Rivi stands at my living room window and looks out, tapping her fingers impatiently on the windowsill. “Let’s go let’s go let’s go let’s go!”
I am sitting on the floor with my back against the wall, and eating an onion bagel. “I’m having my breakfast. You can wait five minutes.”
“I can’t wait. You can eat on the way.”
“You can wait. You’re not going to die.”
“We have to go! It’s going to be dark soon!”
“It’s eight in the morning,” I say. “The only way it will be dark soon is if the apocalypse comes.”
“Fine,” she growls. She turns away from the window and stomps loudly across the floor toward the kitchen. “These are my new boots,” she says as she goes. “They make extremely loud angry noises when I huff off.”
“You are a delicate flower,” I say. “It’s a wonder you’re still single.”
She leans around the kitchen doorway and, with an accuracy that would impress the tights off Robin Hood, bounces a bagel off my forehead from twenty paces. “I am a rubber pot,” she says, “and you are a gluey kettle.”
“And you have anger issues,” I say. “Remember who’s driving you today. You give me a head wound and there’s no guarantee my motor skills won’t suffer.”
“I have plenty of issues, and anger isn’t one of them.” She comes back into the room and goes back to the window. “It better not rain today. Seriously.”
“Don’t Hulk out, anger girl. It’s not going to rain.”
“I’m blaming you if it does.”
“Do I need to eat this bagel more slowly?” I ask. “Do I?” She looks at me and scowls. I raise the bagel at a glacial pace to my lips, and take the smallest of bites from it. “I’ll chew this bite a hundred times,” I say.
“You’re a baboon,” she says. She crosses her arms and turns back to the window.
“A baboon with a driver’s license.” I decide to only chew the bite ten times, then swallow it down. “I don’t even know where I’m taking you.”
“IKEA,” she says.
“Say again?”
“IKEA,” she repeats. “You need bookshelves.”
I raise my eyebrows at her. “Seriously?”
“And a couch. I refuse to keep sitting on your floor when I come over. We aren’t barbarians, Sebastian.”
“You might be,” I say. “You did just assault me with a breakfast food. Is there even an IKEA around here?”
“Across the Bay. I Googled it.”
“Maybe I don’t want shelves from IKEA.”
“Maybe you should shut up,” she says. “I’m offering to buy you some furniture. I don’t generally offer to do anything.”
I tap the remaining quarter of the bagel against my cheek. “Seriously? Maybe it really is the apocalypse. I think that’s one of the signs.”
She stomps over to me and plucks the bagel from my hand. “That’s enough breakfast, fatty. Get up and let’s go. Time’s a-wasting!”
“I don’t know what I’d do without you,” I say. “Except not starve to death, probably.”
“IKEA waits for no man!” Rivi shouts. “Besides, they have meatballs there. You can eat after we buy things.” She flings the stolen piece of bagel at me, bouncing it off my forehead. “Drive, monkey! Drive!”
I get off the floor and brush off the seat of my pants. “I’m only doing this for the meatballs. Just so you know.”
“And the love,” she says sweetly.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “Just the meatballs.”