“Hi, Perry.”
“Josie.”
“Haven’t seen you around for a while.”
Perry couldn’t walk around her. She was standing directly in front of him and in front of Karess, who was standing beside him. The only place to go without knocking over one of the two of them was to crawl over a table at which two guys who looked like graduate students sat, passing a page full of calculations angrily back and forth between them, and he couldn’t do that.
“Yeah,” he said to Josie, and looked around her showily in the direction of the Starbucks counter, trying to make it clear that he was on his way past her, that he didn’t plan to linger here with her. But Josie had never been one to take her cues from other people. “Are you living with Craig?” she asked him. “Because that’s the rumor.” She glanced at Karess, head to toe, and seemed to dismiss her before turning back to Craig again.
“Why do you want to know?” Perry asked.
“Because I want to know,” Josie said.
“Look. Josie, I’ve—”
“Excuse me,” Karess said, sounding meekly polite as she squeezed between Perry and Josie. When she reached the counter she turned and gestured for Perry to follow, but he couldn’t, because Josie was still standing in front of him.
“Who’s that?” Josie asked, jerking her head in Karess’s direction. “You’re dating a hippie chick?”
“Josie—”
“Look,” Josie said. “I want you to tell Craig something for me.”
Perry looked at the ceiling. He waited.
“I want you to tell Craig ‘fuck you’ for me.”
Perry continued to stare at the ceiling—although, out of the corner of his eye he could see that Karess was still waving her pale hand at him, a bit more frantically now. Her bracelets seemed to catch the light, which danced around on the ceiling. He tried to concentrate on that even as he saw (as if, suddenly, he had panoramic vision and could take in all of Starbucks without taking his eyes off the ceiling) Josie’s equally pale hand rise up and rush toward him, colliding with his face.
The smacking sound was oddly muffled to him because, along with his cheek, Josie had struck him in the ear, but it was clear to him, even in his shocked state, that everyone else in Starbucks had heard it, because they all turned to stare at him at once as Josie’s little black shoes snapped away, back to the corner she’d come from, sounding like claws or talons tapping across the linoleum as she went.
“Oh, my God!” Karess cried out, and rushed toward him as if she thought he’d been shot. She grabbed his arm and body-slammed him toward the door, pushed him out into the street. “Oh, my God!” she screamed again. “That girl slapped you!”