Munificent

This is the first of three short stories following a brief part of the lives of two mismatched best friends.

I sat at the table farthest from the cafeteria doors, alone, waiting for my best friend to join me. I was fine with being alone, fine with people inching away from me in the food line, fine with them avoiding my eyes.

I wasn’t exactly a sight for sore eyes; I’d made sure of that. My choppy hair was dyed jet-black, and I wore reading glasses big enough to hide the half of my face that wasn’t already covered by my violet fringe.

I saw Muni walk over to our table with her tray filled. Now she’s what one would consider a sight to behold. Though she’s not as anorexically skinny as yours truly, she’s fit, and pretty, a natural redhead. Also, she’s ridiculously good-natured and altruistic. Even when she’s nothing left to give, she just keeps on giving. Sometimes I think she only hangs out with me out of generosity...

“Hey, freak,” she grinned cheekily, propping onto the empty bench across from mine.

I beamed. As I said, sometimes I get the feeling I’m her long-term charity case... and then she goes ahead and removes all doubts with a single word. Freak.

“Hello, Muriel,” I teased, knowing that using her given name was bound to irritate her. She stuck out her tongue at me before taking a monstrous and wholly unladylike bite out of her apple. “Did you know you’re part pig?” I asked her politely, observing her grotesque eating habits. The apple was gone. How could someone so petite just inhale food like that?

“Did you know George from the soup kitchen gave me two tickets to the Cirque du Soleil?” she said as casually as she could manage while choking on a mouthful of salad. Which made me promptly spit out the gulp of coke I’d taken.

“What?!” We’ve been dreaming of going to the Cirque since we were ten!

“Yeah, apparently, a contortionist who used to be homeless used our soup kitchen when she was a teen, and wanted to give something back to George, for running it. He knew we wanted to go, so he treated us, for all our hard work. I would’ve said no, of course, had it not been the Cirque. Front row, baby,” she sounded like we had amazing things like these happen to us every day, and I gave a delighted laugh. We didn’t think we could afford to go to the Cirque until we were thirty, at least, but here it was happening.

I guess all those times Muni made me do volunteer work with her weren’t for naught, after all.

I was speechless. For once.

Muni raised her bottle of water ceremoniously, and winked.

“What goes around comes around, freak,” she told me cheerfully. “Told you so.”

I looked through my glasses at her, just barely containing my joy. She’d told me dozens of times. Karma.

I touched my can of coke to her bottle.

“You did,” I admitted, and we drank to it.

Author's Note

This is part of the three part story we had to write for English class last year, the topic being 'personality traits'. I love looking up new words, so I named all three stories with words I hadn't known prior to writing them, and actually based my writing on the new word (for example, this one's title is Munificent, and Muni is also the nickname of one of the friends, the one I'm using the story to describe as 'generous')