Random on Tour: Los Angeles (Random Series #7) by Julia Kent Page B

You can’t offend me.”
    “It’s the gummy bears.”
    “The what?”
    “The gummy bears. Evil little sweet gooey, sugar-free messengers of doom.”
    “How do you...?”
    I waved her smartphone. “Process of elimination.”
    “Very funny.”
    I frowned, caught off guard. What did she mean?
    Then I got my accidental pun and smiled at her.
    “Jesus,” I sighed.
    “Yeah, I prayed to him a few times, too, back on the toilet.”
    “This is a shitty situation.” 
    “Caused by evil gummy bears. Tyler, that doesn’t make any sense.”
    I shoved her smartphone in her face. “Read.”
    Five minutes later she said, “I’m going to kill Darla.”
    “Darla?”
    “She’s the one who gave me the gummy bears. Gave me a bag, Charlotte a bag, Amy...oh, we have to call and warn them.”
    “No, we don’t.” 
    “Why not?” Her voice went high, and yet there was a hitch in it.
    “You really want to tell them what’s happened? It’s kind of one of those ‘let’s never speak of it again’ things.” I sniffed, like a snobby British dame on a show.
    “I think I can—”
    Her phone buzzed in her back pocket just as Mordor’s fires flamed back up. I ran to the bathroom. This was turning into a game of shit tag.
    When I came back feeling as hollowed out as a soft-boiled egg, Maggie was smiling.
    Grinning from ear to ear. It was infectious, and I joined her.
    She held up her phone. “That was Darla, telling me not to eat the gummy bears.”
    I groaned. “Too little, too late.”
    “It seems her hometown was struck with some mystery illness. She said the CDC was practically pulling their version of a Stephen King novel by putting the entire region under a dome when they figured out Darla had given her mom the sugar free gummy bears to use as a wedding party favor. Half the town was at the wedding and ate those little colonoscopy prep kits masquerading as candy.”
    “Peters, Ohio?” I asked, remembering the news report.
    “How did you know?” She looked shocked. When she frowned, the scar on her cheek stood out, making her look fierce. 
    “It was on the radio earlier, when you weren’t talking to me.”
    “I was talking to you!” Her face went tight with anger. “ You were the one not talking to me!”
    “Whatever.”
    “No, Tyler, not ‘whatever’. Whatever means you don’t want to acknowledge I’m right.”
    “No, Maggie, ‘whatever’ means I don’t want to keep talking about this.”
    “You avoid talking about things when you get uncomfortable.”
    “Who doesn’t?”
    “Some people process their discomfort. Sit with it. Learn to coexist with it.”
    “You’ve been to a lot of therapy.”
    She was breathing hard, her face gone slack with surprise. With great intent, she caught my eyes and said, “I didn’t have a choice.”
    “Everyone has a choice.”
    “It was therapy or death.”
    “Plenty of people go through the kind of shit you’ve been through and don’t get therapy.”
    “And plenty don’t, and wind up dead from drugs, cutting, whatever.”
    “Whatever. There’s that word again.”
    “Your word, not mine.”
    How did we go from joking to angry so fast?
    And then—the telltale shift. We sprinted back to our respective bathrooms again.
    It was time to relieve ourselves of all this toxic crap inside.

Chapter Seven
    Maggie
    We were at an impasse. It seemed impossible to have an actual conversation with this man. Ever. Even in the midst of shitting our brains out because we ate sugar free gummy bears that included a sugar substitute developed by North Korea and used as a biological weapon against people addicted to online shopping. 
    And sweepstakes.
    I finished in the bathroom and wondered how my body could hold so much, retrieved the half-eaten bag of gummy bears and tossed them in the trash, then returned to the car, pointedly walking to the passenger’s side. Tyler could take the next shift, and I would suffer in gut-cramp silence, waiting for this nightmare to