I marched back into the kitchen and gave her the wad of notes. “Here.” She opened her mouth to argue. “No. You’re taking it. And it’s a gift, not a loan. I don’t want it back.” When do I have time to watch TV, anyway?
Jasmine looked at the money and then at me. “Thank you,” she said at last.
“Thanks for being friends with a weirdo like me.” And then we were hugging and I very nearly started crying myself, so I squeezed her quickly and changed the subject. “That dress doesn’t look bigger on.”
Jasmine blinked back her own tears and looked down at herself, then at me. “Well, at least I don’t look like I came straight from the office.”
I examined my blouse and skirt. “It’s smart,” I told her.
“You look like a secretary. At least undo a button.”
I gave her a mock glare, but undid the top button of my blouse. It wasn’t like it made much of a difference anyway, with my chest. Maybe Jasmine had been in line ahead of me, and the boob gods had given her both our shares.
“Great. Let’s go.” Jasmine started to pull on the same light jacket she’d worn before.
“Wait, seriously? You’re planning to go out like that?” The dress left her bare up to her thighs. “You’ll freeze!”
She shrugged and indicated my sensible winter coat. “Trendy as your polar explorer special is, I can’t afford one.”
I had an idea. “Wait here.”
I went to my bedroom and rummaged in my wardrobe. Minutes later, I was back with a full-length snow white fur coat.
“What the fuck?!” Jasmine asked. “How much money do you have, and how many baby seals did you have to club to death to make that?”
“It’s not real fur—it’s from a thrift store. And it’s not mine! Don’t you remember it? It’s the one you wore in freshman year for the play about the Russian oligarch. You were the mistress.”
Her brow furrowed as she turned the coat over in her hands. “Yeah…Svetlana. I vant to go to America! But what’s it doing in your closet?”
I shrugged. “Afterwards, the girl doing costumes said they might need it if they ever staged the play again, but she didn’t have any room to store it, so….”
“You’ve been keeping it in your closet for three years just in case?! Karen, you’re too…nice.”
“I own about three outfits. It’s not like I need the space.”
She pulled on the coat, which reached down to her ankles. On anyone else it would have looked ridiculous but, with her long red hair and the tiny black dress, she just about pulled it off. She hugged me, which was like being cuddled by the Abominable Snowman.
“I don’t deserve a friend like you,” she told me. “I need to do something nice for you.”
“Let me stay in?” I suggested hopefully, my voice muffled by the fur. “I could do some practice….”
She released me and marched me out the door. “Not that.”
***
We met Natasha and Clarissa at Flicker. Dan had come along, too, on the proviso that he obey our no-boyfriends rule.
Flicker’s known for three things. The first is that, like Harper’s, the bar staff is almost entirely made up of Fenbrook students. The second is that the walls have screens showing random movie clips, without the sound. The third is that all the cocktails are named after movies, and they range from the fairly safe to the I-no-longer-remember-my-own-name.
“I’m going to have a Panic Room,” Clarissa announced. As usual, she was wearing something incredibly expensive and stunningly tasteful: a deep green top and a diagonally cut skirt. With her blonde hair and perfect make-up, you could have dropped her straight into a Vogue cover shoot.
“Don’t,” said Natasha, who worked at Flicker a few nights a week and so was an expert. “It’s just a Morello cherry floating in gray sludge. Barely a shot. Have a Moulin Rouge or something.”
“I’m not having a Moulin Rouge. It comes with pineapple and sparklers and a goddamn plastic elephant. It’s…”—Clarissa looked at Jasmine’s dress—“tacky.”
Jasmine stuck her tongue out at her.
I studied the menu. “I think I’ll have a Mamma Mia.”
Everyone groaned. “That barely has any alcohol in it!” said Dan. “It’s mostly marshmallow fluff. At least have a Pretty Woman!”
I sighed. “Okay, okay—a Pretty Woman. Nat?”
Natasha pursed her lips. “I don’t know. Something like The Godfather.”
A wave of dead silence expanded out from her. People at the table next to us stopped talking. No one had The Godfather.