“How can this be a dress? It’s barely a shirt.” Eloise had one hand reaching to massage the back of her neck and the other tucked in her pant’s pocket, this was a rehearsed stance that made her feel very above it.
Skye examined the garment in the mirror, tilting her head to attempt a different angle perspective. “I’m not really sure, maybe it’s got, like, hidden lengths or something. You know? Like it’s a shirt but then you tug on the right fold and bam! Dress-age.”
Eloise blinked, she didn’t quite understand, but didn’t feel like getting into it. If she wanted to wear a dress that looked like a headband, she supposed that was totally her prerogative. “Are you getting it then? We should go soon.”
“What? I thought we were going to go out.” Skye was still staring into the mirror, sliding her eyes from dress to body, body to dress. Her chest was doing a tilting, thrusting thing that Eloise started to back away from. She wanted to take a bath and eat a really big bowl of popcorn.
“Yeah, but I dunno I’m feeling kind of sick.” She sniffed for emphasis, dabbing at her dry eyes.
Skye stepped away from her reflection walking to the register, “Aw but you, me, Phillip, Penny, and Daniel were going to go to Blazin’ Burger, remember?”
Eloise remembered, she wanted to shake Skye until the few remaining brain cells fell out her nose and then she’d use the hollow head as a trick-or-treat bag for her silent tears. No she did not want to go out with Penny and Daniel and Phil.
“You guys go, I’d just be a fifth wheel anyway.”
Skye’s forehead crinkled in dull concern, “Stop, it’s never like that.”
Eloise knew full well that it was exactly like that. Everyone did the footsy dance but her at these god awful meetups. The only time her foot had been acknowledged, Daniel was just mistaking it for Skye’s. She tried not to think about it most of the time, her prince was coming and it was just a matter of when. Going out with two couples was horrible for her psyche and faith in her knight in shining Brooks Brothers. No she would not be going to Blazin’ freakin Burger.
“I guess I’m just not feeling well.”
“Aw, okay but we’ll miss you!” Skye had discarded the dress and was smacking grape glossed lips on her phone camera. Eloise doubted that this was true.
Skye leaned over and hugged her. She smelled like grape and figs, a poorly set fruit bowl. “Text me!”
Eloise nodded, already seeing a bathtub filling with hot water, the kind that made your skin tingle with the soft heat.
      The outside air was stuffed with the sweaty skin and frizzy hair of pedestrians. Midtown manhattan was a dumping ground for tourists in aloha shirts and liberty hats. Climbing down the ladder of Hell,  it rested just above people who yelled at another person’s child and mouthbreathers. Prince Charming would never be here, surely he was downtown buying Moo Shu Pork. Then he’d give it to her; she really liked Moo Shu Pork.
        Eloise turned right on 8th avenue heading for the train. She assumed her mom wouldn't let her uber it, since she’s thrown up in the last one she'd ordered. It was just throw up, how hard was it to clean? Apparently five hundred dollars worth of hard and it was coming out of the card on file at uber headquarters. She imagined that their headquarters was a really big car that they all ate coffee in, probably spilled it too, but no one was charged they just skipped around going ‘tra la la.’
         She’d been 16 for several months now and she hadn’t gotten to do nearly as much as she’d expected to do. In all the books she read about teenage girls, something really big happened right about now in their life. They discovered that they had magic powers, or their boyfriend turned out to be a demon hunter.
“There is a Brooklyn bound 3 express train arriving in 2 minutes.”
Of course that sort of thing never happens in real life, and that’s why books are a bit like LSD, but she still held out hope for the aha! moment where she became a vampire or her friend group became a sitcom. Right now all she had was the Blazin’ Burger Bunch, a less fun version of the Brady Bunch, definitely minus the funny.
“There is a Brooklyn bound 3 express train approaching the station.”
She stood up with the rest of the cattle staring into the black tunnel--this was not a metaphorical tunnel. 
They all boarded the train together, Eloise felt stringy hair poke her cheek and a meaty hand palm her knees, she jerked away hoping it had been an accident. Everyone had a pantsuit but her, she was wearing cargo pants and a lemon yellow crop top that said: This is what a feminist looks like--it had been an impulse buy when she’d been on a matriarchy kick. Eloise felt nauseous thinking about the everyday trek these people made from home to work and back again. They would arrive home to a family dinner of tofu dogs or gluten free pizza--some delicious comfort food that the family unit had destroyed, and then they'd go to sleep dreaming about property tax and the new Ritz Carleton in Uruguay (that's oo-roo-gwie). Then the pantsuit went back on (in another color though!) and so did the high interest savings account. After college, this is what she and everyone she knew would be working towards. But what had happened to the journey? You don’t read a book for the ending, or eat a sandwich for the last bite. If everyone was waiting to die then no one was living, Eloise wanted to live.
Of course she did want the husband and the kids, the job and the money, change was a constant frenemy. But the idea of this being her life? She didn't want the monotonous pattern that all upper middle class families skipped through in a field of daisies. This was the dream that filled her with equal parts dread and singed excitement.
The doors opened on the Grand Army Plaza station and most of the suits and pantsuits piled out with her. If she shut one eye, then she could imagine that they were miniature magritte paintings with beige apple heads.
Her house was silent as a mouse--but mice weren’t that quiet, just small really--and dark as something that was really black (a black hole? A forest at night?). Images of naked dancing to Madonna in a rarely empty house seductively flashed through her mind, but she decided to take a bubble bath instead. This way she’d still be naked, but she could mope and feel sorry for her social life as well, Eloise was really good at combining her interests.
Eloise poured bubble bath into the tub. She stared at it for a moment as the slippery liquid slithered like snot in the water, wasn’t it supposed to be white and foamy? She’d never used bubble bath before, so maybe it was a misconception. She waited until the bath was three quarters full with hot water, sitting naked with her chin to the cool edge of the tub and watching the water rise.
The steam curled up from the slippery tub. She wrinkled her nose, it smelled weirdly acidic. Eloise reached for her bubble bath to examine its scent. She glared at the bottle, it was her old acne face soap. She remembered that she didn’t have any bubble bath and had poured the contents of the idle white container by the side of the bath into the tub. This was most likely early onset crazy cat lady disease, trying not to die before your cats would and skipping baths cause you were freakin’ stupid.
Eloise opened the drain and turned on the shower pipe. She showered fast and dragged pajamas onto her water slicked body. Today hadn’t been that bad in the venn diagram of bad days where you get to the meaty center of all those circles and you have yourself a real bad day, no plague or murder or cystic acne and she could call it a plus. Eloise curled around the soft detergent of her pillow and shut her eyes. There was always tomorrow to meet her prince, to be happy with her friends, to buy bubble bath. She smiled against her mattress, tomorrow would be better, because it does get better, it does.