Hot Mess (11 page)

Ten

M
y internship was worse than seeing Nicole Richie naked, worse than your roommate eating all the chunks out of Toffee Heath Bar Crunch—
thankyouverymuch, Rachel
—even worse than muffin-topping in your favorite jeans. A typical day at work consisted of me refreshing my Gmail once every five minutes—if I could even wait that long—taking every single quiz on Seventeen.com, getting insulted/ assaulted by Derek, and then making his lunch reservations. And—what an effing surprise!—today was no different.

“Em, you’re not wearing any makeup today,” he said as he poked his fat face in my cube.

“No, Derek. I am.” Actually, that morning I had spent an extra five minutes trying on some of Jayla’s liquid liner. Not that I expected him or anyone else to notice, but still, no makeup? Way insulting.

“Wow, it doesn’t look like it and I always notice the little things.” He then slammed a pile of papers on my desk, thankfully changing the topic from how apparently busted I looked. “Here’s a project for you, Em. Why don’t you go ahead and make fifty copies of these? Have them on my desk in ten minutes.”

Now, I’d only been a professional xeroxer for two weeks, but even I knew that barring a break in the space/time continuum, no copy machine could print out fifty copies of that one-hundred-page packet in under ten minutes. I rolled my eyes at the stack of paper and didn’t even make a move to get started. Why even attempt the impossible? As soon as Derek strutted his fatness back into his office, I e-mailed Rachel to find out about whichever date she’d gone on the night before.

So, are you sending out save-the-dates for your wedding yet?????

Rach responded before I’d even clicked back into my inbox:

Ha ha. No, but this was the first really good date I’ve had. Really awesome. He’s really funny! And not like I’m saying he’s funny because he’s hid-jus. He’s funny and cute. He just texted me for a movie tonight. Should I go? Pretend not to be available? Act like I have another date to make him jealous? Wait for him to actually call? What? I’m clueless here.

As much as Jayla teased Rachel for being such a prudi-fied virgin, truth was that I didn’t have much of a clue about dating either. Brian was so high school. In New York, there were different rules. I mean, there were no basements to have sloppy make-out sessions in, so my idea of a second date couldn’t exist here. The closest thing I’d had to male attention in this city was a wink from my Chinese delivery guy. But now that I think about it, he could have just had something in his eye.

I wrote back:

AHHH! So exciting. I have no idea what you should do though. Ask our in-house love expert, Ms. Jayla St. Clare. Oh, and get more Ben & Jerry’s, you greedy chunk picker!

Within minutes I got another message from Rachel. Jayla had texted her back that she should first say no, then five minutes later pretend that her plans had fallen through and agree to go. That way she wouldn’t look too available.

My vicarious excitement for the day over, I trudged the one hundred pages of fun to the copy machine and then logged back on to MySpace, trying to think of yet another long-lost sandbox buddy I could search for.

The rest of my day trickled by, time moving slower than Jessica Simpson’s reasoning capabilities. When four forty-five finally ticked around, I bolted, figuring that Derek would never notice the fifteen minutes and I might have overloaded the Gmail server if I refreshed one more time. The apartment was empty when I got home. I knew Rachel was off with her Semitic stallion and figured that Jayla was probably canoodling with someone named Fabian on a yacht.

Just as I was positioning myself into my now typical Friday night couch-potato fetal position and thinking about how to start the day’s journal writing, my phone rang. It was Kyle!

“Oh my God! Who have you been so busy frenching this summer that you couldn’t return any of my calls?” I asked him, only half kidding. Really, where had he been these past three weeks?

Kyle filled me in on his summer. Busy at work. Hanging out with his B-list friends. Met a guy that he thought might be his summer flavor, but turned out he already had a boyfriend and was just a huge tease. He saw Mr. Harlevy, our pre-calc teacher, at the mall wearing shorts and he thought he was going to go blind from looking directly at the pasty flesh. Standard summer in the suburbs.

And then I filled him in on mine. I glossed over the daily boredom of the internship and nightly boredom at home with my journal to make my life seem more glamorous. I even walked around the apartment, opening and closing cabinet doors and clicking on and off my hair straightener, telling Kyle that I was getting ready for a big night out. I couldn’t believe I was fibbing to one of my best friends.

“Well, Em, glad you’re doing so well. I have some kind of shitty news for you and I wasn’t sure if I should tell you. But because you sound stable enough to take it now…” I could hear Kyle’s voice rise half an octave with nervousness. “So, you know Skylar Dichter?”

Of course I knew Skylar. Everyone in Bridgefield knew her. And let’s just say that most of the Bridgefield boys would have an easier time recognizing her without her shirt on.

“That skank from St. Margaret’s? Who has that plastic surgeon dad who tucks every mom in Bridgefield? And The Hombres always ask her if her middle name is ‘Everyone’s’ ’cause she’s so slutty? Yes. I know her.” When The Hombres pulled crap like that on Skylar, I didn’t even do my typical “You guys, that’s so not cool” routine. Because there was no defending her. She really had made out with most of the males between the ages of fourteen and thirty-two in the county.

I could hear him on the other line trying to build up the nerve to tell me whatever bad news it was. “Just tell me, poodle.” I really couldn’t care about anything having to do with Skylar Dichter. What was he so frothed up about?

“Okay, so, last week, Brian came into the taco shack with her.” A beat of silence. “Like,
together
with her.”

My stomach dropped.

“What?” I hissed almost inaudibly. My hands began to shake and I felt an awful prickly heat spread across my neck. Brian’s replacing me with her? God, he couldn’t have picked anyone more horrifying. I would be less hurt and shocked if he’d have come out and said that after dating me, he decided that he was actually into boys.

“Yeah. And Daddy definitely took his daughter to work one day this summer because she has a totally new rack. They were, like, poking my eyes out when she ordered. I mean, how is that even legal? And isn’t that supergross, a dad fondling his daughter while she’s unconscious? Even though I guess it is technically medical.”

“Hello!” I shrieked, finding my voice—my hysterical, out-of-control voice. “Eyes on the crisis, Kyle! Skylar? I can’t believe this. That Shasta McNasty and I are in the same club—The I-Know-What-Brian-McSwain’s-Spit-Tastes-Like Club. I mean, it was funny when you and Rach both hooked up with Greg Samkin last summer, but this is so not freaking funny.”

I could feel myself starting to totally stop thinking rationally and lose it. The fact that I was living in New York, that Brian would have just held me back this summer, that I knew we would have broken up when he went to college—nothing logical mattered. Skylar had my Brian and I hated it. Tears welled up in my eyes. Kyle stammered some weak “You’re too good for him’s” before I croaked out that I had to go. The last thing I wanted was pity.

I could already hear everyone in Bridgefield talking about this.

“Oh! Did you hear about poor Emma? Yeah, Brian ditched her for Skylar. I guess he just couldn’t resist her
—ahem—
personalities.”
And then they’d joke about how I was flatter than Kansas.

“For sure. Who could? I mean, Emma’s smart and all but what is she? An A cup? B? Whatever, she just ain’t no Skylar Dichter!”

And with that nauseating thought, all of the stress, loneliness, boredom, anxiety, and homesickness I’d been bottling up came bursting out with monster truck force.

“Baaaaahhh!” I wailed, only mildly consoled that Jayla and Rachel weren’t there to see my nervous breakdown. “Mmmmhu-hu-hu-hu-hu!”

I let it all out, heaving the kind of sobs that make your chest hurt. I cried and cried, snorting and snotting all over myself, which only made me realize how disgustingly ugly I was, how Brian was right to get over me so quickly, and how I was unlovable and might as well buy a pack of Magic the Gathering cards and swear off boys forever. I rolled around the couch in indulgent agony for what seemed like hours, thinking of reason after reason why my entire life was worthless and beyond hope.

“I got a B-minus in honors chem,” I whined to the furniture. “My dog doesn’t really like me and I have cellulite on my thi-i-i-i-ghs. Ahhhh!”

But then something inside me whispered that maybe Kyle was wrong. I mean, sharing a taco combo basket didn’t mean they were dating. They could just be friends. I knew that Skylar Dichter wasn’t “just friends” with anybody, probably not even her grandfather. But still, this gave me a little hope. The geysers exploding out of my tear ducts slowed a little.

I pulled myself off the floor and crawled over to my laptop on the coffee table, yanking it down to me. I sat up, propping myself against the side of the couch, and cracked open the computer to do a little more investigating. I pulled down my Favorites menu and clicked on Brian’s MySpace page, still bookmarked from when we were together. The heaving sobs came back as soon as his page loaded. I don’t know when he changed his profile pic, I swear it wasn’t like this earlier when I checked. His picture was now an image of him wearing the stupid T-shirt he’d picked up in Daytona Beach last spring. The top half of the shirt read “The Man” with an arrow pointing up, and the bottom had “The Legend” with an arrow pointing down. But that wasn’t even close to the most offensive part of the picture. No. His right arm was raised, baring his pit stains with pride, and a very busty Skylar Dichter was in the crook of his elbow. There should have been another arrow on that T-shirt labeled “Herpes Machine 5000” pointing to her.

I dove into the freezer and found my emergency stash of Cherry Garcia and brought it over to the couch for a good old-fashioned pity party. Even with nine and a half months of officially dating him, I was never in his profile pic. I spent the next hour sniffling in sweatpants, listening to Weezer, and giving myself ice cream headaches. Then, just as I was about to pick my laptop off the floor to write a comment on Brian’s MySpace wall about his thirty-second keg stand not being the only thirty-second record to his name, Jayla pranced through the front door.

Eleven

“W
hat the hell happened here?” she shrieked, surveying the mountains of Kleenex and empty pint carton—fine, fine,
two
pint cartons—of Ben & Jerry’s that surrounded me on the couch. “Oh wait, did you try on my Jimmy Choos? Honey, it’s not you. They’re too small for even me. Everyone feels like Big Foot when they wear them. I don’t know why I even keep them around.”

The tears started afresh as I sniffled out the whole sordid tale, half of it obscured by my sobs and soggy nose-blows.

“Stop,” she said, hands on her hips. “You mean to tell me that all of this is about that bro fag Brian? Seriously?”

“J-Jayla!” I groaned. “I 1-1-love him!”

“Oh, Emma. You do not. You love the idea of him.”

I looked up, skeptical but intrigued.

“You love the fact that he fills in all of your blanks, like a Scantron. He’s safe and comfortable and goes with everything in your life. He’s a hoodie sweatshirt. And up until you arrived in this city, you were a hoodie also. But look at you,” she said, beaming. “You’re an Ella Moss cami! You’re a Burberry trench! You’re a Chanel suit! You still go with everything, only now you go with everything good!”

I looked at her with swollen eyes and nodded limply.

“All right,” she said briskly, patting my knee and heading to the fridge. “Enough. I’m sorry, babe, but I can’t have that in here.”

I poked morosely at one of my empty ice cream containers. “Have what?”

“Sulking. It’s just not allowed in this apartment. It was in really small print on the sublet form you signed. So stop.” I tried to collect myself a bit. “Hot Child in the City” sang from her iPhone and all of her attention went to her convo. I listened miserably as she debated about whether the Meatpacking scene was too Murray Hill lately and then agreed to meet up with whoever was on the line.

I was still on the verge of a meltdown. I couldn’t bear the idea of an entire night alone in the apartment. TiVo’d
Project Runway
s were definitely not going to be enough to distract me from the Bri and Sky development. Ugh, God. If I didn’t hate them both so much, I’d think they sounded cute together. “Um, Jay,” I asked as soon as she set down her phone, “do you think I could, like, come out with you? I know I’m not twenty-one or fancy or…” And then the Niagara Falls of tears kicked up again.

She looked over the kitchen counter, taking in my complete patheticness. “Of course you can come.” I couldn’t tell if she really wanted me to come or just didn’t want a night’s worth of tears staining the leather couch. “And don’t worry about being twenty-one or fancy enough. I’ll handle everything, okay?” She turned back to the fridge, pulled out a pitcher and poured two huge glasses. “Let’s start with this first. Drink up.” I glanced at the tall glass and then back at her. “Jayla Juice.” She smiled a perfect toothpaste-commercial smile and winked. “Try it.”

I took a sip. Oh, Crystal Light and vodka, where have you been all my life? It went down like lemon cotton candy. After just a few sips, I could already feel the tingles I get right before a buzz.

“And put this on.” I looked up just in time to have a gold sparkly tube top, still with the tags on, hit me in the face. Before I could even thank her for the loaner top, she was already texting my physical description to God knows who, arranging for a fake ID for me.

“Jay, a fake ID? How illegal is that?” Images of Paris’s, Lindsay’s, and Nicole’s mug shots popped into my mind.

“Oh, you’re just adorable, aren’t you?” She came over and patted my head. “Don’t worry about anything. People lie about their age all the time. My mother still says that she’s thirty-five, which means that she was like fourteen when she had me. This is just a little fib like that, okay? What we
do
need to worry about is this situation.” Her French-manicured fingers swirled around my face. “You’re so puffy, you look like a prizefighter.”

She led me into her room, sat me down on her bed, and flitted over to her vanity, which was packed with every high-end cosmetic on the market. She returned with a tube of…Preparation H?

“Look, Jayla, I like you and all and I do have a sense of adventure, but…”

“Relax! Pageant girls use this all the time under their eyes. And trust me, with all my late nights, it’s the only thing that keeps me from looking like Gary Busey.”

She patted the cream gently under my lower lashes and made me kill the rest of my Jayla Juice. Then she ran out to the kitchen and poured me another. I was already feeling the first one and totally needed to slow down. Normally I didn’t worry about that so much, because Brian would be there to take care of me. But not anymore. I started to choke up again, realizing just how over Brian and I were. I fought hard to keep my tears back. I didn’t want to be so pathetic that Jayla would change her mind about letting me tag along.

As I waited for my ointment to set in and deflate my face, I sat cross-legged on Jayla’s bed and watched her get ready. Her beauty routine was astounding. She narrated each step with a soothing voice and effortless demonstration.

“Eyebrows are very important,” she said seriously. “Invest in a good pencil. I recommend Chanel. You should create an arch that frames your face without overpowering it.”

I nodded along dutifully, forcing myself to focus on Jayla’s Cosmetics 101 class and not on being pathetic second string to slutty Skylar.

“Curling your eyelashes is a cheap, painless way to look instantly refreshed and doe-eyed. I like this little curler from Laura Mercier. Start at the base of the lashes and kind of walk the clamp out, curling it several times. If you curl just once, you’ll look like Dolly Parton. Not hot.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to be a good student. But seeing how pretty Jayla was only reminded me of how ugly I felt and how sexy that awful Skylar was and how she was probably hanging at the pool every day, flaunting her Pam Anderson–ness to Brian and everyone who had a summer member pass. This time I couldn’t hold back.

“Oh, honey, no! No, don’t cry. You’ll take off all your Preparation H.” Jayla rushed over to me and dabbed at my face. I had no idea she could be so maternal. It was weird. But a good weird. Like that feeling you got when you watched
Mean Girls
and realized that Lindsay Lohan could really act.

“Here, I’ll do your makeup for you,” Jayla offered. That got my mind off Brian quickly. A chance to not only use all of this crazy makeup, but to have a bona fide expert apply it for me? I even started to get a little giddy, thinking that maybe she could make me look as good in person as she did with Photoshop.

After I was penciled and curled into a decent version of hotness, she sent me off to get dressed. I shimmied into my Paper Denims—my big birthday gift from last summer—and the gold top and presented myself to Madam Jay.

“Oh, babe, you look…
ahh
!” she gasped, pointing at my feet. I squealed and hopped around, thinking she’d seen a mouse or cockroach. “Jesus Christ, Emma! What the fuck are those shoes?”

“My shoes? Why, what’s wrong with them?”

Barely able to get the words out, Jayla hissed, “Foam. Flip. Flops. Honey, that’s just not done here.”

“But they’re my fancy wedge ones. And they’re all I have. Plus, heels hurt too much.” Not that these were amazingly comfortable or anything. They were the pair that bloodied my feet during the Brooklyn fiasco. But I’d developed calluses since then.

“You’re in Manhattan, not the Mall of America.” She turned around and stomped back into her room. She returned with a pair of strappy high-heels. “That shirt was made for these shoes, babe.” She dangled a beautiful pair of glittery designer foot-binders in front of me and waited for me to slip them on.

“Don’t worry, by the time we get to the club, you won’t feel your feet anymore,” she promised with a smile.

Twenty minutes later we skipped out onto the steamy streets and hailed a cab. Even though the sun was down, the heat and humidity were stifling. One more second sans air-conditioning and my hair would be Frizztown, USA.

With two Jayla Juices in me, I was just on this side of being a puketastic mess. I giggled as our cab sped across town, feeling like a real-deal heiress. “Thank you for bringing me out. So, where are we going?”

“First, we’re going to Plumm.”

I raised my eyebrows, impressed. I had no idea where or what Plumm was, but I was sure it was fabulous.

“Oh God, don’t give me that look.” I tried to protest but she cut me off. “I know Plumm is a little out but I think Mary-Kate is going to be there and I haven’t seen her in ages.”

“Mary-Kate
Olsen
?”

“No, Mary-Kate Letourneau,” she teased.

“You mean the one who got pregnant by her thirteen-year-old student? I think her name’s Mary
Kay
.”

“Ew, the cosmetics lady? She screwed a sixth grader?”

We dissolved into laughter as the cab pulled up to an unassuming awning on Fourteenth Street.

“Keep the change, sir. Thank you,” she said, handing him a twenty-dollar bill. I hopped out of the cab quickly, not wanting to miss a second of Jayla in action.

“So, who are we meeting here?” I asked, trying to keep up with her leggy gait in the wobbly heels she made me wear.

“Chloe. Haven’t you met her?”

I shook my head. I hadn’t met any of her friends. For all Rachel and I knew, Jayla bayed at the moon all night or put on a cape and fought crime.

“Oh, two things. Chloe is kind of a spaz when she’s drunk. So if you see her trying to call her boyfriend, take her phone. I’m not kidding. She’ll start World War Three if she talks to him plastered.” She looked at me gravely and I wished I had a notepad. “And secondly, my ex-boyfriend hangs out here a lot—totally not why we’re here, btw—and he grosses me out. He’s fat and horrible and looks like Shrek in Burberry. So if I give you this signal”—she tugged on her ear lobe—“that means Carter is coming and you need to pretend to get sick so we can both go to the bathroom, okay?”

“Uh, okay.” I nodded. With the Jayla Juice churning in my stomach, I probably wasn’t going to have to pretend to get sick. I followed behind her as she strolled past a mob of people waiting to get in. God, some of the girls who were getting turned away were a hundred times more pretty, not to mention a hundred times more twenty-one, than I was. What if I didn’t get in?

Jayla sauntered right up to the bouncer, smiled, and watched the doors swing open for both of us. Jayla mouthed “Be cool!” as she slipped me back someone else’s driver’s license. Where it came from, I had no idea—it was like my roommate had turned into Criss Angel or something. The burly bouncer looked me up and down before waving me through. And like that, I was in! My first New York club! I flushed and felt like a twelve-year-old crashing prom.

And of course the first thing to come out of my mouth was, “Wow! A real club. I’m cool, daddio!”

Daddio? Uck, God.

Jayla clenched her jaw and pretended not to notice my
Grease
reenactment.

We rounded the corner and Plumm opened up before us, beautiful people and flashing lights everywhere.

“Snip to the snip snap, beeotch!” Jayla called as she spotted her friend. The two air-kissed and Jayla introduced me to Chloe, who looked me up and down, trying not to wrinkle her perfect twenty-thousand-dollar nose.

“If I have to pay for a drink in this place, I’m swallowing a whole bottle of Hydroxycut,” Chloe moaned in a sophisticated British accent, flicking her glossy brown hair over a probably Miami-bronzed shoulder.

“I know,” Jayla chimed in. “The last time I was here, no one was buying me drinks. I spent ninety bucks and that bitchy bathroom attendant thought I was puking in one of the stalls.”

“You
were
puking. Remember?” Chloe said, rolling her eyes. “Then you went home with Max.”

Jayla cocked her head, apparently not remembering a thing. I tried to look interested and laugh at all the right times.

“Wait, Max? Mafia Max? Mafia Max from Guesthouse who wanted to fly me to Rome? Ew, Chlo! Why did you let me go home with him?”

Now was my chance to say something clever!

“Wow, he has a guesthouse? That’s pretty neat. Did he make you pasta like Tony Soprano?”

Silence. I could actually see the confusion and judgment radiating off their bodies.

Jayla finally broke the unbearable tension by laughing. “Oh, honey, Guesthouse is a club and Mafia Max probably only eats at Nobu. You’re so cute.” I tried to think of something to say to prove that I wasn’t totally out of the know, but I couldn’t think of a thing. Chloe ambled off to find cocktail buyers and Jayla snapped into predator mode. I sank into a bog of awkward, looking around and feeling really out of place. I couldn’t imagine having anything to say to anyone in this entire building. If Jayla left me alone, I’d do about as well as a Simpson sister on the SATs—not Lisa and Maggie, the other Simpsons.

“Come on,” she said resolutely. “I’m sobering up and people here are getting ugly. We need a drink.” She grabbed my hand and adeptly navigated us through the throngs of glittery people, throwing air kisses out to those that she knew.

“Jay, are my boobs sticking out of this too much?” I tugged Jayla’s shirt up over my non-cleavage as we eased up to the crowded bar.

“No way! You have to flaunt your best assets.”

“You’re right,” I answered seriously. “But how is this shirt going to showcase my academic record and great personality?”

Jayla rolled her eyes at my joke and smiled at the shaggy-haired bartender who walked up and kissed her on the cheek.

“’Allo, my lovely Jinxy!” he drawled in a thick Australian accent. “How’s my favorite lass, eh? Who’s this ’ere?”

I realized that he was waiting for me to answer, but before I could stutter out something that would have probably been mortifying anyway, Jayla cut in. “This is Domino, she’s prelaw at Oxford and she’s summering with me. Isn’t she such a fox?”

The bartender’s bright blue eyes looked me up and down appreciatively, and I blushed under his hunky gaze. Everyone in this city was so beautiful.

“Domino, you’re quite a bird!” He winked and Jayla giggled into his neck and he turned suddenly and kissed her on the mouth. They exchanged heated eye contact and she mouthed something I thought looked like “Coatroom” but could have been “Go poo.” He glanced back at the crowded bar and sighed heavily.