“Ooh, speaking of tired.” Paige pulls out her phone and opens a memo app. “I need your coffee order for tomorrow. It’s my turn.”
I grin. “I’ll take a caramel latte with an extra shot.”
“Skim, half, or whole? Vente or Grande?”
I stare at her in bemusement. “Um, I don’t know, Paige. I just want a giant-ass coffee with lots of caffeine.”
Karen cackles. “She’ll figure it out.”
I open the door. “Bye, guys. Thanks again for asking me to go. I’m really excited.”
“You should be,” Paige says, grinning. “We’re awesome.”
“See you tomorrow,” Karen calls as I step out onto the sidewalk. “Sleep good!”
“You too.” I head up to my apartment, my plastic bags full of goodies in hand, wondering if I’ll be able to sleep at all.
***
“Ooh, we should stop there,” Paige squeals, her face pressed to the glass of the passenger-side window.
“What? Where?” I take my eyes off the road to glance in her direction. All I’ve seen is rolling fields for the past two hundred miles.
“That sign.” She turns around, her face alight with excitement. “It said there was a salt and pepper shaker museum at the next exit.”
I stare at her, not sure if she’s serious or not. “Are you kidding me?”
“What? I think it would be cool. And how many times in your life do you get to say you’ve been to a salt and pepper shaker museum?”
“No,” I say firmly. “Absolutely not. I’m not stopping.”
She flops back into her seat, pouting. “You sound just like Karen.”
I have to laugh at that. It hasn’t taken very much time at all for me to start reacting to Paige in a very Karen-like way. After a full day in a contained environment, there’s only so many times one can hear someone beg to stop the car at the slightest provocation before patience runs thin.
“Well,” I say, peeking in the rearview mirror; Karen appears to still be sleeping. “What do you think Karen would say if she woke up and found that we were at a salt and pepper shaker museum?”
Paige giggles. “Good point.”
“Are you really that bored?” I ask. “Didn’t you bring like, two stacks of magazines?”
“I read them all this morning.”
“Which is your own fault,” Karen says from the backseat without opening her eyes. “I told you to save some for when you were bored.”
“I couldn’t help it!” Paige retorts. “This morning, I was too excited to sit still. I needed something to distract me.”
“Well, now you’re too bored to sit still, which I’m pretty sure I warned you about. So you’re just going to have to put on your big-girl panties and deal.”
“I’m not sure, Karen,” I say. “I’m kind of changing my mind. It might be fun to visit a salt and pepper shaker museum.”
“You guys are the worst,” Karen says, cuddling up against her pillow. “Wake me up when it’s my turn to drive. And don’t you dare stop at that museum. Or anywhere else ridiculous enough to attract her attention.”
“Come on, Karen,” Paige says, leaning across the middle console to poke her friend’s arm. “You promised you’d entertain me. I’m bored.”
Karen groans. “Listen to your iPod.”
“We can’t get a signal out here,” Paige says. “Your transmitter thingy is crap.”
“Sorry we don’t all have new cars with iPod jacks,” Karen says. “Oh, wait, this is your car. Shut up.”
“Karen, come on. Get up and talk to me.”
“Oh, fine.” Karen throws off the sweater she was using as a blanket and sits up. “I was saving this for a disaster, but I suppose now is as good a time as any. Let’s do a talk list.”
“Yay!” Paige yells, clapping her hands. “I love talk lists!”
“What the hell is a talk list?” I ask.
“Oh, my gosh, Daisy, you’ll love it. It’s this thing Karen does when I’m bored or getting all cuckoo.” Paige lowers her eyes a little. “I don’t know if you noticed, but I get a little wired sometimes. I have ADHD.”
Well, that makes a lot of sense, considering how excitable and distracted she often seems. And maybe that explains why Paige was so quick to treat me with compassion when she found out about my panic attacks.
“You don’t get cuckoo,” I tell her. “You just seem to enjoy yourself. We could all stand to be a bit more like that.”
“Thanks, Daisy!” She grins. “Anyhow, the talk list. So Karen gets out a piece of paper, and we make a list of things we have to talk about, serious or really silly or whatever. And then we have to talk about everything on that list.”