Max Lambert hated eating at the diner after his shift. After sizzling bacon, frying toast, and wiping sweat dripping off his forehead so it didn't get into the customers' hash, the last thing he wanted at 7PM was to spend another minute at the diner. Even if the meal was free.

He'd forego the free meal so long as it meant he could take his apron off, go straight his

Kia

Optima and carry on with his own 

life

.

Damn wasn't

food

expensive these days. He might never go back to college at this rate. He'd never get out of his parents' either. At school he never knew how expensive food was. His

financial aid

covered room and board. It was only one evening Max took a closer look at what he owed in 

student loans

that he looked at what the actual costs of his "

education

" was. That was actually the first time he looked at the bills. When a letter arrived telling him that his loan payments forgiveness period was running out. Until then he never gave it one thought.

So he really ought to accept any free meal available to him. Especially since he had worked so hard at the

diner

that in fact it wasn't a free meal but rather an earned meal. But in his mind, the money saved by eating meals at the diner wasn't enough to justify having to spend more of his life at that place.

Back at school a lot of his friends liked the diner. It reminded them of home. Most of Max's friends were juniors now and they went to diners instead of the cafeteria now that they no longer had meal plans. They thought it was cool that Max worked at a real diner in the middle of nowhere. Max played along acting like it was a pretty cool job. His friends didn't know how much he hated working there. How much he hated living with his parents. But Max tried playing it off real cool. Like he enjoyed saving money on

rent

and liked not having to study for exams.

This was the first time Max didn't know what the next step was. Until that point there was always another action to take. Another chapter. Now it seemed like miserably ever after. He couldn't live at his parents' forever could he? What was the alternative? First semester on break he thought the next step was save enough and straighten his head out enough so that he could actually commit to going back when his mental health improved.

But that mental health never did improve. At least not by the time that semester was over. There were days, weeks during that semester where he felt like things were getting better. But come the end of the semester. He realized he was back to square one. Or worse actually. He felt no better but he had also made no progress in any direction.

While in school he looked forward to having a break. Seeing old friends. Seeing his parents. After leaving school he had none of that. This caused a downward spiral of regret and inability to take action. And two years later he was still at his parents'. Working at a diner with a middleaged man named Dave Steele, who probably didn't actually have that name. Dave Steele? That had to be a fake name right?

In the Kia, Max got onto the highway and drove twenty minutes to the nearest decent sized town where they had a 

Chipotle

. He thought about how he was wasting 40 minutes roundtrip ontop of the money he had to cough up for the meal as opposed to the free one the diner would provide. Max made justifications for this all. He didn't want to go home. There was no place for him to go. So why not drive to the nearest Chipotle. Listen to podcasts and eat americanized Mexican food?