched her swirl the ketchup around itself, like a spiral, like Terry's snail shell.

Terry came back to the table, and scooted onto the seat across from them, the steam from his plate of fried onion rings and hot dogs wafting up into his face.

"So remember when you said we could ask you anything we wanted?" Rosalyn said. Terry nodded, his teeth clamping down on a bite of hotdog.

"Well, question one:," she said. "Are we in Norriswood right now?"

Terry nodded his head a few times, but Rosalyn couldn't tell if it was his way of processing the question, or just signaling that he liked the taste of his hotdog. She waited for him to swallow, and fished an onion ring out of the heap mounted on her plate. She found herself dunking the ring into the ketchup on Tara's fries, dragging it through the spiral of ketchup.