The four of us started on our way, and after a few “side trips” we pulled in the parking lot. The four of us split up in the parking lot and decided to meet at the car in two hours. Nicole was pleased to find the mall has an Abercrombie &Fitch, her favorite store.
My ideal place to shop is a cross between Abercrombie and a little alternative shop. The shop is full of clothes that most days I won’t wear solely because they’re really flashy and normally involve sequins, faux fur and animal prints. My mood today was for a “Little Black Dress” with a touch of sparkle. I told AJ this, and we walked to a cute dress shop. I took one look at the price tag and walked out. AJ dragged me back in, insisting that price wasn’t a consideration. We had the choices down to two dresses and were trying to choose one.
“Personally I like the one with the roses beaded along the bottom edge,” he said examining the dress.
“It’s cute, but I also like the one with the Celtic design.”
“Whatever.”
“I am gonna go with the roses one, simply because I don’t wanna choose and you like that one better.”
“Great, now let’s go finish off the outfit with some shoes,” he said paying the cashier girl for my dress.
“Can I get really high heels? I mean like four inch ones just so I can tower over Nicole?”
“Don’t care. Let’s go,” he said grabbing my arm and pulling me out of the store.
After we were away from the store, walking half running down the mall I said, “Why did we leave so quickly?”
“Because I think the girl in the store recognized me, and I didn’t like the way she was looking at me.”
“OK,” I said pulling him into the shoe store.
About twenty minutes later we had several pairs of shoes each, but the ones I bought to go with the dress were four-inch heels with a marronish reddish tint to them. The color of the shoes matched the color of the beaded roses on the dress. When we realized that we had about forty-five minutes left AJ suggested that I get my hair done. I had changed into my dress and shoes to show him the outfit.
My style for hair is as low maintenance as possible. Ponytail is about as elaborate as I go most days. And I realized that I could never do my hair well enough to work with the dress, so I consented an went into a salon. The lady decided that I needed a French twist, and set to work. It took her about thirty minutes to make it look better than it ever has. AJ again paid for me against my rather loud protests.
With only fifteen minutes left, we headed for the car to kill time before Nick and Nicole came. He unlocked the car and I hopped in. I grabbed for the radio and we finally settled on a station that was playing Nookie by Limp Bizkit. He started to head bang, and I pretended to play the drums on the dashboard. We both got pretty into it, and were interrupted when someone knocked on the window. It was Nicole, and she had a perplexed look on her face. I unlocked the door, and hopped into the back seat with Nicole right behind me. Now, mind you that we both were in our dresses and this is a pretty hard task in heels. Nick jumped in the front seat and slammed the door just in time for a fan to come running up to the car pointing and screaming. There were a few people with her that were just as excited.
AJ didn’t chance the possibility of more fans showing up, so he gunned the engine and we were out of there. Somehow I knew this kind of incident was going to happen when I was with them, but not like that. I think it would have seemed a lot more normal to me if we had been at a concert or something where their presence had been announced.
Chapter 14