“Yep.” I nodded to punctuate it.
“What about it?” Halley asked, jumping off the step stool and looking at me. “People get wrong number texts all the time?”
“Not these wrong number texts.”
“Was it a confession from a serial killer?”
“I’m not sure they do those over text.”
“A grandma looking for her grandchild?”
“No, but I do have an old lady as my number neighbor who cannot text and has a friend named Cheryl who loses her keys.”
Ava frowned. “How do you know that?”
“I texted my neighbors,” I replied. “Back to the point of this conversation: it was a penis.”
They both froze.
“A penis?” Halley asked, one eyebrow raising and disappearing under her blonde bangs.
“Yep. He accidentally sent me a dick pic. At two a.m., meaning it was the first thing I saw when I woke up on Monday morning.” I took my phone out of the ass pocket of my jeans and, after quickly unlocked it, shoved the phone in Halley’s direction. “Look at it! Look!”
“I don’t want to!” She did her best to duck and dive from my enthusiastic picture-pushing, including covering her eyes.
“I’ll look.” Ava grabbed my wrist and pulled the phone in her direction, tilting the screen so she could see it. “Not bad. Good size. Length and girth. Probably a good handful,” she said appreciatively.
“You’re in a library!” Halley jerked around with a hiss. “You can’t go flaunting unwanted dick pics everywhere!”
“This wasn’t unwanted,” I corrected her. “It was accidental. A wrong number dick pic.”
“I don’t care how it came to be in your possession. I don’t want to see it.” She grabbed some books from the cart. “Did you tell him he’d sent it to the wrong person?”
“Yes. I told him he got the wrong number, but he had a pretty nice dick, so it was okay.” I wrenched my wrist from Ava’s grip, locked it, and tucked it back into my pocket.
“There’s no such thing as a nice dick.” Halley pushed the cart along. “They’re all ugly. Even your brother’s.”
Ew. Gross.
“La la la la la!” I put my fingers in my ears.
Ava snorted. “She had that coming.”
Halley nodded. “I don’t get it. You don’t know the guy. He apologized, right?”
I dropped my hands with a click of my tongue. “Yep. I told him it was fine.”
“Reagan, that is not the correct response to a dick pic. Preston sent me one last week, and I told him to fuck off.” Halley rearranged a few books. “Nobody likes dick pics.”
“You’re forgetting who you’re talking to,” Ava said and turned to me. “Didn’t you once ask for a dick pic when you were on that dating app?”
“Yeah, but they banned me.” I paused. “To be honest, I asked because he looked like he had a small one, and those guys can be deceiving. Plus, this guy is really nice.”
“You’re still texting him?”
“Yeah. He thanked me for being cool about it because most girls wouldn’t be. I told him how to get a better angle and asked why he was sending it.”
“Oh, hell,” Ava muttered.
It was a bit crazy when I laid it out like that.
“So are you, like, friends now?” Halley asked, putting the now-empty cart off to the side.
“No. I have no idea what his name is.” I made a show of examining my nails. “I didn’t give him mine, either. No idea what he looks like or who he is.”
The eyes of both my best friends were trained on me, and I knew exactly what they were thinking.
I’d lost my marbles.
It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility.
“I know people think Halley is the weird one here, but you are really quite strange,” Ava said slowly, drawing her brows together in a drown.
“Hey!”
“Yeah, no, she’s right.” Halley raised her eyebrows. “So what are you going to do? Just keep texting this nameless, faceless, unknown man with the relatively nice dick until…”
“Until I get bored, I guess. That, or I have a one-night stand with him and recognize his cock.” I shrugged. I’d thought last night was the end of our chat, but he’d texted me this morning to wish me a nice day. “He’s a nice guy. We actually have a bit in common.”
We took the stairs in single file, avoiding the stream of teens who were headed to study.
“Hey,” Ava said brightly when we reached the bottom.
“What?” I asked.
“Have you considered that we might know the guy whose penis that is?”
I was pretty sure I’d remember those tattoos, but what if they were new? What if I’d just never paid attention to tattoos on anyone I’d met before? I could have passed him in a coffee shop and never known.
“No,” I said firmly. “No, no, no, no. I’m not going to believe that. Ava, why would you do that to me?”
She shrugged, but her eyes were full of mischief. “It just occurred to me. I mean, who is he? Is he even legal? Is he young and hot? Or is he the limping janitor at the high school?”