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form an educated guess. The tires on her yellow Prius squealed dangerously as she zipped in and out of lanes on the 101 freeway. Olivia’s driving was always at least as dramatic as everything else in her life.
    “She just turned seventeen today, for God’s sake. Let’s try not to kill her yet!” Nate protested from the front seat, grabbing onto the passenger-side door and letting out a silent scream of terror.
    “Oh, Grandma, hush,” Olivia said, utterly calm as she narrowly avoided rear-ending an Acura with the audacity to be going a mere seventy miles per hour in the fast lane. We made the usuallyforty-minute-plus drive to the city in record time, pausing only because of slight traffic just before the Golden Gate Bridge.
    Once we finally got onto the bridge, I fidgeted anxiously. I wasn’t a big fan of heights, and being suspended above water always made me edgy. Instead of thinking about it, I pondered to myself for the thousandth time why anyone would call something painted bright red “Golden.”
    Olivia zoomed through the Marina District and turned right just before Fisherman’s Wharf. By the time she’d squeezed the Prius into a tiny and very crowded parking garage, I knew my guess was correct. I also knew I would soon be regretting my unusually large dinner.
    Nate and Olivia led me straight out of the parking lot and to the Ghirardelli Ice Cream and Chocolate Shop, just underneath the red and white clock tower. There was a line out of the door, but it went quickly; when it was our turn, we bypassed the menu and walked right up to the counter.
    “The Earthquake, please,” Nate ordered for us. He and Olivia paid (ignoring my attempt to chip in). We took the receipt from the clerk and scooted along the counter to watch our dessert being made.
    We always got the same thing there. The Earthquake was supposed to contain eight large scoops of ice cream, but you could easily push it to at least ten scoops and a few extra toppings with just a teeny bit of flirting.
    To that end, Olivia was already leaning seductively over the counter, chatting up the guy who Nate had just handed our receipt to.
    “Definitely double fudge and double marshmallow,” Olivia was saying. “And caramel, butterscotch, blueberry, raspberry . . . how many do we have so far?”
    “Not nearly enough,” the ice cream guy smiled at Olivia and added two extra scoops of chocolate ice cream and a generous ladle of butterscotch.
    But she wasn’t done. She threw an arm over my shoulders and pulled me over in front of him. “It’s my friend’s birthday. And she
loves
sweets, don’t you, Addy?”
    Behind us, Nate snorted with laughter and left to go find a table. I turned bright red and mumbled something unintelligible.
    Still grinning at Olivia, and mercifully paying me no attention whatsoever, the ice cream guy grabbed a handful of chocolate cable cars and sprinkled them over the top of our completed sundae.
    “Happy birthday,” he said to Olivia, who winked at him and whisked our dessert over to the table Nate had staked out in the corner.
    I was already full from Gran’s dinner, but tackling an Earthquake is a team sport, and I wasn’t about to let down my team. So I ignored the uncomfortable feeling in my stomach and proceeded to plow through my third of the plate.
    A lot of people at the tables around us—mostly tourists, from the looks of them—gawked at us in fascinated revulsion as we worked our way through the mountain of sticky, cold perfection in front of us. No wonder they’ll give you extra ice cream if you look like you can handle it! We were most definitely a part of the entertainment at Ghirardelli that evening.
    When only two rather runny scoops of ice cream remained, floating serenely in a pool of congealed hot fudge, Nate leaned back in his chair and let out a half groan, half burp.
    “Don’t you quit on us, Whitting,” Olivia said sternly, although she too had laid down her spoon and was looking a little bit