Dan is my best friend but sometimes I catch him picking his nose and flicking his boogers at my windshield.

“Stop doing that. I can see you.”

“I didn’t—“

“I saw you!”

But now he’s depressed so when I catch him I don’t make fun of him for it as much.

My other closest friend, PJ, does the same thing but they never do it when they are both in the car with me, probably because the stakes are higher that they will be seen. PJ is not depressed so it is perfectly acceptable to make fun of him for it. But why do my two best friends always pick their noses and flick it on my car and then lie about it? This is what I wonder when I drive in my car alone. Or when I clean and find dried boogers on my belongings.

I cleaned the bathtub with bleach. Now the bathroom and entire apartment smells like bleach. This is a perfect opportunity to use the most recent terrible gift I was given, a shell candle from Hawaii, but it does next to nothing. Lacking the other thing powerful enough to overcome the smell of Chlorine (tuna), I pop a bag of popcorn and put it in the bathroom.

Dan came over and did homework on my computer.

“Have some of these.”

“What are they?” He asked.

“Just eat them.”

“They’re good.”

“They’re Flintstones Sour Gummy Vitamins. You can only have two a day. Everyday I want all of them. There’s another bottle hidden under my bed so I will forget that I have them. But I don’t. I always know they’re there. I’ve started sucking on them and throwing them out when I’m done so I don’t overdose on every vitamin.”

“You know, you could just buy regular candy.”

“Yeah. If I put this in the toilet, do you think it’ll look like I shat turquoise? I shat turquoise once. After I ate a buffalo chicken sandwich from Wawa. Fucking complementary colors. Weird. Do you want some bathroom popcorn?”

“No thanks.”

He typed a few more things on my computer.

“Can I print this? Is this scrap paper?”

“Oh, that’s just an old draft of my story.”

“The only word I saw is boobs.”

“There’s an entire paragraph about boobs.”

We ate the bathroom popcorn. It tasted like chlorine and an artificial replication of the ocean.

————

Tallulah Marzipan is a writer who hates red peppers and has no cats. She lives in New York City.