Besties in a nightmare scenario

In one of my more unpleasant dreams, the check never comes.

I’m at lunch with a colleague. It’s a meeting with someone I know casually. Seated near the floor-to-ceiling window I watch people stroll along the sidewalk yards away from a marina. It is a picturesque setting, one my lunch companion misses because he is busy answering messages and checking later appointments on his cell phone. Finally our food arrives.

Cellface puts his smartphone down long enough to gaze at his $23 sandwich the size of a cupcake. He smiles.

“Oh. So, you’re still doing that I see.”

“Doing what?” he asks, not bothering to look up as he holds the phone at various angles over the food, then extends it even higher so that, presumably, his fat head is framed alongside the plate of colorful, social sustenance.

“Taking pictures of your food and you and posting it on Snappytwitbook,” I tell him. He is mugging for the camera and holding up an enthusiastic thumb.

“Yeah,” he says, surveying the pictures he has taken, frowning, then posing for more. “Need to post them ASAP for my besties. They’ve been asking me how the food is. Here, would you take a selfie of me, I want to give two thumbs up.”

“But you haven’t taken a bite.”

Cellface shrugs.

“Are you feeling me?”

“What?”

“Feeling. You know, are you experiencing all my feelings on my personal journey? Are you following me on Snappytwitbook?”

No, I tell him. “I’m not on there.”

“Why? It’s really great for your brand. Look, I have 2,203 besties.”

He hands me his phone. I refrain from telling him I stopped using the social media app because of people like him and his best friends.

I see a picture of him sitting on the edge of an unmade bed, shirtless but wearing boxer briefs.

“How’s this good for your brand?” I ask him, showing him the picture.

“Oh, it lets everyone know that even though I’m an executive I start the day the same way they do. I put my pants on one leg at a time.”

Another picture shows him on a boat wearing a ballcap backward giving a thumbs up to a beer bong.

“That says I’m still young.”

I want to remind him that he is closer to 60 than 16. I don’t.

There are hundreds of pictures of him. At parties. Reflecting on beaches. At the gym. I wonder if he is afraid he will forget what he looks like. If he won’t know who he is when he is older.

“Let’s take a selfie together,” he says. “You should really get on here. You can be my friend. We can be besties.”

The check never comes.