Red Vines

Red Vines is the strawberry licorice that gives Margot and Robert’s early courtship its recurring joke and shared vocabulary. First encountered as a purchase at the cinema snack counter, it becomes a prompt for weeks of increasingly elaborate messages, then an offer that brings the two together in person. The candy’s importance lies less in its taste than in the language and expectations Margot and Robert build around it—and in the gap between that imagined intimacy and their actual encounter.

Product and First Encounter

Near the end of the first semester, on a Wednesday evening, Margot is working at the snack counter of a downtown art-house cinema when Robert buys a large popcorn and a box of Red Vines. Margot remarks that it is an unusual choice and that she has never sold a box before. The detail establishes the candy as slightly out of the ordinary in this particular exchange: it is not merely one item in a routine purchase, but the choice that gives her an opening to flirt with a customer she finds appealing.

Margot’s teasing draws on a habit developed when she worked as a bartender, where flirting encouraged tips. The cinema offers no tips, but the work is dull, and Robert seems attractive enough to make the exchange entertaining. He does not meet her provocation with an overt answer; instead, he steps back, leaving her to lean toward him and do more of the work. He then takes his change and leaves. At this point Red Vines marks a brief encounter, not yet a relationship: Margot has tested a playful approach, and Robert has left the possibility of another exchange open without explaining himself.

A Joke Becomes a Shared Language

The following week, Robert returns to buy another box. He jokes that Margot has improved as a cashier because this time she has managed not to insult him. She answers that she is aiming for a promotion. After the film, he comes back to the counter and asks for her number; to her own surprise, she gives it to him. The repeated purchase turns the candy into a small ritual of recognition: their next meeting picks up the first one, and the banter gives them a way to continue without beginning with personal disclosures.

Over the following weeks, the two build an elaborate text-message exchange out of the Red Vines joke. Its running line develops and changes so quickly that Margot sometimes has trouble keeping up. She thinks Robert is very intelligent and feels she must work to impress him. Their messages produce bursts of exhilaration when two or three jokes land in succession, an exchange she experiences as a kind of dance. The candy thus becomes more than a recurring subject: it is the initial material from which they make a private comic language.

That language also carries an imbalance. Robert generally replies quickly, but when Margot takes more than a few hours, his next message tends to be brief and contain no questions, leaving her to revive the conversation. A couple of times she becomes distracted for about a day and wonders whether their exchange has ended for good. Each time, she finds something funny to tell him or an image online that fits their conversation, and starts it up again. Red Vines belongs to a pattern in which continued connection depends on a joke that Margot repeatedly helps keep alive, even while the two still know little about one another personally.

The Candy That Is Not There

During exams, Margot complains that the dining halls are closed and her roommate has used up the emergency food she had stored in her room. Robert offers to buy her Red Vines. At first she deflects the offer with another joke because she has work to do, but he insists that she stop joking around and come meet him. Margot puts a jacket over her pajamas and goes to the 7-Eleven. The offer moves their playful exchange into an ordinary, face-to-face meeting, prompted by a specific late-night problem rather than by a formal date.

It is around eleven. Robert greets her matter-of-factly, as if they see each other every day, and goes into the store with her to choose snacks. There are no Red Vines. Instead, he buys her a Cherry Coke Slurpee, a bag of Doritos, and a frog-shaped lighter with a cigarette in its mouth. The absence of the candy is a small but telling turn: the object that has sustained their messages cannot be supplied when Margot and Robert meet, so he substitutes a handful of unrelated gifts. Margot thanks him for them outside the store, and he calls her the snack girl, although he surely knows her name by now.

Robert is wearing a rabbit-fur hat pulled over his ears and a bulky, unfashionable puffer jacket. Margot thinks the outfit suits him despite its strangeness: the hat emphasizes his lumberjack air, while the coat hides his stomach and drooping shoulders. She expects him to kiss her and prepares to turn her cheek away from his mouth. Instead, he takes her by the arm and kisses her gently on the forehead, as if she were something precious, then tells her to study well and that they will see each other soon. The remembered details of the meeting—the substitute snacks, the distinctive lighter, the kiss—are concrete and intimate in a way their exchange about Red Vines had not been.

Return of the Running Joke

After a later date, Robert again sends a harmless joke about Red Vines. Margot deletes it immediately, overcome by a physical revulsion that she herself recognizes as disproportionate to what he has actually done. The candy’s return makes the message continuous with the playful courtship that preceded the date, but Margot can no longer receive it in the same spirit. What had once restarted their conversation now arrives in the aftermath of an encounter she wants to escape.

Margot considers sending a breakup message, but keeps revising it to avoid giving Robert an opening to argue for a casual relationship instead. Meanwhile, his messages continue, each more serious than the last, though none addresses anything relevant. She imagines him composing them carefully on a bare mattress. She also recalls that he spoke at length about his cats, although she saw no cats at his home, and wonders whether he invented them. These doubts sharpen the contrast between the person she constructed from their messages and the Robert she has now encountered; the Red Vines joke remains familiar, but familiarity alone cannot make that imagined person real.

Narrative Significance

Red Vines links the story’s opening flirtation to the later collapse of Margot’s interest. Its recurrence gives the relationship an easily recognizable motif: an unusual counter purchase becomes a teasing exchange, then an elaborate text-message game, an offer of care during exams, and finally a joke Margot deletes. The pattern traces a shift in meaning without changing the candy itself. The messages have allowed the pair to sustain a sense of closeness while avoiding personal conversation; when Margot meets Robert in person, the candy is not even available, and the encounter must proceed through different details and gestures.

The object therefore works both as a genuine token of shared play and as a measure of the limits of that play. Margot’s excitement when their jokes succeed is real, as is the effort she puts into keeping them going. Yet after the date, the same reference cannot restore that excitement. Its final appearance shows how a private language can outlast the feeling that created it: the joke still arrives, but Margot no longer wants to answer.