“Well, what kind of person are you?”
“Cal!” Fran yelled in exasperation.
“What?”
“You can’t go asking me deep questions when I’m stoned! I’ll go and say something weird and freak out my new friend!”
“Nah.” Cal bumped her knee with his own. “I like weird people.”
The light fromthe outdoor restaurant was playing on the water, music drifted from speakers hidden in the garden, and beautiful couples occasionally walked past along the beach, holding hands. Cal was in the gift shop buying potato chips when a man in a polo and leather flip-flops came over and crouched down next to Fran in the sand.
“Hey, how’s it going?”
“Hi,” Fran replied, confused. Had they met at the conference or was he hotel staff?
“What are you up to?” His teeth were very white, and he looked like he had probably been in a fraternity.
“Just hanging out,” Fran replied slowly.
“My buddies and I are here for the golf tourney and we’ve been with the same foursome all day. We’re sick of talking to each other and we were wondering if you’d like to join us for a cocktail up at the bar, mix it up.”
Oh, Fran realized. Not a coworker.
“I’m actually just about to call it a night,” Fran said politely.
“Booooo. Don’t be lame. Come talk to us,” he insisted.
“I don’t think we like to talk about the same things,” Fran said. She saw Cal making his way down the path and wondered if he would think she knew this guy.
“Ha!” White Teeth barked, surprised. “We’re pretty good conversationalists. We’re not going to talk about golf.”
“No, I definitely don’t want to talk about golf.”
“Well, what do you and your friends talk about? Gossip? We can gossip.”
“We’re here for an engineering conference, so we were talking about drones,” Cal said, slipping into the conversation. He looked sort of heroic, but also like a skinny nerd with the munchies holding two giant bags of chips.
“Drones! You’re funny. Okay, if that’s what you’re into, the boys can talk about drones. You’re both welcome.” The guy was chewing a piece of gum and he had leaned in close enough that Fran could smell the mint on his breath.
“Nah.” Fran shook her head. “You guys couldn’t. Because unless you already know about the recent seizure of an unmanned underwatervehicle in the South China Sea and what it means for US security, especially now that the Chinese can camouflage drones to look like marine life, adding propulsion units that don’t require oxygen, markedly increasing the amount of time they can remain submerged and undetected, you’re just not going to be able to keep up. And we don’t want to spend our whole night explaining it to a bunch of guys.” Fran stared the man down.
“Look, it’s fine if you don’t want to hang out.” The golfer got angrily to his feet. “You don’t need to be a bitch about it.”
As he marched away Fran grinned happily. “I hate guys like that.”
“But you could see why he was confused,” Cal offered. “Why would a woman possibly be sitting on the beach if not for the entertainment and stimulation of men?”
“Obviously. And if I was sitting at the bar? Forget it.”
“No, women only sit at bars alone if they want men to make sexual advances.”
“True, true,” Fran agreed. “And after dark. It’s like a werewolf thing. The sun goes down and women all turn into possible sex objects.”
“Werewolves are full moon,” Cal corrected. “Gremlins are after dark.”
“You really are a nerd,” Fran said affectionately. As they walked back to the hotel with their potato chips, Fran decided that being mistaken for a sex worker was a universal part of the female experience, a rite of passage, as common as getting a period, breaking out from a bad eyebrow wax, or suffering from IBS but eating dairy anyway. It made her glad London and Hale were boys.
By unspoken agreementFran and Cal smoked weed and played Pokémon on the beach the next night and the night after. In themornings Fran would occasionally have a missed call from RJ or a text from London with a heart, she would plan to call back on her break, but as soon as she entered the conference center she was swept away by the swarm of activity, the talks, the breakout sessions, the brown-bag lunches, and the meet and greets. Fran got to know some of the guys on her team, she had coffee with her supervisor, and she took hours of notes on her laptop. There were tables of branded gifts, and Fran collected a portable phone charger, a fancy water bottle, an AirTag, and a waterproof laptop sleeve. She bought treasures for the boys at the hotel gift shop, little wooden surfboards on key chains, tiny glass bottles filled with sand, no different from the sand in Greenhead, but thirteen dollars a pop.
