Page 40 of The Best Worst Thing

Not Quite Saint Barts

By quarter to eleven the next day, Nicole was dressed, sufficiently caffeinated, and hopping into Mari’s passenger seat while Mari looked up from her phone, one eyebrow raised.

“Why are you glowing?”

“I am not glowing,” Nicole said.

“You told me you guys were, like, grabbing breakfast. Breakfast doesn’t make people glow.”

Nicole tossed her bag in the back seat. “Maybe I’m really excited about grapefruit juice. Maybe I just discovered everything bagel seasoning. There could be any number of reasons—”

“You totally fucked him, didn’t you?”

“I did not,” Nicole said.

“But you’re going to, right?”

“Drive the car, Mari.”

Now Mari raised both eyebrows. “Oh god, you’re, like, dating him, aren’t you? What, are you waiting to have romantic sex that’s emotionally vulnerable and thoroughly rooted in mutual respect or something gross and mature like that?”

Nicole, nodding, covered her burning face. “Just drive the fucking car, okay?”

Mari laughed, then giddily backed out of the driveway, pestering Nicole with questions.

Once Nicole’s blushing had subsided, she caught Mari up on her and Logan’s very-chill, definitely-not-serious-at-all plan to take things slow.

After that, she and Mari returned to their regularly scheduled Sunday programming: discussing every detail of Mari’s third date with that physical therapist, then reviewing each of the dozen meetings she’d set up for her weeklong trip to the East Coast. Twenty minutes later, the two women were venturing through an untouched-since-the-nineties shopping mall and into a musty, dinosaur-themed toy store where virtually everything was earth-toned, unpriced, and covered in a decade’s worth of grime.

“I feel like we’re in a time machine,” Nicole said, studying a shelf of stegosaurus figurines. They were shopping for Mari’s eight-year-old nephew, whose birthday party was in a few hours. “Or some shop in the East Village run by a very mysterious, lonely old man.”

“I know,” Mari said. “But last year, I wrote Mateo a check for his 529 and he burst into tears in front of my entire family. So this year, he’s getting a crappy toy and a check.”

Nicole laughed, then meandered to the edge of the store, which was marked by an objectively terrible mural that spanned the back wall.

She snapped a few pictures of a hastily painted, googly-eyed pterodactyl holding a bouquet of party balloons and had just begun to send them to a certain someone when Mari called out her name.

Nicole found her a couple of aisles away, dusting off a DIY volcanic apocalypse kit.

“You think lava expires?” Mari said.

Nicole, who was still staring into her phone, shoved it into her back pocket, then ran her fingers over the active ingredients list. “Well, there’s baking soda in here.

That definitely won’t react after a year or whatever.

But I bet you could make your own at home with Alka-Seltzer or something.

Do you have food coloring? Canola oil? We could probably use an egg too, or mustard? Something to emulsify …”

Mari stared at her, mouth open. “Don’t take this the wrong way. But you’re a giant fucking nerd.”

“I am not a nerd! I just spent a lot of time at the Saint Louis Science Center growing up. Paige was a nerd. I was supporting her!”

“Yeah, no. You’re a first-degree dork, and we both know it.”

Nicole was beginning to prepare some smart-ass response when a bright yellow, shrink-wrapped box on a just-out-of-reach shelf caught her eye.

She got on her tippy-toes and used the tail of a stuffed triceratops to send it tumbling into her arms. She was halfway through the blurb on the side panel when Mari walked over to her.

“Oh, that’s perfect!” Mari said, nearly prying the box out of Nicole’s hands. “Come on, let’s go. There’s a yogurt place here with good toppings.”

Nicole pulled the package a little closer to her chest. “This one’s for me.”

Mari’s whole face lit up. “Nicole Speyer, are you buying an ant farm? For a boy?”

“You’re the one who started this! Leave me alone!”

Mari cocked her head at a beet-red Nicole, then used Nicole’s dinosaur-tail trick to send a Jurassic-themed ant farm of her own sliding off the top shelf.

Mari caught it, then nudged Nicole toward the cash register, laughing out loud when Nicole began asking the extremely stoned teenager ringing them up whether the manufacturer sold additional larva and cleaning kits online and, if so, whether those items shipped quickly.

“Can I say one more thing?” Mari said as they strolled back into the ready-to-be-condemned mall, packages tucked beneath their arms. The damp, skylit air; a blend of hot pretzels and orange chicken and black mold. Cell phone repair kiosks blinked. Massage chairs buzzed.

“Since when do you need permission to speak freely?”

“I just wanted to take a moment to discuss how you went from spending New Year’s in Saint Barts to buying literal bugs at an indoor mall in deep Torrance,” she said. “It’s …”

Nicole rolled her eyes. “It’s what?”

“It’s going to be the best sex of your life,” Mari said. “Trust me. The weird ones always surprise you.”