The Suit

There’s this guy sitting outside the building in a dark suit, hair slicked back, and he starts talking to us as we’re passing. His voice is hard to make out, everything slow and deliberate, and he’s telling us he hasn’t eaten in days. His hands are moving like he’s pulling the words out of the air. I tell him we’re broke, we’re students, I say it without thinking about it. We were heading to McDonald’s. Of course we were.

He keeps talking as we walk—nobody has money, everybody just passes by. I hear him but I don’t turn around.

In line at the counter, something shifts. I catch Mona’s eye and she’s already looking at me like she knows exactly what I’m about to do. There’s this second where I can feel the actual weight of what just happened. So I count out the change in my palm and ask for two cheeseburgers. We didn’t need them. I wasn’t even hungry. But it felt like something, like maybe we were actually going to do the decent thing.

By the time we get back to the building, he’s gone. We stand there with the bag getting cold in our hands, and it occurs to me that the whole thing was pointless anyway. The guilt didn’t fix anything. The cheeseburgers didn’t help him. Nothing did.