In profile, the two look like something out of a Vogue article. A giant banner across the courtyard between the buildings announces the opening of some new children’s wing near an art museum. Or a botanical garden.
The man turns just enough for me to see that it’s Declan McCormick.
Maybe that new children’s wing is in hell.
Cars behind me honk as I sit here, frozen, going out of my mind. Jessica and—
“DECLAN!” Mom squeals. “SO GOOD TO SEE YOU!” She’s half out the window, and if I push the button and slowly close it on her, maybe she’ll snap in half, ass remaining in the car with me and screaming head rolling down the street, scooped up by the next bicyclist carrying away the trash.
Speaking of trash, I look at Jessica once more, and a white wall of rage takes over my vision.
BEEP.
Mom pulls her body back in the car as someone behind me screams profanities about my feces-topped car. I hit the gas and thud into something, just hard enough for me to realize I’ve made a terrible error in the heat of furious passion.
A barrel of garbage goes flying up in the air and lands on the top of my car, rolls down, spewing food waste of every kind imaginable, then chunks of used tampons, and finally a thick batch of slime-coated paper.
And Mom’s window is open. Wide open.
By some miracle of divine intervention (for Mom) or craptastic luck (for me), the open end of the trash can is on my side. I get an armful of what smells like composted marijuana mixed into about four cups of se**n. Fermented se**n, that is.
Sprouted, fair-trade, organic, non-soy spooge.
Or maybe it’s just vanilla pudding. I should be reasonable here.
Jessica’s derisive laugh can be heard over the screaming banshees in my head, and a thousand cars all start honking at me in unison. The people-powered garbage dude is apologizing profusely. It turns out the trash can popped out of his cart just as I hit the accelerator and it’s actually not my fault.
Finally. Something’s not my fault.
I fling my arm repeatedly in varying rotations of horror in an attempt to get the worst of whateverthehell that stuff is on my skin, while Declan gives me a pitying look that makes the white wall of rage come back. If small children didn’t dot the crowd around Jessica and Declan I’d ram the car into them, pinning her in place and shoving the garbage can on that perfect curtain of hair while doing some revenge-type thing of undetermined specificity to Declan.
“Shannon?” Mom gasps. “Shannon, honey, you’re saying the F-word over and over again and I think we need to get going.”
BEEP times a thousand plus composted garbage delivered by guys who only eat paleo diets and who think mashed dates in coconut milk are “dessert” is a kind of math problem that makes me shut down. Completely.
Ignoring the mess, ignoring the honks, and flipping off the car behind me and—did she really?—Jessica and Declan, Mom storms out of her side of the car, pulls me out of the driver’s seat, throws a towel she found in the back seat over the driver’s side, plunks herself down, and waits for me to move all zombie-like into the passenger’s side.
I’m covered in just enough slime to feel like Carrie, on stage at her prom. There’s a thought. My fingers on the door handle, I stop, the sound of ten thousand horns like Buddhist gongs being struck in unison. Eyes on the building next to Jessica, I will it to crumble and crush her to death. Or a manhole cover to split her in half. An intake vent to suck in her hair and scalp her.
Thirty seconds of trying and all I get is a cloud of fruit flies in my eye. And when I go to wipe it, I get ganja-scented goo up my nose.
“Get in the car, Shannon! We have sex toys to visit!”
I am so done.
Chapter Eight
Pad Thai brought over to your bedroom by your best friend after a long day of listening to mystery shoppers give excuse after excuse for late field reports is the nectar of the gods.
Amanda shoves a piece of chicken satay in her mouth and mumbles around the meat. “That’s it? He’s seriously just…done? He dumped you because you pretended to be a lesbian?” We’re reviewing the past week’s events because we’re all still in WTF mode over how my relationship fell apart.
“No, he dumped me because he thinks I dated him just to get business deals.” Like that’s so much better.
“And because you swing the wrong way.” Amy declares this around a piece of shrimp so big it could choke her.
“I don’t swing the wrong way!”
“There was that girl in college…” Amanda adds, making Amy’s eyes go wide, either from shock or maybe she really is choking.
“One kiss! Everyone experiments at least once.” I told Amanda that story in confidence.
Amanda and Amy shake their heads no.
“Seriously?” Now I have to add this to my ever-growing list of Shannon faux pas?
“I thought you were a little too good at the credit union,” Amanda says with an arched tone.
“C’mon…well, anyhow, I’m not g*y and Declan knows I’m not g*y. He’s not upset about it. That’s a red herring. Mom keeps thinking it’s why he broke up with me and she’s wrong.”
“Then…why does he think you were only with him for the accounts?”
I retell his version of why he thinks that. By the time I’m done, Amy looks horror-stricken and Amanda is patiently picking lint balls off her cotton socks.
“Oh,” they say in unison.
“Ouch,” Amanda adds.
“Yep.” What else can I say? Other than confessing my need to throw myself into a bottomless pit and enjoy the ride forever while thoughts of Declan torment me, there isn’t much more I can explain.
“And then you saw him with Jessica Coffin at Smith College. Touching,” Amy says.
Amanda waves a piece of chicken in the air and says, “But we figured that out. They’re both part of that charity. Her father and his father donated more than a year’s tuition at Smith to the project, so they’re just there.”
“Together,” I groan.
“But not together together,” Amanda insists.
“They watched me run into a garbage can and cover myself with slime.”
“There are worse things,” Amy says.
“Like what?”
“Being caught with your hand in a toilet in the men’s room?”
I hit her. Hard. With a piece of shrimp.
“That can’t be all there is,” Amy insists. She’s in her running clothes, tight knee-length Lycra pants and a tank top with a built-in shelf bra, two other sports bras underneath. The Jacoby girls aren’t just well endowed. We have so much breast tissue that if left unleashed, one good sudden turn to the right and we could knock out a small village.