text: Girl was a big fan of Taco Bell. She was also a big fan in that she expelled copious amounts of air into the atmosphere on a daily basis. Fast food is gassy. Don’t blame her, though; she was a casualty of convenience. Fast food in general has everything a financially dependent teen needs; it’s super cheap, vaguely edible and dangerously addictive. In regions like South Asia, most Mexican food is sold as fast food (with flagrant disregard for the region’s doubtless interesting culinary history and culture), so Girl was already lost in a sea of indiscriminate sauces and refried beans by the time she reached her seat. You are correct in assuming the stereotypical loneliness and lack of social interaction, but she didn’t care (or so she thought). What she did care about was the food on her garish plastic tray and as she consumed it, it consumed another bit of her life. She loved her tacos and nachos and burritos and rice bowls much more than any human being, so alone in the oppressive décor she stayed. That is, until a predictably hot and humid afternoon in May. Girl was sitting at her favorite corner table with the L-shaped plastic seat and dealing with bean-sweat in spite of the relatively frigid air-conditioning. She twiddled her thumbs nervously while chewing her last bite. The tray in front of her was completely devoid of food; all that remained was a mass of greasy paper and empty sachets of Fire sauce with silly things written on them. She belched with unabashed satisfaction and checked her watch noisily. A quarter to three. She had entered at one p.m., so she complimented herself on her timing and her freakish metabolism. Fifteen more minutes and she could propel herself to the toilet. All the industrial deep-frying had not been kind to her stomach lining; she considered a switch to rice for a couple of months would help. A hundred milliseconds before she got up from her seat, she saw Boy. He walked in like a superstar, glistening forehead moving in time to the chart-topping hit blaring from the cheap loudspeakers and eyes fixed on the menu he wasn’t really reading. Girl stared at him with more than interest, and her heart stopped dead when she heard his timid but measured voice. “May I help you?” “Yes, I’d like a burr-” “What would you like on it, sir, *Extracheesevegnonvegsmallormedium*?” “Uh-” “Any drinks, sir? *CokeFantaMountainDew-*” Boy held up his hand. A tiny vein pulsed in his forehead. Our Romeo was about to lose his temper. The cashier noticed this and tactfully stopped in his tracks. “Can. I. Give. My. Order. Please.” “Yes sir, I am sorry. Go ahead?” “All right, please listen carefully.” Boy took a deep breath as if preparing for an important speech. His quiet tone turned authoritative; here was a man in his element. Girl could not breathe from the torrent of romantic feelings crashing into each other in her carb-fueled brain. She ignored the loud gurgling in her stomach and walked to the counter where she stood behind Boy and listened. “Okay. I need the wrap to be lightly toasted; it helps the contents sit better inside it. I noticed the other day that you guys have been adding a lot of beans and meat to the burritos lately, so please go easy on them; maybe three-fourths of a normal serving. I know you haven’t got new stocks of spicy salsa since last week’s truck strike, so it’s alright if you don’t use your reserves. Here’s what you can do; just use the topping sauce you put on your spicy loaded nachos. The reddish one with a bit of cheese in it. Not too much, just enough to give me a little spice without an overpowering heat. I’ll get that from the upstairs tissue drawer in which you hide the fire sauce sachets when your stock is low. Don’t worry, I will only use two and will pay for them if you want me to.” He took a quick breath and steadied himself once more before resuming his address. “Rice just a bit past half-cooked, all right? The beans are already mushy enough; I don’t need more gooey rice on top of it. Add the cheese from the quesadilla counter and the vegetables from the crunchwrap area, because even though you preach standardization of your raw materials, some things are very marginally superior to what you use for other items.” He grinned widely at the cashier, who was now trembling like an autumn leaf. “I’ll pay cash. Two hundred and thirty with a little box of sour cream, I believe?” The man at the counter restarted his now short-circuited brain, stopped shaking and took the money dazedly. Boy leisurely walked over to the pickup area and set a timer for three and a half minutes. The cashier disappeared into the kitchen for a few seconds and then walked out. He smiled weakly. “Your order will be ready soon, sir.” “Thank you so much!” Boy wiped his now sodden forehead with a tissue and busied himself with a small glass of water. Girl gave herself a few seconds and regained her composure. Maybe she could initiate something. She decided to try and catch Boy’s eye before his food turned up. She stood in front of the cashier and gave her favorite order; a soft taco, a plate of loaded nachos and a side of cheesy fried potatoes (Fiesta potatoes, discontinued at time of writing). She would combine them into a fully loaded semi-crunchy, semi-gooey creation; it had a good balance of flavors and textures, she found. She paid up, stood next to Boy (whose food hadn’t arrived yet) and slid her bill across the garish counter. “May I have an extra bowl and three packets of mild sauce, please?” “Sure, ma’am!” Boy frowned and looked over. Another connoisseur? He got a smile and a wink in return and was surprised. A fellow fan!? *Ding!* went his alarm. He smiled at her as he received the burrito; she pointed towards the corner table questioningly. He was overtaken with a sudden fear but with an effort, he nodded and walked over. In two minutes she joined him. The first few minutes were unsurprisingly awkward. Boy looked around and at the ceiling as if he had never seen man-made buildings before. Girl was also too shy to make conversation and decided to attempt to break the ice by preparing her meal. She looked up, said, “Give me a couple minutes, will you?” and began her work as Boy watched on in silence. He was beginning to like Girl very much indeed. But Girl was not looking at the ghost of a smile slowly moving across his face; she was busy meticulously preparing her creation. She carefully opened the taco shell and separated out just the lettuce with a practiced hand. She deftly introduced a spork to the potatoes and scraped off the cheesy yellow topping; in a few seconds all of it was in the taco shell. In went the peppers from the nachos and one packet of mild sauce. She finally looked up at him, smiled and assembled the remaining lettuce, nachos and oddments into what she called a ‘mishmás’; it was a relatively authentic name for the brand and she liked it as an appetizer salad. Once complete, she looked at him quizzically. For the first time in his life, Boy got the hint, realizing he had been invited to eat with her. It was time to appreciate their creations. He got up, went upstairs as quickly as he could while looking languid (at least, he thought he was being languid) to get the two fire sauce sachets from the secret drawer. There were only two in there; he assigned cosmic meaning to that fact. He walked back downstairs, sat down, dabbed at his forehead with a paper napkin and put his sauce sachets to the side. He gave his burrito a cursory check to see if anything had torn or was awry; everything was fine. Finally, he looked up and locked eyes with her. “Cheers.” That first bite was to them what- How does one explain it? We’ve all had that moment before. When you see a mountain for the first time, when you hear the first few seconds of music you know will change your life or when you meet your first partner; there is something indescribable about the electricity and emotion that goes through you. You seem powerless to behold anything else but also grateful that this moment is even happening. There is disbelief and mild confusion but also a profound happiness, the depth of which cannot be comprehended. Even though this was probably the thousandth time our two characters were eating their creations, it still hit them the way it did the very first time. Between chews, Boy decided to speak. “Do you remember the first time you ate here?” “Of course I do, man. Don’t you?” “Yes, obviously I do. But what I wanted to know was what you ordered.” “Ah, well, I got the crunchy taco thing, a rice bowl, a free-fill soft drink, and-” Boy chortled. “Free-fill!? How could you? How could you fill your stomach with a million glasses of those sugary, gassy-” “I didn’t know!” Girl glared at him and then laughed. “I didn’t use any sauce either. I thought the sachets were ketchup or something. But I didn’t know! And besides, it was good enough to make me come back the next week, so I was hooked anyway.” Boy laughed hard for twenty seconds, complete with lots of snorting and wheezing. Once he regained his composure, he smiled. “I’ll give you that. I just had a rice bowl with the fire sauce and I realized I never wanted to eat anywhere else every again. Especially not at home.” Girl was surprised once more. “Oh, what? Really!? You too?” Boy had a wise, weathered look on his face. “Yeah... It’s obviously why we even bother living with being addicted to this stuff. It’s not like we’d look at all this greasy and unhealthy food for happiness and fulfillment if we had households and families that provided the same thing, right? This place isn’t about the menu or the sauce. It’s where I come to feel at home. Because home isn’t that.” Girl was moved and felt a connection she hadn’t felt in a long, long time. “Yeah. I guess... Actually, let’s not talk about it. No need to ruin this place with reality. And besides, we’re here at this table eating together, right? One could even say we’re *dos guisantes en una vaina*.” She looked up to see Boy’s face overcome with emotion and a strange joy. There was a minute of silence. Then he said, “I believe the more accurate expression is s*er uña y carne*.” And the rest, as they say, is flatulent history.