Driving With the Top Down by Beth Harbison Page B

outfit two sizes too small and not made properly for their shape. The kind of accoutrements they thought made them hot, but really only made them cartoonish.
    Every time he remarked on this, it stung a little. It just didn’t feel right for a man to talk about girls like that. Any girls, but especially not ones who were so much younger than he was. Plus it sucked because since he was always saying that kind of thing, now she noticed it whether she wanted to or not.
    Now Tamara was thinking way too much about these girls she’d never know. Just a weird girl at the table next to them thinking about them.
    Colleen, on the other hand, didn’t seem aware of them. She didn’t acknowledge the chatty volume at all and just opened her menu and said, “I could eat everything on this menu. One time, one of my girlfriends and I ordered six different things just to share them all.” She shook her head at the fond memory. Days so long past, they didn’t even seem real anymore.
    “We paid for it using the money we had just gotten back for selling our textbooks. That was a good night. But let me tell you, even with a young metabolism, combining pancakes with chicken tenders with a cheeseburger and cinnamon French toast and God knows what else—that’ll give anyone a horrible stomachache.”
    “I bet,” replied Tamara. She recognized that she sounded uninterested in the story, when actually she was just thinking how good all those things sounded.
    And how she wished she had a friend she could pig out like that with. What a lame and pitiful thought: I wish I had a best friend .
    Tamara didn’t really have anything resembling a best friend. She used to, back home at her mom’s, but they had lost touch. At home, all she had were “the girlfriends.” The other groupie girls who watched the boys play video games and went off to make out or do more whenever the guys said to.
    She shivered, thinking of Vince and the fact that he had recorded that video. God. How could she have been so careless, letting him do that? Not that she “let” him; she was just too lazy to stop him. No, not lazy. Tired. Painfully, sickly polite. Something. At any rate, she knew she didn’t trust him, despite his promises it would go no further. Knowing him, it could very well be on Reddit or 4chan or something else by now. Her private moment with him, being upvoted and downvoted by creepy unattached losers sitting at home, feeling high and mighty with their job as judge, no idea that it was a big deal to her.
    Hopefully she was wrong. Maybe this time he was telling the truth when he said he wouldn’t tell anyone. She just feared that by “anyone” he had meant “anyone who would tell Tamara they saw it.”
    She bit on the inside of her cheek, and decided that cinnamon French toast was a lot easier to think about than Vince exposing her.
    “I’m getting that French toast,” she announced.
    “You are? Hm. I was thinking about it too. But we can’t both get the same thing, then we’ll miss out on swapping bites.” Colleen smiled. “What else sounded good to you?”
    Swapping bites. Not something Tamara was used to. Neither was getting to help pick out more than one thing. Both sounded okay at this moment.
    Her answer was quick, as every time she went to a restaurant that served breakfast food—not very often—she had trouble picking between something sugary that would make her fall asleep in half an hour and something with protein to keep her going. “Uh … the mini meat loaves with mashed potatoes. Is it weird to get something so dinnery and so breakfasty, though?”
    Colleen thought for a second. “No. I think it’s quite civilized, actually.” She flagged down their waitress. “I’m going to get the mini meat loaves.” She gestured at Tamara to order.
    “Oh. Um. Cinnamon French toast.” Tamara noticed Colleen let her order her first choice and took the second one herself. It was a small gesture that didn’t really mean anything,