* * *
And that washow I ended up sandwiched between Fatima and Chloe on my sofa several hours later, a smorgasbord of sushi and wine spread out on the coffee table,Legally Blondequeued up on the TV. It felt like the perfect option to fuel our current hatred of men.
The weather outside matched our moods, too; not only was it still raining, but it had started thundering as well just as Fatima had arrived. The delivery driver with the sushi had looked positively terrified, so we’d tipped him a bit extra to make up for the fact that he’d brought us our food on what was basically a moving lightning rod.
We were just getting to the iconic “What, like it’s hard?” moment when the power cut out. We all froze for a moment, hoping it would just be a flicker, but when it didn’t immediately come back on, we simultaneously checked our phones.
“I’m at twenty percent,” I said.
“I’m at twelve,” Chloe said.
“Ugh, you’re both so unprepared,” Fatima sighed, turning on her torch. “I’m on fifty, and I’ve got my portable charger in my bag.”
“Sorry we’re not all preppers,” Chloe scoffed as I got up to find the actual torch in the kitchen.
“I’m not a prepper,” Fatima said, slipping fully into teacher mode. “I’m a responsible adult.”
I found the torch, but it seemed to be dead. So I rifled around in the junk drawer for batteries, not finding any.
“Here,” Fatima said, “use the batteries from this.” I turned around to see her extending the TV remote towards me. “We don’t need it if we can’t use the TV, right?”
Once Fatima and I were both equipped with torches, we started trying to fix the lighting situation. The fireplace was operational, but I’d never learned to use it, always having left that to Cara, and there wasn’t any fuel for it anyway. So instead we started gathering candles from around the house. I had a shocking number of them for someone who didn’t actually like burning candles, which I told Fatima when she gave me her fire hazard lecture after seeing how many there were on the bookshelves.
There were so many in the end that, when we lined them all up on the hearth and lit them, it was almost as bright as the lamps had been.
“What now?” Chloe asked.
“I don’t know,” Fatima said. “Seance?”
Chloe laughed. “You joke, but you know I’d be well up for that.”
“And I decidedly would not,” I said.
“I’m just sad we won’t get to finish the film,” Fatima said, slumping back down on the sofa. “We hadn’t even made it to the best part.”
“The part where Ali Larter shouts ‘liposuction’ in the prison?” Chloe asked, sitting next to her.
I scoffed as I brought another bottle of wine out. “Um, I’m pretty sure she means ‘Don’t stomp your little last season Prada shoes at me, honey’,” I said, putting on my best Enrique impression, waving my finger around and everything.
“Oh my god,” Fatima said, clapping, “that was brilliant! Do another.”
I set the bottle down on the coffee table and thumbed through my mental repository ofLegally Blondequotes. “Um, let’s see, how about…” I cleared my throat and pitched my voice up to a register worthy of Elle Woods, donning what was probably quite an offensive American accent. “‘Isn’t it the first cardinal rule of perm maintenance that you’re forbidden to wet your hair for the first twenty-four hours at the risk of deactivating the ammonium thioglycalate?’”
Fatima squealed in delight, but Chloe just sat up and donned a nervous expression.
“‘Y-yes?’” she asked, giving me the next line. I stood in front of the fireplace and postured towards the window seat as if speaking to an imaginary jury.
“‘And wouldn’t someone who’s had, say, thirty perms before in their life be well aware of this rule?’”
Chloe continued her impression of a panicked Chutney, and Fatima sat back with her glass of wine, watching us as if she were watching the film for the first time. And by the time Chloe yelled “‘I thought it wasyouwalking through the door!’” Fatima was sideways on the couch in a fit of giggles.
Within a few minutes, we’d re-enacted most of what we could remember of the film, and right as Chloe finished rattling off the where-are-they-now updates from the end, the lights flickered back on.
“What do you say?” I asked, swapping the head torch batteries back into the TV remote. “Watch the rest of the film for real?”
“Hell no,” Fatima said, snuggling up next to Chloe. I sat on the other side of her, and she grabbed my hand, lacing my fingers with hers. “That was definitely my preferred rendition.”
Chapter42
