Disclaimer: I don't own RENT or any of the characters or anything. This is just for fun.
Mimi was a believer in slow mornings, mornings that started with stretching her feet, turning over, tucking the covers up to her chin and checking to see if sleep would be visiting once more. Failing a morning nap, she spent the next fifteen minutes lying still, stretching, and generally waiting for her entire body to wake up. Only then did she stand, dress and leave the bedroom.
Mark stood at the counter; he tipped over a milk carton and poured something the looked very like lumpy curdled milk into a bowl, then swallowed a spoonful. Mimi pulled a face. "What are you eating?" she asked, mentally composing a list of thick white substances. The list began, 'Off milk, spooj,' neither of which Mimi thought Mark would eat. As poor as they were, hunger was better than that.
Mark tilted his head. He looked at his breakfast, then again at Mimi, his glasses wobbling. "Cottage cheese," he said.
"But…" Mimi paused. She hardly knew Mark. They partied together, lived together, and she thought he had held back her hair as she vomited once, but they never sat together and had a conversation. She wouldn't know where to open. Mark was a middle-to-upper-class white Jewish-boy-turned-artist who had gone to a reputable college; she was a dancer with a positive attitude. "That's a milk container," Mimi observed, pointing an accusatory finger at the carton.
Mark nodded. "Yeah," he said, and pushed his glasses up on his nose.
To Mimi, the imbalance was clear. Mark seemed not to notice, so she explained, "Cottage cheese doesn't come in a milk container."
"Uh, it does when you live with Roger," Mark said.
"Um…" Mimi took a deep breath. "So… where's the milk?" she wondered.
Without a second's hesitation, Mark produced an old soda bottle, capped and filled with milk. "Coffee?"
"Please."
He poured her a cup, then passed it and the soda bottle across the counter. "Um… he never said why," Mark said apologetically. "Roger just sort of… started rearranging things. Milk in soda bottles, cottage cheese in milk cartons, that's been the pattern for years. It's never made sense to me. I mean, we have condoms in the freezer."
Mimi swallowed half the coffee in one gulp. "Those don't… get used?" she asked.
Mark shook his head. "No. It could be metaphoric… I mean, I hope it's metaphoric. I don't… know much about Roger's sex life… except what I hear, and I've never heard, 'Ow, it's too cold.' And, it would hurt. I mean, I don't remember my bris but it's a sensitive area--"
Throughout this speech, as Mark babbled on apparently unaware that he was discussing his penis and Roger's in unnecessary anecdotal detail, Mimi grew more and more embarrassed. One of her first real conversations with this boy, and it focused on sex. "Mark?"
"Hm?"
"Just… eat your spooj."
"What?"
"Cottage cheese."
Mark looked at the cottage cheese, then again at Mimi, his stomach twisting into knots. "That doesn't look like…"
Roger emerged from the bathroom, still damp from the shower, buttoning his jeans. "Hey," he said. "What're you talking about?" He kissed Mimi's neck. "Anything fun?"
"No, baby, nothing's fun without you," Mimi replied.
"Rog… cottage cheese?" Mark asked, offering the bowl with a frog-like grin. Roger could not understand why neither of his flatmates would eat cottage cheese after that day, why they always asked him to, or why they laughed when he did. But Roger liked cottage cheese, as he made abundantly clear, asking, "Why is that funny? It's tasty! And it has a great texture."
Mark and Mimi laughed themselves ill.
Fin!
