damn french ... fries

I never want French fries until I see someone else enjoying them. I smugly choose a salad, smiling at the checkout girl, who looks at my tray and thinks, “Wow. She’s eating a salad. She looks like someone I would like to know.”
No matter that this salad is literally swimming in French dressing and cheese.
What is it with the French, anyway? See, they are the reason Americans are obese. It’s not the fast food joints lurking around every corner; it can’t be the fact that we consider watching sitcom reruns for five hours exercise; no, it’s those damn French. Them and their cigarettes and hairy underarms.
Halfway through the meal, my salad abandoned, my brain registers that there are French fries in close proximity. Not close, even. Right on top of me. I could reach out a quaking hand and touch the salty devils. My lunch partner smirks at me, dragging three of the delectable delights through a ridiculously large mound of ranch dressing. Rolling my eyes, I spear a piece of lettuce, or what my father refers to as "rabbit food", on my fork and pretend, as I take a tiny bite, that I'm having the tastiest dining experience of my young life.
“Damnit, Alyssa, just take a French fry,” she states, with equals parts exasperation and amusement.
Now, I have often been told I should have focused my studies on something of a more theatrical nature than writing. I widen my eyes convincingly, sputter incoherent statements of denial, and, to put the cherry on top, I crank out a few well-placed tears. Which causes Missy, whom I often wonder why I am friends with, to laugh. Not just any laugh either, but her annoyingly obnoxious, squinty-eyed, louder-than-all-hell laugh. Which startles me so much, my tears stop completely. The moisture halfway down my face gets so frightened that it attempts to flow upward, back into my eye.