Bad Girl Reputation by Elle Kennedy

“Come on!”

The club smacks the ball, launching it toward the high embankment, up and around the spilled pile of gold doubloons, where it sails straight into the rushing stream and down a waterfall. With a plop, it lands in the pool below, filled with colored golf balls like a hundred painted clams.

“After all that!” the friend heckles, while Shaggy Head guffaws loudly.

“Hey.” I round on them, pointing my club. “Get fucked, shit-heads.”

“Whoa.” The boys retreat a step with mocking expressions. “Ma’am, this is a family establishment.”

I’ve got a mind to dangle them over the water feature, because these dudes have been getting on my nerves since the second hole, but Evan throws his arm around my shoulder to hold me back.

“Best behavior,” he whispers at my ear. “Remember?”

Right. Nice young ladies don’t drown little punk teenagers at the mini-golf course. “I’m cool.”

“Get a handle on your chick, bro,” Shaggy says.

His friend makes a taunting face. “She’s crazy.”

That snaps Evan’s spine straight. Eyes glittering, he strides up, his fist tight around his club. He backs the kids up into the bushes as they stumble to escape him, expecting a beating.

Instead, Evan grabs a golf ball from the friend’s hand and stalks back to me.

“Hey!” the kid complains.

“Consider it an asshole tax,” Evan barks over his shoulder. He makes a grand show of sweeping his shoe over the ground to clear the tee for my turn. “My lady.”

I fight a smile. “So chivalrous.”

Then, knowing better, I hit my shot through the mouse hole, where it travels through an unseen underground passage and spits out from a canon, rather than the apparent turtle’s mouth exit, and straight into the hole. Too easy.

Looking back at Evan, I see him twist his lips, cocking his head. “Cold-blooded, Fred.”

At the next hole, we place a little wager on the game with the kids behind us after Evan decides to play nice and make friends. The matchup is closer than he’d like, in fact, but my hot hand keeps us up over the boys. In the end, Evan manages a clutch hole-in-one to push us over the top.

“That was decent of you.” In the parking lot beside his motorcycle, I crack open a bottle of water. The afternoon is waning into evening, but the sun is still furiously insistent. “Giving the boys their money back.”

Leaning against his bike, Evan shrugs one shoulder. “Last thing I need is some irate mom hunting me down for hustling her kid, right?”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d almost think you had a good time. Despite the lack of police chasing us.”

He straightens, closing the small space between us. His proximity makes it difficult to remember why we aren’t getting up to more tactile activities. I want to kiss him. Feel his hands on me. Straddle him over his bike until security chases us away.

“When are you going to accept that I’d be happy watching paint dry with you?” His voice is low, earnest.

“Challenge accepted.”

We end up at one of those paint-your-own-pottery places. It also happens to be overrun with a little girl’s birthday party. A dozen eight-year-olds run around while a haggard shop girl struggles to keep ceramic horses and knockoff Disney figures on the shelves before they topple into mounds of dust and sharp edges.

At the back of the store, Evan and I pick our table and decide on our canvases.

“I just remembered we’ve been here before,” I inform him, pulling an owl off a shelf. A similar one sits in my bedroom at home.

Evan studies a giraffe. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, we left homecoming early freshman year and wandered in because you were tripping balls and saw a dragon in the window display, so you wouldn’t let us go until you painted a purple dragon.”

“Oh, shit,” he says, backing away from the animals. “Yeah. I started freaking out because the dragon turned evil, and it was going to burn down the whole town.”

I chuckle at the ridiculous memory. Turned out he’d pre-partied a little without me and consumed some pot brownies before the dance.

A sudden shriek rips through the room. The birthday girl in her crown and pink feather boa is red in the face and gesticulating wildly, her mother wide-eyed and horrified as the girl’s friends cower in their seats. A tantrum poised to bubble over.

“I want the castle!” The girl fumes.

“You can have the castle, sweetie.” The mom places a clearly substandard royal dwelling in front of her petulant offspring with the deliberate motions and sweaty brow of a bomb tech.

“Not that one!” The girl grabs for another child’s far superior castle, which the other girl clutches, defiant. “It’s my party! I want that one!”

“If I ever have a kid like that,” I tell Evan, “I’m leaving it in the woods with a sleeping bag and some granola bars.”

“Remind me not to leave you alone with our kids.”

Casting a grin over his shoulder, Evan picks a seahorse off the shelf and strides over to the party. He gives the mom a reassuring nod then kneels in front of the angry birthday girl to ask if she’d do him the honor of an original artwork by painting the animal for him. Her bloodshot eyes and feral snarl return to a mostly human expression. She’s even smiling.