“Whoever. The one with the earring could be looking for me, and I truly wouldn’t mind.”
“Like that’s going to happen. When he saw you undressing him with your eyes, he gave you this look like, Go away, little girl. I’ve got someone to beat up.”
Holding her three books, Bibi turned to the teenagers. “You want to know who they’re looking for? They’re looking for me.”
They regarded her like two baby night owls surprised by a light.
“How many of them are there?” Bibi asked.
The blonde said, “For real, they’re looking for you?”
“Or,” Bibi said, “this is some brain-dead YouTube joke show, and I’ve got a camera up my nose. Can you help me? How many are there?”
“At least twenty,” the brunette whispered, though there was no need to whisper. “They’re everywhere.”
“Way more than twenty,” the blonde said. “They’ve all got these little phones in their ears. There’s a freakin’ swarm of them.”
“Men in black—you mean like the movie, suits and sunglasses?”
“No,” the brunette said, graduating from a whisper to a stage whisper, “they’re all dressed different, but they’re still the same. They have a look. You know, like they’ve all got somebody’s boot up their ass.”
“How’s everyone reacting to them?”
“Everyone who?”
“The other shoppers, mall security, everyone.”
The blonde shrugged. “We’re maybe the only ones who noticed.”
Her companion agreed. “We notice things. We’re super-observant, because we’re among the one percent, brainwise.”
“We’re super-observant,” the blonde amended, “because basically we don’t have a life of our own.”
“We have a life, but it sucks like a movie.”
The blonde said, “One thing we’ve noticed is these days people see all kinds of things they don’t want to see, so they go blind.”
“Selectively blind.” The brunette had stopped whispering, but her huge dark eyes were bright with a spirit of adventure.
Bibi said, “You know where the term butthole spiders comes from?” They shook their heads. “In the days before indoor plumbing, outhouses had wooden seats with holes cut in them. Spiders loved to build their nests and breed down in all the crap.”
“Gross,” the brunette said.
“Gross but cool,” her companion decided.
As a plan occurred to Bibi, she said, “What’re your names?”
In a bit of practiced theater, the brunette pointed to the blonde and said, “She’s Hermione,” as simultaneously the blonde returned the gesture, saying, “She’s Hermione.”
“Two Hermiones?”
The brunette said, “Our mothers were fangirls of a certain age.”
When Bibi still didn’t get it, the blonde said, “They were über-impressionable high-school seniors with middle-school tastes when the Harry Potter books were all the rage. They still haven’t gotten over them. Hermione Granger is Harry’s friend.”
“We’ve read the series, of course,” the brunette Hermione said. “It’s a daughterly obligation.”
“It’s a gun-to-the-head thing,” blond Hermione said. “Read ’em or die. But they were okay.”
“Listen,” Bibi said, “I need help. After I buy these”—she put the three books on a browser’s chair, unzipped her purse, reached into it—“I need you to walk with me to my car. They’re looking for a woman alone.” She handed five hundred dollars of Dr. St. Croix’s money to one Hermione. “They won’t look twice at a woman with two teenage daughters.” She handed five hundred to the other Hermione, who squinted and chewed her lip as though she might try to negotiate a higher price, but then accepted the cash.
“You don’t look old enough to be our mother.”
“Then let’s pretend I’m your sister—the one who isn’t a kidney stone.”
Wearing her baseball cap and sunglasses, one Hermione on each side, Bibi came out of the ground floor of Atrium Court, into the open-air mall. Keeping a leisurely pace. Head up, not tucked down as if trying to hide something. Twenty feet ahead of them, holding a large paper cup of Starbucks coffee, stood a formidable man with a hands-free phone looped around one ear, trying to look like a patient husband killing time while he waited for a tardy wife.
The blond Hermione whispered, “Butthole spider,” and then continued in the excited voice of a thirteen-year-old girl. “All I’m saying is a boy band should have boys in it, not old guys with hair growing out their ears.”