Everything We Ate Was a Logo

The train was free if you’d pulled decent grades—some Deutsche Bahn summer promotion, the kind of thing that felt like a reward and was mostly just a slow regional service to Munich. Ben qualified. The girls qualified. I don’t remember the exact specifics of my own situation.

We had no plan beyond being in the city. Lydia, Betty, Bianca, Ben, me. Breakfast at Burger King. Lunch at McDonald’s. Dinner at Pizza Hut—three different logos, one continuous afternoon of not spending money on food so we could spend it on other things. There’s something deeply teenage about that logic that I still find perfectly reasonable.

The girls disappeared into Orsay and Pimkie for a while. I stood outside and looked at my phone, which in 2005 meant actually holding it and having nothing to check. Saturn happened at some point. And then Neo Tokyo, which was the real destination—a shop in the city center packed with J-Pop imports, anime merchandise, and CDs you couldn’t find anywhere within a hundred kilometers of where we lived. I bought three or four, went slightly over budget, felt nothing about it. That’s what Neo Tokyo is for.

A good day. Nothing remarkable happened. We took the train home.