A phone number in a fortune cookie? I might be too drunk. Are these even numbers? I take a deep breath, raise my head level with my shoulders, and try that stupid fucking breathing technique for about nine seconds before deciding again that it’s useless.

But my vision does clear enough for me to read the fortune from the cookie, and it is definitely a phone number. What is this? Do I have to call the number for my fortune? What happened to six words that barely made sense in the broadest of situations?

You know what I’ve always wanted. Specificity from the fortune cookies. “You will get hit by a bike messenger on the second crosswalk as you walk back home. Your pants leg gets caught in his gears and he’s so goddamn jacked that he doesn’t even notice he’s got extra baggage to deliver.”

Alright, that’s obviously too long, but you get what I’m saying. But when had a fortune ever been anything but numbers? Much less a phone number. A local one, too.

In a panic that must have looked hilarious to the other diners, I whipped entire body around in my chair, for some reason coming to the conclusion that I had wandered into one of those “special” massage parlors.

And with that panic, those motions, and that thought, I had made three demonstrably racist assumptions because of a fucking fortune cookie. The wrapper on the table had an unmistakable declaration on it: “MADE IN THE USA” as a little extra dollop of “you’re an asshole.”

That’s why she left. Almost those words exactly.

“You’ve turned into an asshole.”

Turned into. Meaning assholelessness had once been a quality one could ascribe to me. Then I got a promotion at work — alright, since we’re just getting it all out there, it was more of a lateral repositioning than anything else — an suddenly I was the center of attention whether that center had to be manually redirected immediately and with great fanfare.

So she was absolutely right. But I told her that she could not be more wrong if she tried, which only reinforced the point she was going to make, but I beat her to the punch. The punch to my face. Whatever. That’s the jist. She deserves better and there’s no doubt she’ll find better.

Still fiddling with the fortune, rolling it around in my fingers, my curiosity finally gets the better of me. My vision is still a little swimmy so the last “868” part takes me more brain power than I’d really like to admit.

I hesitate for maybe half a second and start the call. It rings maybe ten times, and someone finally picks up.

“Took you long enough, Twerp,” says the voice I know on the other end.

I feel all the blood rush out of whatever body part it’s in and into someplace it shouldn’t be because whatever this feeling is cannot be good.

“Br—Bryce?” I ask.

“Who else calls you ‘twerp’, Twerp?”

No one else calls me Twerp. Not anymore.

Not since Bryce died eight years ago.