Like a Best Friend | ✓

chapter nine

"Did you know we haven't been in Vegas this whole time?" Kitty says the next day as we sit on the Deuce and ride nine stops up the Strip.

"What do you mean?"

She shows me the map on her phone, the Las Vegas city limits highlighted, and it's only as our blue dot passes the Sahara hotel that we cross over the red line. "We've been in Paradise all this time." She gasps and says, "Does the world know that everything they associate with Las Vegas isn't actually in Vegas? This is wild!"

"Scandalous," I say with a laugh, leaning over to zoom out on the map. The actual Vegas is a strange sprawling shape, only the northernmost part of the strip covered. "Still, Paradise? That's not so bad. Pretty apt, actually. The last few days have been heaven."

"At least now we can officially say we've been to Vegas. I wonder how many people spend their entire trip on the Strip and don't even know they never made it to the city."

We ride four stops beyond the Sahara and walk a few blocks to our destination: The Writer's Block.

Neither of us anticipated how much time we'd spend reading by the pool but I've finished both books I brought with me – yes, I have my Kindle but there's something special about holding a physical book – and Kitty's resorted to borrowing my thriller even though she'd much rather be reading a cutesy romance. So the first thing on today's agenda (we haven't even been to the pool yet) is to go to a cute indie bookstore and find something to read.

It must be one of the best things about going to a new city, finding new independent bookstores filled with the owners' recommendations, stacked with books I've never heard of. I envy anyone who comes to Boston for the first time and gets to bask in the glory that is Brattle Book Shop with its iconic pencil sign and its book-stuffed courtyard. I may not have traveled that much, but wherever I go I make sure to buy a book, a shelf in my bookcase dedicated to the novels I've bought on my travels from places like Books are Magic in Brooklyn; The Novel Neighbor in St Louis; The Dog Eared Book in Palmyra; Sherman's in Portland, Maine.

That shelf is a fan favorite on my Instagram account and my followers are often recommending stores for me to visit. When I posted on my story a few weeks ago that I was coming here, five separate people told me to check out The Writer's Block. So here we are, in a quiet, more residential part of downtown Las Vegas that feels much further than a couple blocks from the Strip, standing outside a modern black square covered in windows, the store's name in white block capitals. I take a photo with the sky in the background to post later – I never post about somewhere while I'm still there, something Kitty has drilled into me, so neither of us have posted anything to do with our hotel.

Kitty has posted about being in Vegas, though. So many of her followers were hyped up about her wedding and kept sending her questions about it, to the point that last night she ended up posting the selfie we took outside the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign with a confessional caption, letting her fans know that the wedding's off but she's okay and she's having some quality time with her best friend. The sympathy poured in, her inbox flooded with DMs (most nice, but of course, it's social media, some were nasty), and her post was soon bloated with comments. When I offered to scroll through them for her and read out the nice ones, I didn't realize how many people would be bashing me. Random accounts, some of which don't even follow Kitty, criticizing my appearance or, for god knows what reason, accusing me of breaking up #Letty. Apparently her followers are bigger fans of Levi than I am.

That stung. But it's nothing I can't handle. I do occasionally feature in my pictures on my account, and with twelve thousand followers, there are a few assholes in there who think they can shock or hurt me by calling me fat (which is objectively true) or ugly (subjectively false) or a pick-me. Because apparently dyeing my hair and wearing fitted clothes as a plus-size woman makes me desperate for attention. Funny, really, when I am only in about five percent of the pictures I post, if that.