Shayla laughed. Her voice flat with irony, she said, “Yeah. Rolling sushi.”
“I want sushi.”
“There’s no sushi. We’re going to learn how to be captivating, and have men wrapped around our fingers.”
“I’d rather have sushi.”
“Sushi doesn’t give hand jobs in the back of fancy cars while a chauffeur drives you around.”
I cleared my throat and pulled myself up to sit. “I guess I didn’t hold back any details last night, did I? Oh, the pain of the bare-assed truth in the morning light.”
She patted my knee. “Don’t be so dramatic. You met a hot actor, and he turned out to be a twatwaffle, and now you’ll go to this workshop and move on with your life.”
“Some life.”
We both glanced around my room, at the stacks of books on my dresser and on the floor.
“Peaches, are there any books left in the actual bookstore?” she teased.
“What did I pay for this non-sushi workshop?”
“It’s non-refundable.” She jumped up from my bed and started browsing through a stack of books. “This looks good.” She flipped to the end to read the last page, as she always does. It makes me want to tackle her to the ground when she peeks at the ending, and I swear she does it half the time just to antagonize me.
I rolled out of bed and took myself to the bathroom for a hot shower and a big glass of water.
As agonizing as the workshop sounded, it was something to do, to keep my mind off Dalton Deangelo. As I washed my hair, I thought about his bumpy abdominal muscles, and how some other girl would be enjoying them. Maybe he was showering with her right now! Euch, what a pig.
I sincerely hoped that the dinner rolls he ate the night before were converting to fat at that very moment, because I’m mean like that.
~
The workshop was at the Beaverdale Community Center, and we took Shayla’s little Rav. Thanks to coffee and toast, I was feeling human.
We parked the Rav in front of Black Sheep Books, and we both hissed like angry cats at the window display of our enemy as we walked by.
“They have dead flies in their front window,” Shayla said.
“Figures.” I narrowed my eyes at the red-painted bricks. Just as Superman has his Lex Luthor, Peachtree Books has Black Sheep Books. I have, on occasion, threatened to burn them to the ground, but they had it coming.
“Doesn’t look very busy in there,” Shayla said.
The little store was full of customers—at least five people—but it was good of my best friend to demonstrate her loyalty by lying.
I pushed my sunglasses up my nose, enjoying the sun on my pale skin. Catching glimpses of myself in shop windows, I liked what I saw. After I turned twenty-two, I stopped looking like a pudgy teenager and turned into a voluptuous woman. My blond hair had darkened through my teens, and I’d recently started getting highlights put in at my hairdresser’s.
That morning, most of my favorite clothes were in the laundry, so I’d put on my favorite turquoise dress with a black belt. The brilliant shade of blue brought out my eyes and made me look neither tan nor pale, and the hem line ended at the exact perfect spot above my knee—the almost-skinny stretch. Around my neck, I wore chunky wood beads that tied in with my cork-soled sandals. Not bad for a hangover morning.
Shayla wore jean cutoffs and a striped shirt with a wide neck, falling off the shoulder.
A man in a city-worker reflective vest wolf-whistled at us from where he was kneeling on the sidewalk, tugging out a dandelion by its root.
“For shame, Lester,” Shayla said to him. “I’m your cousin.”
Lester wiped the sweat off his brow with the back of his hand, his thick bicep tanned and rippling beneath the sleeve of his tight, bright-white T-shirt.
“The whistle was for Peaches,” he said, grinning. “She ain’t my cousin.”
I linked arms with Shayla and giggled like we were thirteen again and talking to out-of-town boys at a softball game.
After we were past hearing range of Lester, Shayla said, “They can smell it on you. One night with a man attracts more men.”
I shoved her away. “Gross.”
“Not literally, dumbass. You just wait, though. This is going to be your summer. Grandma Clever taught me to trust my intuition, and I can feel it in my bones.” She poked me in the arm with one fingertip. “The object of your ladyboner lust will be back. Dalton Deangelo is going to call, and you should give him another chance.”
I glanced back over my shoulder at Lester, who had been following my butt with his eyes and looked away quickly. He had such broad shoulders, and he was always tanned from the landscaping work he did around town. I did not care for the Birkenstock sandals he wore with wool socks, but that was just a wardrobe flaw. I’d never considered Lester Dean as a dating option before, but he was recently separated from his wife, and not that much older than me—barely thirty. An older man was certainly intriguing.
“What do you think of Lester?” I asked Shayla.
“Irrelevant. Dalton Deangelo will call.”
She pulled open the glass door of the community center and we stepped into the brutally air-conditioned space, the air so cold it gave me goose bumps. My father would have freaked out over the waste of taxpayer dollars.
Shayla continued, “Once you two start dating, you can invite me along to exciting Hollywood parties.”
Hollywood parties? No, I didn’t think so. Meeting Dalton had been fun, but all that nonsense he’d said about us being stardust seemed ridiculous—ridiculous like the cheesy lines Drake the vampire always said to his waif-like love interest of the week.
Shayla and I travelled down a corridor and found the room of our workshop. The hand-lettered sign read:
Charm - A Workshop for Ladies!!
Your teacher: Dottie!!!
Shayla and I took two seats at the back and checked our phones for messages before the class started. People milled around us, taking their seats.
A woman’s hand, short-fingered and covered in jewelry, snatched my phone from my hand. “What if I’d been a handsome fellow?” she asked.
I stared up at her, my jaw dropping open. She had pale skin, beautifully wrinkled with laugh lines, bright pink lipstick, and twinkling blue eyes. Her hair was chin-length and as pink as her lips. As pink as a Halloween wig.
She continued, her words clear and crisp with spaces between, like little bells ringing, “You. Won’t. Find. Him. If. You’re. Texting.”
I reached for my phone. “Maybe he’s texting me right now.”