“Jinx! Jinks again!” they shout and then proceed to punch each other in the arm.
“Ouch, that’s going to bruise!” Casey whines and Brie smirks.
“Have you never seen When Harry Met Sally?” Brie asks through a mouthful of whipped cream and I wince back into my seat.
“Yeah, I have. I just wasn’t expecting a reenactment in front of a bunch of kids!”
“Chill, Blair…we’re only messing around. It’s not like we’re drunk and cussing up a storm.”
I groan but concede the fact and sit up taller in the booth.
Brie purposely drips cream on her chest and then scoops it up slowly and sucks it off her finger, the two dudes mesmerized at her display. She flashes them a devilish smile and I elbow her in the side.
“What the hell, I thought you and Jackson were dating?”
“We are!” she laughs. “Those guys have been looking over at us since we came in so I thought I might as well give them something worth staring at.”
Casey shakes her head, smiling at her as I sit here utterly perplexed.
“You’ll get a reputation acting like that,” I say. “I bet that’s something Della would do!”
“Ohhh, no you did not!” Casey says finger snapping.
I’m startled out of my stupor by the sound of my cell and I have to slide out of the booth to retrieve it from my back pocket. My smile slips as the screen flashes ‘Moira’ and I can’t help but feel instantly disappointed. I’ve been waiting for Ethan to call for hours now.
“Hi Moira, how are you?” I turn from the girls and head to the doorway, away from all the hustle and bustle of the other diners so I can hear better. The line is completely silent and I pull the phone from my ear and look down at the screen to make sure that I hit accept, or that I haven’t accidently cut her off. It’s lit up like the call is still active. “Hello? Moira, are you there?”
I hear a sniffle and then her voice, quietly on the other end of the line.
“Yes, Blair I’m here, I…I…”
She’s crying and my stomach churns. This can’t be good.
“Are you okay? Has something happened to Frank?”
“No honey, um…it’s Ethan.”
I freeze mid-step and my stomach lurches, threatening to expel the truckload of ice cream I just consumed.
“What do you mean it’s Ethan? What’s wrong? What’s happened?”
I know before she answers that whatever she needs to say is bad, and I brace myself for it. I’m waiting for, ‘He’s left and won’t speak to Frank,’ or ‘We’ve had an argument’ to come, but it doesn’t.
“Sweetheart, he collapsed in the hospital and…and…” she’s sobbing so hard that I can’t make out what she’s trying to tell me.
“Moira, I can’t hear you!” I shout into the cell. I’m not sure why I’m the one shouting, she seems to be able to hear me just fine but the anxiety and fear she’s causing has me jittery.
She proceeds to tell me something about a subdural hematoma and I fall to the ground. An old man with his grandchildren rushes to help me up and I feel overwhelmingly dizzy.
“Are you alright there, miss?” the old man asks as I stare at him blankly, not quite understanding what’s going on.
“She dropped her phone, Grandpa,” a little girl with chocolate sauce smeared all over her face says pointing to my cell, still licking her cone.
The gentleman picks it up and passes it back to me as Casey and Brie rush over and assure him they’ll take over. I grab my cell and look back and forth from them. Casey’s hunched over me, her long raven hair falling in my face. She pulls it to one side and holds it back as I’m frozen, trying to process what’s going on, wondering if this is all some twisted sick dream. The buildup of tears and hammering in my chest let me know that it’s not.