Flo was not having the very best of days. First, her roommate was sick, which made the apartment just an unhappy place to be. Stacey was behind a door, looking like a zombie (this was Flo’s mental image, anyway) but the apartment still felt sick. Which led to bad part of the day number Two, Flo went and got a flu vaccination. She had seen, in her life, many worse things than a needle, but when she saw it coming toward her, she was fairly convinced it was the worst thing in the world. She went into a very hyperbolic state over that needle (it was the absolute worst thing ever), and was unhappy and pouty about it ever since, carefully cradling and protected her Band-Aid, angry that she was old enough that she was supposed to act like an adult about the whole thing. She hadn’t felt like an adult. She’d wanted a sticker.
The Third thing was that she had to go ice skating. She was not, as a general rule, against spending time with people. She’d spent a lot of time with people in her life, even though the other people often weren’t aware of her. In fact that basically summed up the vast majority of her birthday parties. She was not against having fun with people around. Her problems with ice skating were not her company. Her problems were sharp metal blades, the slipperiness of the ice, and the easy bruising of the backside and just the lower part of her body in general. These three things combined seemed to Flo like the perfect recipe for disaster. She was also fairly certain it was raining, or was about to rain, or had just rained. Which felt like an even worse time to get onto ice wearing lethal weaponry on your feet.
But even all of that wasn’t the worst part about going ice skating. The worst part, for Flo, was the $29 for getting to spend an hour and a half on the ice, and another $12 for the ice skate rental.
She had sat, she’d managed to get her feet into the old, worn out, dirty rental skates (which looked nicer than her own snow boots) and laced them up. She continued to sit, her hands buried deep in her ragged (but warm) coat, looking out at the ice rink, trying to bury her face in her scarf. A part of her wanted to tell Cordelia it wasn’t too late to go back where it was dry and they could drink milkshakes and nurse their needle-wounds. But she’d paid over forty-dollars for this already. That meant it was too late to back out now.
Flo turned to Cordelia, who she suspected didn’t have a list for why today was the worst. “You did promise I would enjoy this,” Flo reminded her, her voice serious, though perhaps its more threatening undertones were lost in her scarf.