“We’re size inclusive,” the saleswoman chirps.
I stretch out one dress. The fabric expands unnervingly. “I guess technically it could fit?”
“Try these on.” Gran dumps a handful of the dresses in my arms. “And these shoes too.”
“Gran, I’m in my late thirties.”
“We have a lot of women your age come to shop in here. They wear the dresses to swingers parties.” The sales associate giggles and adds earrings to our pile. “Pineapples, whoo!”
“Go try this one on.” Gran stacks more cheap fabric onto the pile.
“That looks like a sweater for a dog.”
“You won’t be in those dresses that long. Chop-chop.”
In the mirror in the poorly lit dressing room, I stare at my reflection. My boob is about to pop out of one of the random holes in the stretchy gold fabric. The chunky heels pinch my toes, and the straps that crisscross the back of the dress dig, itchy, into my back.
“This is so not my color.”
“This is not my fabric.”
“I mean, it’s like it’s made out of badly recycled plastic bags.”
Carolina and I step out of the dressing rooms.
“This is why I didn’t participate in the club scene in college,” I groan. “I’m having flashbacks to that time we tried to go to a frat party.”
We both shudder.
“Isn’t it fun that you can’t outrun your trauma?”
The dressing room across from us opens, and Kathy steps out looking like she’s on a runway.
“It’s unfair that she makes those look good.” Carolina sighs.
Kathy looks like—well, she looks like a model. The sales associates coo over her and ask her if she ever considered a career on the catwalk. This is why I don’t go shopping, and why I especially don’t go shopping with my sister.
“It doesn’t matter, girls. Just get through the door.” Gran claps at us.
“Door to what?” I’m suspicious.
“I told you—in-person fucking.”
“We’re not going to a swingers party, Gran, are we?”
It’s Saturday night.The Seattle hockey team just got done playing, apparently, judging by all the fans clogging the streets.
Did they win? Who cares. I hate sports fans.
Kathy sighs wistfully. She’s like that main character in a Hallmark movie, small-town girl in the big city looking for love as all the lights glitter on her skin.
I scratch at my face. “Don’t pop that zit,” Carolina warns.
We lurch as Gran swings my parents’ old Volvo into an illegal U-turn and screeches to a halt in front of a swanky hotel near the stadium. Several tipsy hockey fans jump into a planter to escape the car.
Drunken men in Orcas jerseys wolf-whistle as we climb out unsteadily onto the sidewalk.
“We still got it!” Gran pumps a fist.
