Friends like Ice Cream

by @thatsallshewrites1       

The smell of ice cream was in the air as Joyce sat in the ice cream parlor that hot summer day. She had been there for twenty minutes, waiting for her friends to show up, but they were nowhere to be seen. Joyce started to worry that something might've happened to them. Maybe they all got sick and couldn't come? She really hoped not.

Then, her phone dinged. She searched her purse quickly and found her phone, then opened up the notification, which was from Instagram. When she opened it, she saw her friends smiling with an amusement park in the background. The caption was #firstdayofsummer.

Joyce hated amusement parks.

Why were they there?

Her mind started to race. Did they change the plans and forget to tell her? How could they forget? Today was their annual start-of-summer get together, where they would stuff themselves with ice cream and laugh until they couldn't breathe. No, they didn't forget. They didn't want her there.

Her eyes started to blur. She sniffed and wiped her eyes on the back of her hand. The place was full of people, and she knew she couldn't cry here.

"Hey! Are these seats taken?"

Joyce looked up and saw a boy with glasses and brown hair. He looked familiar, and she realized he was from her homeroom last school year. Behind him were three other people, two girls and one boy. One girl had red hair and was short and a little chubby. The other girl wore a purple hijab on her head, and the boy was lanky with a mop of blonde hair on his head and a shirt that was way too big on him.

"Oh, um..." She was going to say that she was waiting for her friends, but that thought quickly vanished. If they weren't going to tell her about their plans and just leave her, she might as well do something else. But, wouldn't her friends be mad? It didn't matter. They probably wouldn't know what she was doing. "No.."

"Great! Can we sit here? The place is packed," the brown haired boy said.

"Sure. I'm Joyce by the way," she said.

"Oh yeah! From homeroom. I'm Randy," the boy said.

"Tina," the red haired girl said shyly.

"Anaya! Nice to meet you!" the hijabi girl said.

"I'm Max," the lanky boy said, holding out his hand. She shook it, and he had a surprisingly strong grip.

They all took their seats, and Anaya took out a deck of Uno cards from her mini backpack and handed seven cards to each of them. When she got to Joyce, she stopped and said, "Do you wanna play?"

"Well, okay.." Joyce said, taking the cards. She felt guilty that she wasn't with her friends. Maybe she could ask her mom to drive her to the amusement park and meet her friends. She didn't want to be rude and leave though, so she shuffled through her cards and played.

After ten minutes of concentrated playing, Max shouted, "Uno!" and held up one card. The rest of them groaned, even Joyce.

"How are you so good?" she asked.

"I forced these guys to play with me when we had time. It helped with my tactics," Max said, grinning.

After three more rounds of Uno, in which Max won each round, they all decided to go down to the beach for a little (since the line for ice cream was so long), and come back later. They grabbed all their stuff and walked down to the shore.

At the shore, they all saw that there was a pedal boat for rent. Joyce thought about how her friends would never go on the pedal boat because they never liked the water, but then they were each paying a bit of the amount and floating across the water. Joyce was grinning from ear to ear.

Minutes after they got on, Randy and Max were having a pedal contest to see who could move the boat the fastest, and the girls all judged.

"C'mon Randy!" Tina said, losing all the shyness she had when Joyce first joined them. "Max is winning by a foot!"

Max sat on the edge of the boat, his feet dipped in the water, and he smiled smugly at Randy, who stuck his tongue out at him. Watching Max sit on the edge, Joyce got an idea, and told Tina and Anaya about it.

They all nodded and Joyce sat down next to Max.

"So, you like the water?" she asked him casually.

"Oh yeah. I take swimming classes," Max said.

"Really? How about we test it out?" she said, and Anaya and Tina pushed Max. He yelled out and hit the water with a huge splash. Randy stopped pedaling and laughed, and the girls joined in. Max finally came back to the surface, and he was grinning. He splashed at the boat, wetting all of them. They all ran around the tiny boat, trying to dodge each of Max's attacks until he finally got tired, and they all helped him back up.

By the time they got back to the ice cream parlor, the sun was slowly starting to set, making the sky a vivid reddish- orange color. They each got a cone and went outside, behind the parlor, and sat on the ledge of the hill it was on, looking at the waves and the setting sun. Joyce looked at her ice cream and licked it, feeling the cold and sweetness from it. She thought about earlier, when she was sad that her friends didn't invite her, and she realized while eating her ice cream that friends can be like ice cream. Sometimes, one flavor just doesn't fit, and other times you really like a flavor.

As she looked at all her new friends, licking their ice cream and staring at everything below them, she realized that she had found a flavor she liked.

She had a feeling this summer was going to be awesome.