Sam looks as she always does—head to toe in black, her sleek, straight black hair falling to her shoulders. As far as I know, she sleeps in her eyeliner. People sometimes ask me what my roommate is like, and over the years I’ve learned I can sum up her entire personality in a single fact: she has microbangs. She trims them to deadly precision using a laser tape measure.
“Were you making those fucking cookies yourself?” Sam says, cackling at her own brilliance. Even without the smell of weed gently perfuming our apartment, her slow blink would be a dead giveaway. Sam is very high.
“That took alotlonger than I expected,” Carrie says,emitting a perfect smoke ring with the tilt of her jaw. “So glad I didn’t go with you. No offense.”
“What kind of loser gets up at dawn after a rave and goes uptown to a bakery,” Sam muses.
“The kind of loser who made a pointless bet and lost it,” I say, throwing myself down on Carrie’s other side. She holds her ridiculously pearlescent glass pipe toward me in question, but I decline.
“So do we get to try them?” Sam asks.
“I told Carrie she wouldn’t get any if she didn’t come. I feel like I should stand my ground on principle,” I reply.
“That doesn’t apply to me,” Sam says, reaching for the box. “Hand them over.”
When I told Connor that I knew the girls would want to try some, he wrapped one up for his mom and then sweetly sent me home with the rest of the leftovers, something I’m extremely grateful for now that I know my two best friends have the munchies.
Sam and Carrie rifle through the box of half-eaten cookies, busying themselves for several minutes by breaking off little pieces and sampling each flavor with impressive speed.
“Good, I guess,” Sam says, chewing, then immediately deciding, “No, amazing. These cookies have changedme.”
“Same,” Carrie agrees. “It was absolutely worth Annie lining up all day.”
“I wasn’t lining up all day,” I tell them, segueing nicely into what I really want to talk about. “I was lining up for an hour. Then…”
Sam side-eyes me. “Then…?”
“OK, so you know that guy I work with?”
“No.”
“You do. The one I sit beside.”
“From the gallery?”
I feel the heat spread up my neck. “No, that’s Andy. I’m talking about Connor.”
“Try saying his name without looking like you’ve committed a crime,” Carrie says, grinning.
I clear my throat and continue. “So when I went to wait for the cookies…he was there.”
Carrie reanimates at this tidbit, her hand closing around my knee in a vise grip.
“Oh my god. Are you banging a guy from work?” Sam exclaims, her tone one of awe, or maybe revulsion.
“No,” I say, but my voice cracks, ruining everything. I try again. “Nobody is banging anyone. We’re just…” We’re just nothing. Why am I so embarrassed? “I don’t even know if we qualify as friends. We’re colleagues.”
“ ’Kay,” Sam says.
Carrie guffaws. “Colleagues don’t hang out on Sundays.”
“That’s the thing,” I tell them. “Ithonestlywasn’t planned. Or,” I pause, thinking. “I didn’t plan it. He just showedup.”
“Do you know what that sounds like to me? A date.”
“It felt like one,” I admit. “Later on, I mean. We went on a big walk through the neighborhood. He took me to a flea market!”
This detail feels particularly damning. You can’t just take a woman to a flea market and expect her not to get ideas.
