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sun.
    I form my lips into a nervous smile. “I think it did,” I find myself saying, not at all sure this is true.
    The brunette laces her fingers around Lex’s and pulls him toward our meager selection of rollerblades, which conjures a wholesome image in my mind of the twosome skating hand-in-hand along a sunny California boardwalk. “Looking for anything in particular?” I ask, following along behind them but keeping my distance.
    While the brunette spins the wheels of a sweet K2 skate with her thumb, Lex asks me, “You don’t know who I am, do you?”
    This is perhaps the strangest thing anyone has ever said to me. I glance toward the backroom in hopes of spotting Harvey, but he must be bogged down with the monthly inventory. “You’re on TV, right?” I say.
    He smiles. “You’re good. You had me going for a minute there,” he says with the same wink he’s employed to melt the hearts of a hundred gorgeous starlets back in Hollywood. “What’s your name?”
     I have the weirdest feeling that he should know my name already, like we’re friends through the TV. “Bobbi-Jo Cotton.”
    “These should work,” the brunette interjects, dangling a raspberry-colored K2 by its tongue. “Size eight and a half.”
    My feet are tiny. Size six. Stumps on a bloated tree. “Okay,” I say. “Let me check out back.” I scurry for the stockroom and, as I pass Harvey’s office door, raise my voice and say, “Hey, Harv, come here.”
    I don’t wait for him to answer, my eyes trained like a laser on the neat rows of rollerblades I can see through the door-less stockroom entry. When I reach the K2s, a glad rush washes over me for the fact that Harvey’s made me organize the back-stocked merchandise so meticulously.
    But there are no eight and a halfs. I pull an eight and, miraculously, a nine (a size we don’t order too often due to its sluggish sales rate) and spin back out into the hall, where Harvey drifts from his office into my path.
    The size nines bang into his arm, then crash against the wall. “Sorry!” I gasp.
    Harvey rubs at his elbow and eyes me with confusion. “Everything all right?”
    “Come on,” I say, pushing past him. “You’ll never believe…”
    Harvey trusts me, no questions asked. With a minimal sigh, he shuffles toward the sales floor, where Lex and the brunette are curled around each other on the extra-deep window ledge, my advertisement for the Yo-Yo race looking childish over their tilted heads, which are poised to kiss.
    I clear my throat as I approach. “We’ve got an eight and a nine,” I say in a hopeful tone, “but no eight and a half.”
    The brunette stands up and Lex leans back, tucks his hands behind his head. I glance over my shoulder at Harvey, whose expression is inscrutable. “Can I help you with something?” he asks the brunette.
    I dart my bulging eyes from Lex to Harvey and back again, but Harvey remains immune to my eyeball pointing. The brunette says, “I’ll try the eights.”
    I lead her to a rickety Asian-style bench in front of the cash register, where she slips off her rhinestone-encrusted flip-flops (those can’t be diamonds, right?!) and crams her bare foot into one of the rollerblades. I hold out its mate and say, “You can try ‘em on the sidewalk, if you want.”
    She gives me a closed-lipped smile that is quite lovely and not the least bit bitchy, as I’d expected. (The tabloids portray all of Lex Arlington’s conquests as money-grubbing trollops.) Softly she says, “Thank you.”
    While the brunette ventures out onto the pothole-ridden walk, I pretend to dust the front counter. And I eavesdrop.
    “How many’ve you got so far?” Lex asks Harvey.
    “Mmm…let’s see,” Harvey says. “Twenty-six? No, no. Twenty-eight, counting Mr. and Mrs. Willard.”
    “That’s it?”
    Harvey shrugs, his back to me, his frame just wide enough to eclipse my view of Lex. “It’s meant to be an intimate affair. Not more than fifty riders,