“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Lainey said to the stranger, her tone obscenely peppy. The woman straightened to attention like a spooked horse. “I wasjusttelling Elliot that I thought it was you. Oh my god, how long has it been?”
Lainey turned to Elliot, who was completely red-faced, looking like a man who’d suddenly discovered he was inside a Pottery Barn without his pants. “This girl right here. Don’t even try to put on the ten-minute ‘All Too Well’ around this one. Every word. She knows every word! I swear. You’ve met Elliot, right?” Lainey turned back to the sales clerk and watched her face vacillate between bewilderment at the strange woman in front of her and embarrassment that perhaps Lainey was in fact a genuine friend she’d inadvertently deleted from her memory.
“Umm, I’m not…” The saleswoman looked over her shoulder as though searching for the person Lainey was actually talking to, because it couldn’t possibly be her.
“You know what, I didn’t bring him to that thing.” Lainey imbued “thing” with vague meaning, as though this “thing” might be anything but also something precisely identifiable.
“Oh my god, you’re never gonna believe this.” Lainey leaned forward giddily. “You remember Katie?”
“Uh, yeah…?” The bow-haired woman nodded slowly, because as a woman in her mid- to late twenties, she definitely knewaKatie, if not their shared Katie, who, again, didn’t exist. “I think so.”
“So Katie was supposed to get married next week to this guy Tom—you don’t know Tom,” Lainey assured her. The woman appeared relieved to have not forgotten him. “I sent this guy…” Lainey stuck her thumb out at her unwitting accomplice. “…out this morning to buy the gift, and you know me—a classic Aries—Iimmediatelyremove the price tag to wrap it when, this afternoon, I get a phone call. Get this: it’s Katie telling me that the wedding’s off.”
“Really? What happened?” Our clerk friend leaned forward eagerly, because now our Katie, fictional or otherwise, was producing top-tier gossip.
Elliot was less amused. “Yes. Please share,” he murmured.
Lainey lowered her voice—out of respect for Katie. “He’s been cheating on her withher motherthis whole time.”
“No!” she cried.
Elliot grimaced.
“Yes!” Lainey replied eagerly. “And she’s on the hook for this whole big wedding because his dad is, like, an ambassador to Liechtenstein or something and the fiancé…” Shesearched her brain for the cast list of her fictional melodrama. “Uh…”
“Tom,” Elliot provided.
Lainey eyed him gratefully. “Tom. Yes. Tom has diplomatic immunity.”
Our new friend furrowed her brow. “Is that a thing?”
“Apparently!”
“That’s so wild. I can’t believe it!”
“It almost sounds made up,” Elliot deadpanned.
Lainey cut a glance to Elliot. “Anyway…Everyone has to return the wedding gifts and give her the cash so she doesn’t go into debt after her fiancé’s devastating betrayal, but this dummy over here”—she elbowed Elliot, who bleated out a startled guffaw—“didn’t save the receipt.”
The girl blinked. “Oh…um…without a receipt I can only offer store credit.”
“Even for Katie?”
She didn’t budge.
“Okay.” Lainey made herself sound disappointed. “That’s probably fine. It might be nice for her to treat herself to a pillow sham when she’s forced to move in with her home-wrecking mother and her ex-fiancé-turned-stepdad.”
Elliot nearly choked.
“Okay, I…” Katie’s friend folded under the threat of such astonishingly bleak living arrangements. “I can probably make an exception. For friends and family.”
“Oh my god. You are the sweetest.” Lainey grabbed Elliot’s arm again as she imagined this fictional Aries woman she’d crafted would touch her boyfriend. Perhaps the bicep squeeze was laying it on a bit thick, but Lainey didn’t know. She was a Gemini, and Elliot’s arms were surprisingly muscular,something Lainey was discovering shereallyliked in real time. “Isn’t she the sweetest, babe?”
His lip twitched. “So sweet.”
Gina—Lainey finally learned her name when she logged into the system to make the return—handed her $87.77 in cash. As they walked toward the entrance, the two women made indefinite plans to grab drinks with the imaginary, jilted Katie.
Once they were both in the car, Lainey placed the crisp bills into her wallet.
