“Well, I just wanted to stop embarrassing myself. Stop embarrassing you. You understand that, Bea, don’t you?”

“You think you were embarrassing me?”

“I wouldn’t blame you. I’ve been behaving pretty badly.”

“God, honestly, that’s the meanest thing you’ve ever said to me.” Bea looks like she’s on the verge of tears. “I love you, Lulu, you fucking asshole. I don’t care if anyone else thinks you’re cool.”

Lulu doesn’t know what to say.

“Is that what you think we are to each other? That I’m gonna ditch you for Kiley because she’s dating Owen now?” Bea puts the basket she’s carrying down and cups her hands around her mouth like a megaphone. “Attention!” she shouts. The other people in the aisle look at her, startled. Some just keep walking. “This is Lulu, and she is my best friend,” Bea continues. “My best! Friend!”

“High five for friendship!” Some dude offers Bea his palm, and she slaps it.

Bea turns to Lulu coolly. “What I just did,” she says, “was embarrassing. You’re not embarrassing. You’re just a mess, like everyone else.”

Lulu has never wanted to laugh and cry so hard, at the same time, in her whole life. Who even is Bea? Who is she?

“Okay,” Bea says. “Your turn.”

“My turn?”

“Even if you were embarrassing me,” Bea says. “I wouldn’t mind. So what is it, Lulu? Do you feel the same way about me?”

In the last six months Lulu has accidentally uploaded a video of herself mid-make-out to the internet. She’s made the first move on a girl she wasn’t sure liked her. She’s stripped off her clothes and leaped into freezing water. She has changed her whole life. Somehow, it’s still hard to curl a hand around her mouth and yell out, “ATTENTION SHOPPERS.

“BEATRIZ OCAMPO IS MY BEST FRIEND.

“SHE IS A BETTER FRIEND THAN I DESERVE.

“JUST THOUGHT YOU SHOULD KNOW.”

Then she collapses into a ball on the floor.

“I was gonna say, ‘That wasn’t so bad, was it,’” Bea says, somewhere above her. “But, um. Did I kill you?”

Lulu realizes that lying on the floor of Eataly is not much less dramatic than yelling in the aisles of one. She gets up and dusts herself off. “Incredibly,” she says, “I survived.”

A security guard approaches them cautiously. She looks like she isn’t much older than they are, and she isn’t at all sure what the protocol for a situation like this one is.

“Um,” she says. “I think? I think I have to ask you to leave.”

Lulu has never been kicked out of anywhere before in her life. She doesn’t know what to say to Bea once they’re standing outside. They weren’t even allowed to buy the snacks they’d picked out, so they’re empty-handed.