Willow made a bee line for where she had last seen Jenna. To her chagrin, the only person in that area turned out to be another store clerk: an older woman with short curly hair. The woman didn't seem to be busy, and by the way she immediately locked eyes on Willow and smiled, she might have been explicitly searching for customers to help.
"Hi, are you looking for anything?" she asked pleasantly.
Normally, Willow wouldn't have minded interacting with her, but with the way her tongue was betraying her so much, she wanted to keep chatter to a bare minimum. She still did her best to smile and brushed a lock of blond hair over her ear...forgetting that it was not going to cooperate.
"Uh, yes," she said, tilting her head to get the stubborn lock out of her eye. "Are you seeing... uh... I'm looking for my friend. She is being Cuban... err... black hair, this tall...?" She leveled her hand near the top of her head, then remembered that Jenna had shrunk herself, and lowered it down to near her eyes. Her smile grew more awkward as she tried to get this across to the woman.
The woman seemed to peer at her with a mix of confusion and curiosity. Willow had trouble figuring out exactly what it was, though. She tried to keep smiling, and her cheeks turned red.
Suddenly, the employee's chin snapped up and her eyes widened. "Oh, yes! I did see her. Just a minute ago." She pointed the way. "Over there. Not far." Her delivery was conspicuously slow and crisp, a far cry from how she sounded before.
"Thanks," Willow said, and promptly trudged in the direction the woman pointed. She soon realized that she was headed in the direction of the women's lingerie. Her face turned even more red, but she continued on. Hair stubbornly bounced in front of her eyes and she kept having to brush it aside. She slowed her urgent pace to a modest strut in order to keep it from moving around so much.
A man she passed by gave her a double-take. She pretended she didn't notice and kept going.
Finally reaching the section the employee had pointed her to, she started looking around for Jenna.