We go to the place that sells massage chairs, and get confused on how to get them to start. The guy comes over and asks if we need help, and tells us how to turn them on. We sit on chairs across from one another; I almost forget to take off my shoes because it feels somehow wrong in a mall to do that.

“What does the chair feel like on your legs?” Jim asks.

“Squeezing gogurt.”

“Gogurt seems sexual.”

“Gogurt is gay yogurt.”

“Yogurt smoked weed and became gogurt.”

“What does your chair feel like?” I ask.

“Getting fucked by a robot.”

“In a good way?”

“Yeah. Bi robot,” he says and I laugh out loud before feeling weird that a child is staring at me.

We go to Hot Topic and Jim says to not look, and I ask him for how long, and he says about 5 minutes and I say that’s a crazy amount of time to not have my eyes open and I’ll be bored and he says I should not look though. I stare at various t-shirts trying to feel how exciting it must be to be a depressed teenager who has just started rebelling from his or her parents, and the sense of a paradigm shift like that, that seems so sudden and freeing that for a second I feel envious to have not been more rebellious as a teen, feeling a general sense of loss for not having done things like having stolen my parents car, or eloped with an older man.

“I got us Adventure Time headphones,” Jim says from behind me.

“You bought them?”

“No, they’re in my crotch area. Are you Jake or Finn?”

I think for a bit.

“Jake is funnier, though I admire Finn’s sense of adventure and courage and overall life affirming attitude.”

“Good answer” Jim says.

We look over the railing towards the floor beneath us and Jim says we should “drop something down there” and I say “like what?” and he says “a penny” and I say “a dollar” and he laughs and asks if someone would like or dislike having a dollar fall on them.

I throw a dollar bill down, trying to get it to land on one of the tables below. It moves more forcefully and accurately than I thought possible, almost as if it had been a penny, before landing on someone’s table. The woman looks up and we pretend to be looking at a cinnabon vender. “Ahh yes, cinnamon and buns together, what a steal!” Jim says in mock enthusiasm. I say: “she fell for it.”

We head down to the food court because we’re hungry. In the elevator a woman starts singing a rap song out of nowhere, loudly as if she was unaware she was in public. Jim and I try not to laugh, but I look at him and I laugh and say: “what a steal!?”