Tiffany Robertson suppressed a chuckle. "Since when have you known any good men?" She cautiously raised her own cup and took the tiniest possible sample of the scalding liquid. "And why's this stuff always too hot until all of a sudden it's ice cold?"

"It's that miracle cardboard in the cups. It puts on this great show until all of a sudden it just gets tired and gives up. Kind of like--"

"Don't say it." Tiffany wasn't sure precisely what analogy Brenda was about to make to her latest boyfriend, the gone, but-not-gone-long-enough Brad, but whatever it was, Tiffany had heard the refrain too many times before.

Brenda's disgust with the opposite sex was legendary. Sometimes she blamed the men, sometimes her parents for afflicting her with an impossible name. Not that there was anything wrong with "Brenda." It was that awful alliteration. When Tiffany and Brenda met, in junior high school, Brenda was going through a chubby period and the boys had called her BB behind her back (and sometimes to her face) "because she's round as one." Ha-ha. Brenda had long ago lost the weight, but she was still wearing the scars of adolescence--scars that caused her to swoon over any hunky guy who looked her way, even the ones Tiffany reflexively dodged. But if Tiffany said any of that, Brenda would tell her that when your parents bequeathed you a name like a sorority queen and the mane of golden hair to go with it, you were never going to want for men, and by luck of the draw, a few just might be marginally okay. Although, come to think of it, there hadn't been many good ones of late.

Sometimes, the best way to deal with Brenda was to take the initiative. "What's wrong with those guys over there?"

"What, you mean the chiropractic students?" Brenda let the disapproval practically drip from her voice. The coffee shop wasn't far from a chiropractic college, and before and after classes, it often filled with students pouring over their books. Four students at the next table were grilling each other on what sounded like anatomy. "That's the anterior cruciate ligament," one was saying. "There's also an MCL. What's the difference?"

"What's wrong with chiropractors?" Tiffany asked. The students tended to be her age--people who'd chosen to live a few years before venturing to grad school. In Tiffany's book, that was a mark of maturity.

Brenda snorted. "Can you imagine what would happen if you needed a back rub? I want a guy who'd make me feel good. Not 'Oh gee, can I adjust your vertebrae?' Crunch, crunch. How romantic."

Tiffany started to object, but then another snippet of conversation drifted their way from a second study group. "What's first aid for a sucking chest wound?" a woman asked a quartet of males. Most likely, they were studying for their EMT certificates. Tiffany had hung out in the shop long enough to know that many of the students supplemented their credentials in this manner.

"A what?" one of the men responded.

"That's the question written here," the woman said, gazing at a pamphlet. "We never used that term in class."

The man pondered a moment, then his voice brightened. "Oh," he said. "I bet it's a really nasty pneumothorax. First, you need to--"

Brenda laughed. "I rest my case," she said. "Do you really want to date someone who deals in sucking chest wounds, but only if you call them pneumo-whatevers? And who's likely to talk about it at dinner?"