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     ‘Um. Yeah.’ He can’t decide which is worse: dopey-eyed dopey or Your Kind. He could do with some chilli fries right about now. ‘So – is she here or not?’

   “How’d you guys meet?”

     ‘What? No. No way. I never lie.’ At the back of her mind she’s thinking about how Sheila is going to stick, and it’s going to be kind of shitty because Shayla is a cool name and Sheila makes her sound like she’s someone’s fifty year old aunt and not someone’s twenty-seven year old aunt. If she points it out now (uhm, it’s Shayla, by the way, not, not Sheila, S-H-A-Y-L-A Shayla) he’s going to think she’s trying to distract him. ‘My reference is from my old boss there, you can call her if you wanna.’

Hah, never lying, as if that’s a thing people do. Vod’s neither naive nor honest enough to believe that. But he can let it slide, because he’s also not enough of a moralist to really give a shit whether Shayla lies about not lying. And he’s far too lazy to contend the point. A complex man, inarguably.    “Mmmnh.” He holds his breath, tip-toes from one foot to another and lets a gust out in one dry puff.     “-- mmmokay I’ll take your word for it. Just pull your weight and then... bedamned if you were really at KFC or not. There’s one working here on a family favour.” He means Maggie but he means Maika. “You can probably run rings ‘round the staff if you even hypothetically worked in McDonald’s.”

     ‘ — I used to work at Wingstravaganza but it closed down.’ As she’s tucking her hair away from her face behind her ear, she hurriedly adds, ‘But this place is way better anyway, so whatever.’

He doesn’t believe any real business could be named Wingstravaganza.

          ‘ I’m hearing I’m Tina and I’m going             to turn you into Skrillex. ’

   “Uh-huuuh?” And that is so beside the point. Did Skrillex pee on undercuts to mark his territory? Nuh-uh. Does Tina look like Eva Mendes just because they’re both blonde and latina? Well, like, it would be fucking awesome to look like Eva Mendes, but unfortunately no. So like, “Whatever, you’re so not seeing the big picture here. And the big picture is like, some Mona Lisa shit except it’s you with an undercut.”

     A pause while David assesses the situation, which is filled quite neatly with a soft leftwards tilt of his head. ‘Actually, sir, I am fluent in all known languages, включая, но не ограничиваясь ими русского языка.’

   “Ohhh fuck me.” That ‘ohhh’ has a lot more variance in tone and defeat than its capitalization would lead you to believe. “вы умный печенье кекс,” he admits very, very wearily.