“She claims she stayed up late reading a book—that’s why the dark circles and eye luggage.” Sophia sounded skeptical.
“Well you look like hell,” Kat said frankly. “It must have been some book. Was it a horror novel or what?”
“Something like that,” Liv muttered sulkily. She was in no mood to put up with her friend’s teasing.
“Well don’t get bent out of shape, doll.” Kat smiled at her as she continued pulling ingredients out of her shopping bag. Liv hoped the strawberries and mangos were for a fruit salad and not the sardine and black olive quiche. “I just thought with that sexy outfit maybe you’d finally decided to get back on the dating train. You and Mitch hit splitsville over six months ago now.”
“You’re the last one to talk about dating.” Sophia was whisking something in a bowl—no doubt she’d decided to make pancake batter after all as a back up to the disastrous quiche. “You’re even worse with men than me—and I suck at the social scene,” she added, tasting the batter and reaching for a bottle of vanilla extract.
“Exactly—because most men today don’t appreciate the pleasures of a plus sized woman.” Kat gestured at her own lush figure with a small pineapple she’d pulled out of the seemingly bottomless bag. “Which is why I have to live vicariously through you two skinny-minnies. A size eight looks good in that naughty little nighty—a size eighteen, not so much.”
It was true Kat was a size eighteen but she had it all in the right places, Liv thought. She had often wished that her breasts were as full as Kat’s but then, Kat was full to running over all over the place, including her mouth. She was thinking of going back to school to become a lawyer instead of just a paralegal because getting paid to argue was her idea of a perfect job. Usually her quick wit and naughty sense of humor cracked Liv up but this morning she so wasn’t in the mood.
“Change the subject. Preferably away from my hot jammies and the fact that I don’t have a man to wear them for,” she said, getting up from the table and going to the fridge for a glass of juice. Actually she’d tried dating again after she’d dumped Mitch but somehow it didn’t feel right. Mainly because none of the men she went out with were tall and dark with glowing amber eyes…Stop that! she scolded herself, pulling open the fridge door which was covered in colorful magnets and reaching for the carton of OJ. Stop thinking about him—he’s not even real!
She tried concentrating on her favorite fridge magnet instead, the one with two California rolls in bed side by side. The caption underneath read, Wake up, little sushi!
“Okay, sourpuss, try this subject on for size,” Kat snapped, folding the empty shopping bag and stowing it away in her barn-sized purse. “You remember Jillian Holms that took home-ec with us in high school?”
“The head cheerleader?” Sophia made a face. “How could we forget?”
“That’s her.” Kat nodded enthusiastically. “Well, you’re not going to believe this but she got drafted.”
There was complete silence in the room for about two seconds and then Liv and Sophia said simultaneously, “She what?”
“Got drafted. I know, can you even believe it?”
There was no need to ask what Kat meant when she said their old acquaintance from Hillsborough High had gotten drafted—every woman in the room knew about the draft and every one of them lived in fear of it.
Five years before the Earth had been suddenly attacked. The space station orbiting the moon, which had been completed in 2025, had been destroyed and the rest of the planet was threatened by a mysterious force known only as the Scourge. Attempts to contact and reason with the menacing threat had failed and even the deadliest weapons had little or no effect. It looked like the Earth was down for the count and everyone on the planet was going to wind up as alien take-out.
Liv remembered those horrible days—it had been forty-eight hours of mass panic. Suicides, bombings, looting and unprotected sex which she thankfully had not personally participated in. With no other immediate family, she and Sophie and Kat had locked the doors to the little apartment she’d been living in at the time and eaten themselves sick on Ben and Jerry’s while they watched a never-ending marathon of vintage chick flicks.
It might not have been the most productive way to spend their last days on Earth but eating your body weight in Chunky Monkey and watching Sixteen Candles and Pretty Woman beat chowing down on the business end of a gun or having sex with a total stranger any day of the week, in Liv’s opinion. And their wait-and-see approach had been justified—in the end everything turned out all right.