Page 58 of The Checklist
“You can get those in a pitcher,” CJ offered, grabbing a bar towel.
“I’ll get that. And a beer, please,” Mike said, glancing at Stacy’s drink, which was less full than one would have expected given the electric taste. Turning back to Dylan, Mike added, “If you all want to sit, I can bring ’em over.”
“Sounds good,” Neale called from her perch near the bar. She began her saunter to the table, ignoring that the question had not been addressed to her.
“Thank you,” Stacy said, grabbing Dylan’s forearm and weaving her way back to the duct-taped booth, leaving enough time for Dylan to smile and mouth, “Thanks” over her shoulder before focusing her attention on keeping her drink from sloshing on the floor. Not that it would have mattered to anyone, but Dylan was rather keen on not adding additional safety hazards to the space.
Releasing Dylan’s arm, Stacy sidled into the booth, where Neale was already at home, and leaned in conspiratorially. “Oh my God. Dylan, he’s into it!”
“Please. Based on what? The fact he’s buyingallof us another round?” Dylan made a small circular motion with her glass to indicate they were receiving the exact same benefit. Noticing the potential for spillage, she took another sip.
“Or the fact that he was checking you out. Get it!” Neale said, bouncing up and down and shimmying her shoulders.
“Okay, stop. I saw no such thing, and I was there.”
“Of course you didn’t. You dated that tool for how long?” Neale took a break from her shimmy to sip her drink, then yelled, “But not anymore.”
Dylan used Neale’s return to dancing as a moment to think. Mike was always flirty. She figured he did that with everyone. The stay-at-battheory or whatever. But maybe Stacy and Neale were right? She might not have been completely honest with herself when it came to Mike’s intentions. Now that she thought about it, she wasn’t sure that she could say the same about honesty and her intentions either.
“I’ll bet he does a lot of squats,” Stacy said, leaning outside the booth to get a better look at his backside. The obviousness of Stacy’s act pushed Dylan’s self-reflection to the side of her mind.
“Probably the kind with that bar thing over his shoulder.” Neale nodded, trying to lean over Stacy for visual confirmation of their theory.
“You two, stop. Don’t be creepy,” Dylan hissed, taking a bigger sip of her drink, hoping it might wash away whatever humiliation she felt stuck to the back of her throat.
“We’re not creepy. You’re a prude,” Stacy answered, leaning back into the booth, forcing Neale to sit upright. “It is really unfair, you know.” She stopped and adjusted her T-shirt before continuing. “I don’t think you should be allowed to be that good looking and have a PhD. You can either have brains or beauty, like everyone else.”
Neale nodded in vigorous agreement and took a sip of Dylan’s drink, as if she didn’t have the dregs of her own sitting right in front of her. Taking her drink back, Dylan conceded, “People like him exist to remind us that we did not win the genetic lottery.”
“To think, in some backwoods part of the world, someone hates him for being a successful minority with two moms,” Stacy said, leaning into her palm and staring at the back of his head. Dylan wondered if he could hear them.
“Nope,” Neale shouted, confirming Dylan’s fears. “Nope, if they ever saw the guy and read his résumé, they would love him.”
“True. But you are assuming someone that backward can read.” Stacy giggled into her glass.
Dylan opened her mouth to say something about the folly of making assumptions around literacy and social values, when Stacy straightened and hissed, “He’s coming back.”
A surefire way to let someone know you are talking about them is to go dead silent as everyone turns to look at the person. Dylan chastised herself for being too addled to face forward, make up a conversation, dig in her purse, or touch the sticky stuff on the walls. Anything would have been less awkward than watching the guy walk over, beer in one hand, Rollercoaster pitcher in the other.
“Hey, Dylan, can you scoot over?” Mike asked. If he had noticed the awkward staring, he was too polite to react to it.
“Of course,” she said, beginning a hop-slide to the end of the booth, her muscles stinging with each pop up.
“Perfect timing. We were just about to hit the celebration phase,” Neale said with a shake of her shoulders before draining what was left in her glass. Next to her, Stacy mimicked her actions, but with considerably more bounce.
“What are we celebrating?” Mike asked, setting the pitcher in the center of the table, then lowering himself into the space Dylan had made for him.
“Dylan’s breakup! It was fantastic. I wish you could’ve seen her in action,” Neale said, smiling at her big sister like she had won the Fields Medal in applied mathematics.
For a brief moment, Dylan fully understood what the phrasesororicidal tendenciesmeant. Stacy readjusted her posture with such force that Dylan was surprised she didn’t hurt her neck trying to look at her. To Mike’s credit, he was considerably more smooth about adjusting his torso, his broad shoulders angling toward her. Mike’s well-shaped eyebrows had managed to quirk up, accompanying the tell-me-more expression on his face.
“I’m not sure we were actually celebrating,” Dylan said, finishing her drink with less panache than either Neale or Stacy. She willed her pointed look to convey theshut the hell upshe was thinking to Neale, who ignored it.
“I’m just saying you told him about himself in public and drove over a median to get away from the guy when he blocked your car.”
“It was technically a sidewalk with a flower bed,” Dylan said, as if the specifics of what she’d driven over made the story more reasonable. For a small second, she considered melting into the floor, preferably before Neale started quoting the exact language she’d used. At least until she remembered the state of the floor. Dylan really liked the sweater she was wearing. It was cashmere.
“He sounded like the worst,” Stacy said, reaching for the pitcher and pouring some for the three women.
