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you?”
    “Uh, yeah. I mean, no. No. I don’t care. Do whatever you want. I don’t care.” What is wrong with me? I wait for Sam to snicker and say ‘yeah right, loser’ for despite his sweater vest and those goofy glasses he is cute, cuter than I thought he was last night. My fingers tighten around the cart handle. Cute guys used to talk to me. Now they give me a wide berth and whisper behind my back. Things must be pretty desperate in Sam’s personal life if he has no one better to walk around a grocery store with than me.
    “The dairy section is this way,” he says, nodding to the left.
    I steer the cart around a display of potato chips and follow him. When we get to the eggs I reach down automatically for the carton marked ‘free range organic’, but Sam grabs my wrist. It is a fleeting touch, gone almost before I have time to register it was there, but it is enough to have my hand recoiling back. “What? What’s wrong?”
    “Why get those ones?” he asks.
    I glance down at the carton I was about to grab. I have never been able to taste the difference between an organic egg and a regular one, but some part of me does kind of like the idea of free range chickens.
    I imagine them running through a meadow eating sunflower seeds and laying their eggs in pretty nest boxes lined with straw. I’ve seen the specials on TV that show the chickens in their cages, piled ten high. Some of them barely have enough room to move. If I’m going to eat baby chickens – let’s face it, that’s what eggs are – I would rather eat one that came from a happy mom.
    When I tell this to Sam in so many words, he just shakes his head.
    “You don’t know anything,” he says.
    My mouth drops open. “Excuse me?”
    “About chickens,” he clarifies. “You don’t know anything about chickens.”
    “And you do?”
    “I know what happens to a free range chicken when she isn’t laying enough eggs.”
    “They let her retire?” I ask hopefully.
    Sam’s gray eyes bore into mine. “She gets stuffed in a semi truck with her free range sisters and shipped to slaughter.”
    “Well at least she had a good life before she died,” I reason even as I wonder what the point of this rather strange conversation is. I never pegged Sam for a chicken advocate.
    “Dead is dead, Winnifred,” he says. “You should know that better than anyone.”
    I go absolutely still. I would ask Sam to repeat what he just said, except I heard every word clear as day. Dead is dead, Winnifred. You should know that better than anyone.
    “You’re an asshole,” I say flatly. Blindly I snatch up two cartons of the free range organic eggs, slap them down hard enough to break every single one, and spin my cart towards the register.
    Girlfriend #3’s list is only half complete. I don’t care. After paying for everything with my dad’s credit card I barrel out of the grocery store and race walk to Bridget’s car.
    She is slouched in the driver’s seat and makes me wait ten seconds before she hits the unlock button. The wind whistles, rattling the plastic bags and wreaking havoc with my hair. I ignore it. I ignore everything except the rage slowly building inside of me. How dare Sam say something like that to me. How dare he. Who does he think he is? He is no one. Nobody. A loser. A weird loser freak who wears sweater vests and prowls around parking lots in the dark. 
    “Are you coming or not? I’ve been waiting here for like an hour.” Bridget leans across the passenger seat and opens the door, pushing it towards me. I get in and dump the grocery bags between my feet.
    Bridget turns the car on and pulls slowly out of the parking lot, weaving around the biggest pot holes and having no choice but to hit the smaller ones. I don’t say a word and she must sense something is wrong, because before we’re even halfway up the mountain she is trying to coax me into conversation.
    “So what did you get?” she asks.
    I stare vacantly out the window at the