Shampoo

That springbound afternoon began with an argument about shampoo.

"How could you possibly know about this brand?" Nara cried out, her ears twitching with genuine alarm.

"Please keep it down," I said. I didn't want to have to vacate the premises before we had done all our grocery shopping. I stared balefully down at the shampoo brand I had selected at random. "Look, I've only chosen because it says it's for hair that gets frizzy, like yours." I tried to ruffle the top of her head, but she smacked my hand away. I inhaled sharply. This was a bad sign; she normally enjoyed getting pet.

"You must have made a bunch of new girl friends at your school," she said miserably, making a ridiculous assumption. This was always her way, at least when her period swung around. She wasn't normally so neurotic, but what with the stress of moving into a new apartment together alongside the recent mysterious death of her pet fish, she was very quick to get worked up about small things, good or bad.

"No, no," I said, trying to put the shampoo and conditioner bottles into our basket (it had been my ungentlemanly mistake to let her carry it, upon reflection), but she yanked the basket and herself away from me and began running down the aisle.

I followed cautious suit. Luckily, she did not start yelling about a cat chasing her across several aisles. We passed by vacuums, sponges, yogurt, and scientifically-grown meat. I bumped into two people trying to catch up, a horse-girl and a rhinoceros-boy. They were mulling over what to bring for dinner, since a carnivorous guest was coming over. I stopped and apologized for a moment, and pointed out a very good brand of lab-grown steak. 

"This is very expensive," murmured the horse-girl through her long forelock. She wore an interesting all-brown getup and her eyes were very bright.

"That's what I get," mused the rhino-boy, checking his phone. "Having a tiger for a boss." 

I shrugged and carried on in the search for my mouse. We had now traversed almost halfway across the whole store. "This is irritating," I mumbled to myself, looking around in the aisle I happened to enter. I saw only paper plates and aluminum baking pans. I had a sixth sense about these things, though, and I knew her scent by heart. I followed it into an aisle filled with bathroom products. She was here, somewhere. I muttered a very minor expletive.

"What?!" Nara squeaked behind me. I jumped and turned around.

"How did you get there?" I said in disbelief. Mice and their escape routes! She'd probably hidden herself in the toilet paper aisle and waited to jump out at me at the opportune moment.

"What did you call me?"

"I was referring to the situation. Listen," I said, catching her by her wrist before she started running away again. I knew she was only dashing around the store like this to give me a hard time, and because we not done our evening workout session last night - we had been too busy studying for our respective classes. I knew better than to let her forego her exercise- she became nothing short of a rodent on crack without it. I swore to myself that tonight we would do double rounds of following along with the small-weights workout video that she had been obsessed with as long as I had known her.

"What?" she said, faux-sullenly. It showed on her flushed face that she was very pleased to catch me by surprise. Her toned arm squirmed in my grip.

"Listen," I mewed softly, trying to get through to her. I was only having a little bit of fun (this happened often), "We need to prep the apartment before Sylvie and Dom come over. Don't you have to bake her the cake?" 

"No, we're just going to buy one," she said, her body slackening as I released her. She carried on talking like nothing was annoying. She started to shudder. "Sylvie, Sylvie. What flavor is she going to want?"

Sylvie was a rattlesnake girl that Nara befriended in their senior year of high school. Nara obsessed over her, the way some people obsess over cliff-jumping and car accident videos. When the two were together, Nara often asked Sylvie do "do the thing," which could refer to unhinging her jaw, or wrapping her reptilian body around Nara. Once, Sylvie had acquiesced to Nara's demands to shake the rattle at the base of her long, patterned tail, but the hollow sound of it had made my gums go completely dry and I had almost fainted. Of course, this had greatly pleased Nara. Sylvie was a very timid, gentle, bookish-type of girl, so I had no idea what kept her hanging around someone as excitable and careless as Nara. Dom, Sylvie's boyfriend, was a male marmot, a very upright, gentlemanly kind of guy. They were good friends, but I didn't want the apartment to look messy when they came over.

"Mouse,"  Nara said, gasping to herself. "I cannot in good conscience purchase a mouse-flavored cake." She shook her head, her body vibrating with self-righteousness.

I rolled my eyes and began dragging Nara to the bakery section of the store, taking the basket from her just to ensure things would keep moving. Sylvie was pescatarian, like many carnivore women who refused to eat meat, even though all consumable meat in this day and age was lab-grown.

"Does she like carrot-cake? Red velvet?" I asked, guessing at her friend's preferences. While she wasn't looking, I slipped the shampoo and conditioner bottles into the basket.

"Wait, she told me she would prefer something savory," she said.

"Okay, like what?"

"Sardines?" she looked at me like it was a question.

"I don't know," I said, flustered. We couldn't very well serve her sardines for her birthday. "She's your friend. What does she get when you guys go out together?"

"Usually she gets Chinese food," she said.

I stared at her. "How much Chinese food is pescatarian?"

I watched a thought bubble float around her head and then pop! "Let's get Fish Party!"

"Fast food?" I said in despair.

I eventually wrangled her into the car and through a drive through. She ordered two large, precarious containers of salmon sour soup. The smell of it filled my small car. I did not remember my own birthday celebration being this much trouble. However, the smell of the fish brought about the memory of her poor pet goldfish, which I had consumed in an unfortunate bought of sleepwalking. I was planning on telling her by the end of this week.

Hopefully I would not blurt it out during this dinnertime. I was terrible at keeping secrets. The savory salmon scent wafted across my nose as I drove. She ate a granola bar from the grocery trip and got crumbs all over the passenger seat. The trees waved us by, in their green spring dance. Nara's bright eyes tried to meet mine at their corner, and she tried to kiss me, but I couldn't because I was driving, and she still had granola in her mouth. Her tail twitched with anger.

I realized I was in for an interesting life full of interesting problems, with her as my special companion. Her glossy black hair shimmered with granola pieces in it.