Dead Famous

DAY THREE. 3.25 p.m.

Layla slammed the fridge door angrily. “Hey right, I mean, yeah, I mean, come on, OK? Who’s been eating my cheese?”

“Oh yeah, right. That was me,” said David. “Isn’t that cool?” David always spoke to people in the sort of soft, faintly superior tone of a man who knows the meaning of life but thinks that it’s probably above everybody else’s head. Normally he talked to people from behind because he tended to be massaging their shoulders, but when he addressed them directly he liked to stare right into their eyes, fancying his own eyes to be hypnotic, limpid pools into which people would instinctively wish to dive.

“I mean, I thought it would be cool to have a little of your cheese,” he said.

“Oh, yeah,” Layla replied. “Half of it, actually… But that’s totally cool. I mean totally, except you will replace it, right?”

“Sure, yeah, absolutely, whatever,” said David, as if he was above such matters as worrying about whose cheese was whose.

“Later,” said Andy the narrator, “in the girls’ room, Layla confides in Dervla about how she feels about the incident involving the cheese.”

Layla and Dervla lay on their beds.

“It’s not about the cheese,” Layla whispered. “It’s so not about the cheese. It’s just, you know, it was my cheese.”