“I’m not sure it’s mink.”
“No wonder Marcela’s annoyed! Her drink orders are dreadful.”
“They’re…specific.”
“She wears mink year-round!”
“What’s wrong with—Okay, fine. The fur’s a little odd, but on days like today, you have to admit, it’s perfect.”
I roll my eyes. “Okay, Nate. You got me.”
He smiles a little. “Sometimes you have to accept what’s right in front of you.” He gestures to the window. “And what’s not.”
“I really don’t think that analogy works.”
At least, it doesn’t, until Marcela strides up, a boxed space heater tucked under each arm. She shoulders her way through the front door and dumps the heaters on the counter. “Voila,” she says without stopping. We watch her disappear into the kitchen in a rush of particularly frosty air.
We’re quiet for a moment. “Wow,” I say finally.
“Yeah.”
“What’d she say when you told her?”
He blows out a breath. “I didn’t exactly ‘tell’ her. We bumped into her last night when we were walking home from dinner and she looked startled, but not angry. Then when she came in this morning I tried to tell her I’d been seeing Celestia for the past month—”
“Month?”
“And she just froze me out.” A pause. “That was before the window broke.”
“Life imitating art.”
“Or just shitty luck mirroring shitty luck.”
“Well, for what it’s worth, if you like Mink Coat, I’m happy for you.”
“I like Celestia, I do not like mink coats.”
“It’s too cold for mink, anyway. Fox, maybe.”
He glares at me and tries not to laugh. “Go do some work. I have to call these glass guys and ask what’s taking so long.”
I head into the back and find Marcela smearing frosting on a tray of cooled cinnamon buns. “Smells good.”
“They’re warm, that’s all that matters.”
“Fair enough.” Because of the ovens and the sanitizer, the kitchen is always hotter than the front. Normally we complain about it, but today it’s a blessing. When Marcela doesn’t say anything else I add, “Nate told me about Celestia.”
She snorts. “Me too.”
“And you’re…angry?”
“That she’s dating him to get half-price drinks? Of course I’m bothered.”
I watch her massacre a cinnamon bun in the name of caring. “You look more than a little bothered.”
She sighs and tosses down the spatula. “I was just surprised.”
“So was I.” I watch her closely. “Are you jealous?”
“What? No! Look, you should be bothered, too. She’s going to come in here even more now, with her fur coats and her ridiculous drink orders. We’re all affected.”
“It’s not—”
She holds up a hand. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. It’s not important. Tell me something good.”
I rack my brain, filtering past the Dean-Ripley-gave-me-a-sex-talk horror until I come to something I know she’ll like. “I got invited to the Alpha Sigma Phi Halloween party.”
Her eyes light up. “You’re kidding!”
“It’s true.”
“We have to go. I’ve been trying to think of ways to get in, but my best guess was tracking down that army man you hooked up with, except I don’t think we ever saw his face when it wasn’t painted green.”
I groan. “Don’t remind me.”
“Right. Sorry. Now let’s talk about our costumes. Slutty cat? Slutty aliens? Slutty nurses? No, what am I saying? We’re modern women. Slutty doctors!”
I laugh too. “No slutty anything. How about you go and tell me about it later?”
She gasps in offense. “Absolutely not. We’re a team. Where you go, I go— Actually, never mind. You spend a lot of time at the library. But where I say we’ll go, we go. And we’re going to this party. We can be the Black Swan and…the white one.”
“What?”
“Or the two broke girls from TV.”
I gesture to my apron. “Perfect. I won’t need to change.”
She claps her hands, bits of cream cheese frosting flying from the tips of her fingers. “Thelma and Louise!”
“We—”
But she’s on a roll. “It’s perfect. They’re classic, they’re best friends, they’re gorgeous, and—”
“They die at the end?”
“And Thelma bangs Brad Pitt. In the name of friendship, you can be Thelma. I think you could use a Brad Pitt.”
“You realize he robs her, right?”
“Your belongings fit in a milk crate. You’re safe.”
“I don’t think—”
She presses her frosted fingers over my lips. “You need to stop thinking and take the night off. Halloween is the Saturday after midterms. You can bury your nose in a book until then, but on October thirty-first, you’re mine. And we’re hitting the road.”
“They drive off a cliff.”
She winks at me. “That’s the spirit.”
*