Evie's POV

"Why are we going to IKEA? Do we even need anything there?" I asked my friends as the Uber helpfully dropped us off in front of the bright blue home furnishing store. Lars Sua laughed and said, "Oh, we need nothing, I just want to fail at building something. Also, there's no IKEAs in Samoa, so I can brag to my friends back home."

"Your middle name sounds like IKEA." Mia Fernandez pointed out. "Isn't it literally Ikaia?"

"Yeah, your point?" Lars questioned.

"I don't have a point, I just wanted to say something." Mia said.

"Okay then." Grace Khatri said as we walked into the building. Sunny Kobayashi started giggling as we approached Smaland, the children's play place. "Hey Evie, go play at Smaland!" Everyone started laughing at Sunny's statement but me. I was the shortest person in our friend group, so my friends enjoyed teasing me about it much to my dismay.

"Ha ha very funny. Now, let's see if we can get out of this maze alive." I said. I heard a sharp gasp and turned around. Sunny was bouncing on her toes and pointing towards the restaurant. "I smell Swedish meatballs!" Sunny said in a sing-song voice.

"SWEDISH MEATBALLS?!" all our other friends besides Grace said at the same time. Grace can't eat beef, but she saw chicken fingers and gasped. Grace can eat an entire bucket of fried chicken and not get sick of or from it. I should know, she's done it before.

"Fine, we'll get food." Lars said.

"Who said you were in charge?" Grace said, grabbing a tray and loading it up with three juice boxes and two slices of cake. She turned to the worker behind the counter and said, "Hi, may I have the chicken fingers? Thanks!" Grace gasped as a bunch of chicken fingers were put on a plate and handed to her.

"These actually look really good." Lars said, looking at the menu. "You know what, screw the meatballs. I'm getting myself some chicken fingers and y'all can't stop me."

"Okay then."

_________

"WHEEEEE!" Lars screeched as they ran down the aisles of the IKEA showroom with a shopping cart. Grace was chasing after her holding a succulent and a package of plastic straws.

"What do we need that for?" I asked Grace, trying to take the succulent from her. Mia was observing desks and writing stuff down on a piece of paper. And as I expected, Lars and Grace had taken about 50 IKEA pencils, all of which were way too small to use for school or virtually anything else.

"Come on, Lars. Let's get your stupid desk and leave." Sunny said. Lars rolled his eyes and handed off their shopping cart to Mia, who is the most responsible one of the five of us.

_________

"OOH YAY A HAMMER!" Lars screeched, yanking the hammer from Mia.

"Do you think it's a good idea to, um, read the instructions first?" I said. Lars groaned and took the instructions from me and quickly scanned them. "If you need help, call IKEA? No, I will not need help and I will certainly not call IKEA if I do!" Lars screeched.

Twenty minutes later, I was pleasantly surprised Lars hasn't hurt himself, anyone else, or broken anything.

"Note to self..." Mia started to say

"Don't be gay in Indiana!" Lars said, cutting Mia off and singing over the sound of a whirring drill.

"Don't trust Lars with any power tools." Mia groaned. "And Lars, please, for the love of God..."

"Our love is God!" Lars sung.

"STOP SINGING MUSICALS!" Mia screamed.

"Rude." Lars said.

________

"Okay, why is only about a fourth of the desk built, but there's a massive dent in the floor?" Sunny asked.

"Lars likes hammering the floor." I responded.

"It brings me joy." Lars said.

"It also brings us a massive bill to fix this thing, this is a dorm room." Grace said.

"CRAP!"