Mr. Elitist [ A Novel ]

10

| Nathan |

The zoo itself wasn't particularly crowded today, seeing as most people were heading to the local water parks with the hot summer months approaching. We were standing in line under and awning shielding us from the mid-day sun. My eyes were shielded from the sun with a pair of black Ray-Ban sunglasses.

Isabella was shifting from foot to foot, looking slightly bored at the wait time but I was just fine.

Out of all things, I didn't have a problem waiting, especially when building my company required that you be good at playing the waiting game. Lines didn't really bother me, but if it was just ridiculous I wouldn't bother with the line at all.

Finally we got to the front and she was about the take out money to buy the tickets when I grabbed my wallet out and handed my card to the guy in the booth, beating her to it.

I felt her eyeing me as the guy handed us these little green, plastic tokens to hand to the security people at the front of the gates. We stepped out of line and walked to the gate.

"You know I could have gotten that right?" she asks. Sliding her wallet back into her purse.

"Yep, but I wasn't going to let you." I say shortly and I hear her huff. We handed our tokens over, got the map of the zoo and then she tried to decide where we should go first.

"Well, I want to go get a locker for my bag first." she says glancing around and I saw the locker rooms.

"Over there." I point. She smiles and nods and we walk over, she got a locker, locked it up and then came back holding her phone and sunglasses.

"Where is the key?" I ask.

"It's a code, so when I want to go back for my purse I just enter the code. I have to remIsabella though, its locker number 219." she says. "Okay, look at this with me."

"Alright." I mumble and she holds out the map. We looked over it a few minutes.

"There, do you want to go see the Giraffes?" she asks pointing to it on the map. "They were my favorite animal as a child."

"Okay." I say, fine with whatever she wanted.

"What do you want to see?" she asks me and I made a face, trying to decide.

"How about, those." I say pointing to the 'Penguin Exhibit' and she nods.

"Then at noon they have the bird show, so we should see that." she says, motioning to the day's program which had come with the map. "Hmm, unless you'd rather see the dolphins show."

"Let's see dolphins." I say making the decision and she nods. We walked to the giraffes, and she got super excited by it, which I found oddly cute. She refused to feed them though, insisting they might eat her tiny hands, which nearly made me laugh, but only nearly.

The penguins were kind-of boring, they didn't do much so we ended up making it over to the lions cage and we watched them playing with each other. There were two baby cubs, which Isabella nearly 'died' over seeing. Apparently they were just too cute.

Then 12:30 rolled around and we walked to the dolphin show, which was actually quite good if I'm being honest. At the end of it one dolphin pushed the trainer in to the water from his platform, which actually made me laugh, but I couldn't decide if it was part of the skit or if it wasn't supposed to happen.

When it was over it was 1:30 and I was feeling hungry, but we went and saw these little tiny ferret-like creatures. Isabella insisted they were actually ferrets, but I disagreed, and it turns out I was right.