As a child, I rarely rode shotgun in the shopping cart at Target. I remember thinking it was so cool and so fun to push the cart, with my forearms leaning on the bar and me walking with a little swagger. Oh young Megan.

Fast forward about 12 years and here I am, in Target with my friend Sarah, riding shotgun in the cart. Yes, it was a tight squeeze. Yes, there were yogurts on my feet and I crushed the case of Oreos. But I was all in.

It sounded like a great idea. I would sit back and observe while my dear friend, who happens to have mono, struggles to push the cart with her aching spleen.

No. It wasn’t great.

Me, being prone to vertigo and unable to ride rollercoasters, felt as if I was in fact on one.

Being at the eye level of a 7-year-old in a cart is really difficult to process with everything whizzing by you all at once.  All I saw was a mish-mosh of colors and different shapes out of my peripheral vision and I was approaching the point of being carsick. Or should I say, cartsick.

Sarah pushed me into the shoe section, and coming at us from the left was another mother pushing her son, who was probably at most 4 years old. Before I knew it, I found myself in the middle of a staredown with the toddler.

He won. And we retreated to the book section.

We didn’t find a 4-year-old, instead, we found a 40 year old employee.

“You know, that kind of purchase isn’t a refundable one,” he said to Sarah.

“It’s okay. She’s defective anyways,” she replied.

He thought he was clever. But as he was saying his line, his pile of overflowing books in his cart all fell over.

I laughed and said “That’s what you get,” and we rode away into the sunset.

Non-refundable my ____.