Hot Mess (19 page)

He totally ignored me? God, that terrible Excel one-liner really had tanked this would-be summer fling. Why couldn’t I have just said something normal? Or, even worse, could Derek have mentioned that he had an intern working for him and Colin put it all together? I spent the entire afternoon alternating between hating myself and my lame one-liner and despising Derek and his fat mouth.

That evening, I shuffled into the apartment wanting nothing more than some leftover takeout, a remote control, and some QT with my journal. I was shocked to see my couch real estate already occupied by Jacob, who was fully concentrated on the iBook in his lap.

“Did we have plans for tonight, Jake?” I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice as I kicked off my heels and limped toward the fridge for some mu shu. He could’ve at least sent me a text reminding me. “I totally forgot.”

I heaved open the fridge door and poked my head in, rummaging through the various takeout boxes that no one ever bothered to throw away.

“No. I just came over because Jayla called.”

“What? Ow!” The combination of Jayla calling Jake and the smell of my leftovers-turned-petri-dish was so shocking, I banged my head on the fridge roof.

“Hey, Em!” Jayla yelled from her room. “Yeah, I think I have some sort of virus on my computer and I thought that Jake would know how to fix it.”

I refolded the corners of my carton of takeout closed and placed it back in the fridge. Something was fishy here…and it wasn’t just the five-day-old sushi. “Don’t Macs, like, never get viruses or something?”

I craned my neck to peer into Jayla’s room to see if I could catch her eye—she might be able to pull off the coy and innocent routine from the other room, but one look at her face and the jig would be up. Her door was half shut and all I could see was a pile of dresses scattered on her bed, and glimpses of her running back and forth trying on clothes.

“Yeah, they’re pretty solid. I’m not really sure what’s going on here,” Jake said, clueless that my roommate was in a sartorial frenzy ten feet away.

Yeah, I didn’t know what was going on here either. I jammed a spoon into a jar of peanut butter I’d fished out of our candy-stuffed cupboard. Why would Jayla ever want to hang out with my dorkus cousin?
I
didn’t even want to tonight and I was, like, genetically obligated.

“I’ve been looking for the glitches she’s talking about, but I’m not finding any.” He went back to full concentration on the laptop.

“Well, if you can’t fix it, no worries.” Jayla smiled from the doorway of her room, modeling a bright green bandeau dress from American Apparel, the kind that can be worn twenty different ways or something. Wide-eyed and slightly slack-jawed, Jake’s attention was no longer on the computer. “Maybe it healed itself or something.”

“Jay, it’s an Apple, not the Terminator. It can’t just heal itself,” I snarked, now pawing through the fridge for the jar of raspberry jelly I knew I’d seen last weekend. I mean, whatever, if she wanted to date someone like Jake, I guess I could understand that—she’d had enough bad boys and even worse luck. A safe, normal guy like him would have its appeal. But couldn’t she go for someone
like
him—not him exactly? I’m related to him, so isn’t that kind of like her dating me?

“Whatever. Since nothing’s wrong, then maybe we…” She moved her eye contact from Jake up to me. “I mean, we
all
can grab dinner or something.”

It totally felt like I was intruding on some weird, mismatched date. Like post–nose job Ashlee settling for one of the Yin Yang Twins. Though, my only other option was rancid Chinese or condiments on a spoon. “Sure. Should we wait for Rach?”

“Oh, she’s on another one of her computer dates,” Jayla informed me as she stuffed her clutch with two AmExes and about ten different lip glosses.

I couldn’t help but be a little irritated that Rachel hadn’t e-mailed me herself with a full dating update or even just a recap of how the Lilly Allen interview went. But I tried to pretend like I didn’t care. “Oh wow. With that guy from the weekend that she’s in love with? We’re going to have to break out some celebratory Manischewitz when she gets back.” I looked over at my killjoy cuz on the couch, who was giving me a dorky parental look. “Or maybe just some Kosher-for-Passover Martinelli’s.” I rolled my eyes at him to let him know that I was just saying that because of his pseudo-parental presence.

“No. Not him. She’s with some other guy. I told her to diversify her dating portfolio. I mean, she can’t stick all of her Hanukkah candles in one menorah, right?”

Jake and I nodded in agreement.

I couldn’t decide which of my roommates was surprising me more—Princess Jayla crushing on Jake Starfish-face or Little Miss Only-Kissed-Three-Boys Rachel becoming the dating queen of Lower Manhattan.

“Okay!” Jayla sang as she pranced toward the door in a pair of adorable tan heels I was sure I’d just seen on Jessica Alba in
Us Weekly.
“You guys ready?”

“Yeah,” I said, and reached for my purse and then realized I was still in work clothes. I felt like such a prep school tool in my collared work shirts. Usually when I came home, I tore my work gear off so fast I was in my undies by the time I got across the living room. Rachel always said it looked like I melted or something, just a trail of empty clothes where Emma used to be. “Wait, I want to change real quick.” I scuttled into my room and rifled through my closet to see what was clean and cute enough to put on. I didn’t have a shot in hell of looking as foxy as Jayla, but I hoped that “non-grubby and discernibly female” was attainable.

“Ahhhh! I’m coming! I’m hurrying!” I hollered from the depths of my closet. I could hear Jayla’s heels click-clacking around on the hardwood, probably impatient. She got so fussy when she was kept waiting, but I guess that’s what happens when you grow up with an entire staff anticipating your every need at all four of your houses. I paused so I could hear whatever mildly bitchy response she had as I clutched a flowy, if kind of wrinkled, turquoise tunic in one hand and pair of black, also pretty wrinkled, leggings in the other. But instead of “Hurry your pretty ass up, Domino!” I heard, “So I learned this new pose in yoga, wanna see?”

And then a small, stifled gasp from my cousin. Envisioning the Kama Sutra coming to life in my common room, I poked my head quickly out the door. Jayla was in some wonky lunge pose, with one of her legs somehow hooked over the back of her shoulder, and she’d arranged her dress just right so that she was showing a ton of leg but nothing X-rated.

“Jayla!” I snapped instinctively.

Startled, she jumped and toppled over with an awkward thud, her dangly gold earrings clanging on the ground. Jake rushed over to help her as she fumbled to keep her lady parts covered.

“Ow! My elbow!” she whined, rubbing it and grimacing.

He looked at her totally not injured arm as she batted her eyelashes, the perfect damsel in Downward-Facing Dog distress. I rolled my eyes and closed the door to change.

I pulled on my outfit, touched up my melted makeup, fluffed my hair, and slowly opened my door, sure to make plenty of noise doing so just in case those two were playing doctor.

Thankfully, Jayla had been lured away from contortionist flirting by her iPhone and was furiously responding to texts as Jake flipped idly through the issue of
Nylon
magazine on the coffee table.

“Ready!” I announced, and we all quickly headed out.

We decided on Republic, right across Union Square. Over a steaming bowl of udon, I told them about my run-in and then walk-by with Colin.

“So, what do you think? Did I totally dork him away with that Excel make-out joke? Or what if it’s because Derek blew my cover and told Colin I’m only an intern?”

“Em, you would know if he found out about you being a high schooler. Trust me. He was most likely just trying to be discreet. What you two are starting up is probably against the rules,” Jake said, fumbling for a mouthful of pad thai with his chopsticks.

“I’m eighteen! I mean, despite whatever he thinks, I
am
eighteen. Totally not against any rules!” I could hear my voice get shrill with defense.

As Jake set down his chopsticks and picked up a fork, Jayla cut into the convo. “He was talking about company policy, Em. Not the law. Hooking up with someone at work, intern or not, probably isn’t a first-class ticket to a promotion. Haven’t you seen
Love Actually
?”

“Yeah, most companies tell you not to piss in your own pool,” sensei Jake added oh-so-eloquently.

Jayla rolled her eyes and laughed, “Ew, you’re gross! Now shut up and pass the edamame.”

I was too perturbed by this news to focus on the flirt-freak-fest taking place in front of me. I mean, Colin was risking his rep by dating me? I hadn’t even thought about that. And he didn’t even know just how much he was risking. I’m no workplace gossip expert, but I’d assume his dating an intern would be about as hot a topic as when The Hombres decided to bring those eighth graders to junior prom. I made a mental to-do for tomorrow—come clean to Colin. I had to. If I fessed up now, things could still totally work out. Who knew, maybe he’d like me more because I was so mature and honest, totally not what he’d expect from someone who had Cute Is What We Aim For under “Favorite Music” on their MySpace page? Oh no—my MySpace page! If Colin saw it, I was completely screwed. I had to change my profile picture to a snapshot of my dog and set my profile to private. Ugh, this was getting to be a huge fiasco. My mind raced thinking of all the other ways I could be found out, and then I stopped and resolved again, stronger this time, to tell Colin the truth.

I sat through the rest of dinner pretty quiet, stressing about MySpace, Facebook, and God knows what other Google hits were out there, just waiting to expose me as a fraud and an intern and a teenager before I could be the adult I was faking to be and tell Colin myself. Thankfully, Jayla and Jake were so consumed with their newfound “we have so much in common” moments that my silence went completely unnoticed. But even through my panicked haze, I could hear how odd the conversation had gotten.

“So wait,” Jake said, pushing back his glasses excitedly. “You’re telling me that you, Jayla St. Clare, can shoot an M16?”

“What’s an M—” I started to ask.

“Yeah!” she squealed, unconsciously turning her chair away from me to face him. “Before my dad got into real estate, he was a Green Beret, so he’d always take me shooting out in the woods and stuff. I’ve shot a 16, an M60, AT4, and I can set up a Claymore mine.”

“Oh my God!” Jake threw his hands in the air in amazement. “I totally did ROTC in college!”

“Shut up!”

“Seriously! I was going to go into aviation, but”—he tapped his glasses—“bad vision. No one wants the guy who can’t see steering the Black Hawk.”

Jayla dissolved into laughter as I tried to picture Princess Jayla tromping around the wilderness. The fiercest jungle I could picture her in was the Fourth of July sale at Bloomingdale’s. They then moved on to their mutual love of X-Men. Jayla said she wished on a daily basis that she were Magneto, while Jake told her all about Element, the mutant he’d invented, who could control earth, wind, water, and fire.

Jayla was digging these confessions of a dorkus? Well, there went my World of Warcraft blackmail. I was going to have to dig up some other dirt on him if I ever wanted to drink in his presence again.

“So does that mean Element could control the water inside someone’s body?” Jayla mused, chewing thoughtfully on her chopstick as I tried not to ralph at this nerd-a-thon. “Because if it does, you’d totally be more powerful than Magneto.”

After debating this point for a torturous fifteen minutes and even calling each other “Ellie” and “Mags,” I had to make a move and asked for the check. And then immediately demanded that we leave already.

I guess it shouldn’t weird me out so much that she and Jake were hitting it off. Rachel was meeting tons of guys, I had the Colin thing (or at least up until this afternoon I did), why shouldn’t Jayla find someone she liked? But still, what could she
possibly
find so compelling about my cousin? She’d kissed half the Abercrombie catalog. I let her walk home in dreamy silence as I mentally rehearsed how to tell Colin that I was practically jailbait.

Seventeen

A
s soon as I sat down at my desk the next morning, still dewy with my a.m. commute sweat layer, Derek bellowed for me. I picked up a pad and pen and trudged over to his office, bracing myself for another excruciatingly boring Excel assignment.

Derek was reclining back with his feet up on his desk and his arms folded behind his head. The pose was kind of pinup girl–esque, but more a display of male-pattern baldness and midlife weight gain than of coy sexiness. “Hey, Em-a-licious, did I ever tell you about how I used to play football in college?”

Crap. Not another back-when-I-was-young-and-knee-injury-free story. “No, Derek. You haven’t ever mentioned college football.”

“That’s because I never played college football! It was a joke.” He unfolded his arms to shoot finger guns at me. “See? I’m a jokester! I told you back when you started, Emmarooni, that you always had to be on your toes with The Dorf or he’ll get you good, like I just did.”

I rolled my eyes and turned around. As much as I wanted to inform him that pointing his fat fingers at me after saying something that wasn’t true made him a liar with a hand tic, not a jokester, I knew that would just lead to more Dorf time, and really, all I wanted was a quiet day of Googling myself and my loved ones.

So I shuffled back to my desk, threw my pad and pen down, and quickly busied myself with possibilities of how to break the news of my teenage wasteland citizenship to Colin. I drafted a few completely terrible e-mails.

Dear Colin,

I have some news to break to you. I’m not old enough to buy liquor, but I can buy cigarettes. Still want to be my summer boyfriend? Please keep in mind that cloves are making a comeback.

Hmm. No, too subtle.

Dear Colin,

Ever wanted a second chance to win Prom King? Well, have I got an opportunity for you!

Too game show–like. This wasn’t
Who Wants to Get Arrested for Statutory Rape?

Dear Colin,

Technically, this isn’t pedophilia, but I bet (hope) it’s the closest you’ve ever been.

Gah, I was realizing that e-mail was totally not the way to go about it. And who knew if he was even really still into me? After our evening of French fries and French kissing, had there been any real signs that he was? Not really. Maybe he was one of those guys who just liked the chase and once they got the prize, the thrill was over for them. I feel like there totally was a
Sex and the City
episode about that species of man. Actually, I think the entire series was about that species. I e-mailed Rachel my theory, hoping she’d say I was off the confession hook.

Her response:

Kissing hasn’t been “the prize” since spin the bottle. At this point, a date that ends in just a kiss is a consolation prize, if anything. Even I know that. And honestly, do you really want him to be over you? Tell him the truth.

She was totally right, especially about the not-wanting-him-to-be-over-me part. I needed to kiss him again, to see his head tilt and lean in, to taste his lips, salty from French fries. What if he didn’t buy the “age is just a number—a connection is a connection” spiel? Would I never see him again? I couldn’t tell him and risk missing out on kissing skills like his.

But even if I didn’t tell him about my age, what if he really was over me? Not because he’d won the grand prize of kissing me, but just because he’d met another girl. He very well could have gone out when we split ways on Tuesday night and met a girl who knew what the national drink of Brazil was and didn’t run away every time her cell rang. Or he could have just gotten bored with me. From what I gather from
One Tree Hill,
a week is the standard life span of a relationship. Or maybe he decided against dating someone from work. He did seem like a guy who was pretty serious about his career.

I could hear my inbox ping with a new message, thankfully interrupting my pyschogirl inner monologue. Hopefully, Rachel had taken pity on my corporate hostage situation and sent a funny link and this wasn’t just an e-mail from IT alerting me that my inbox was too full.

While the message was not from CurlyRach91, my inbox held something even better than a link to www.settleforbrian.com. It was an e-mail from CChristensen@media inc.com. The subject line read “Saturday, Miss Freeman?” Birds chirped and fat black women sang “Hallelujah” in the background as I clicked his message open.

Emma,

The weather is here, wish you were beautiful. No, wait—other way around. The weather is beautiful, wish you were here. Ah, that’s better. What do you say to some Saturday afternoon hanging?

—CC

I clapped my hand over my mouth and squealed as quietly as possible. Weekend hanging? Cheesy jokes? He so wasn’t over me. My fingers twitched to write back immediately. But I knew I should stay cool—wait at least an hour before writing back.

But playing about as hard to get as mono, I only managed to wait eleven seconds before replying.

CC,

As long as you promise no more burgers, you’re on for the hanging. Three burgers in one week is too much of a great thing.

—Emma

I sat totally still, my eyes on my inbox, waiting for a reply message. And within five seconds, I got a response.

Ha ha. No burgers, you got it. I’ll call you on Saturday around noon.

More low-volume screeching and twittery foot stomping. But I didn’t even have a moment to soak in the delicious fantasy forming in my head. Derek dropped a stack of papers on my desk, a sonic boom echoing through the office.

“I need one hundred copies of this. Double sided, stapled, and collated. And step on it, missy.”

Step on it? I’m not a freaking cab in a car chase, I thought to myself. Or maybe I said it out loud, because Derek turned around.

“What, Emma?”

I just shrugged my shoulders innocently and beamed the biggest smile I could muster as I headed to the copy room. Forty-five mind-numbingly boring minutes later, I returned to my desk with a redwood forest’s worth of paper. Just as I’d finished stapling the ninety-eighth packet, Derek sauntered over to my cube.

“Oopsie-daisy! Typo on page four, just found it. I’m going to need you to go ahead and copy and collate this packet instead.” He kerplunked a new pile of paper on my desk. “Hope you didn’t get too far.”

I restrained myself from strangling him—I figured that a juvie prison stay was not the kind of unique extracurricular activity a college admissions officer would be looking for. I silently slipped the 980 stapled pages into my recycling bin, then made my way back to the copy room to kill some more of the rainforest. When the packets were finally finished and typo free, I sank back in my chair and began my countdown of the remaining 270 minutes in the day.

At minute 245, my work phone rang.

“Em, I need you in here.” It was Derek, sounding serious. “Bring some paper, it’s important.”

I immediately thought that he’d been monitoring my Internet time and I was going to get the smackdown for doing nothing but surfing Bluefly.com all morning. A nervous sweat broke out on my brow and my mind went into overdrive thinking about all of the ridiculous and in-no-way-justifiable-as-work-related websites that I visited on a daily—no, wait, hourly—basis. I hastily composed an “I was on eBay looking for a kidney for my terminally ill puppy” excuse and walked into his office, trying not to look as panic-stricken as I was.

“Yes?” I chirped, sounding as innocent as I could.

“Can you come here please and watch this?” He motioned to his monitor, his brow furrowed. Was it surveillance of me in the supply closet that day? Okay, my official story was that I didn’t mean to take those four spiral notebooks, they just ended up in my purse.

But instead I was faced by something far more horrifying: I moved around to his side of the desk to get a view of his computer screen and was confronted with…home videos of his kid playing hockey.

“Look at this. What do you think of his form?” He chewed his lip pensively and waited for my expert evaluation.

This was unreal. I was on an emotional roller coaster and Derek was going to derail me.

“Uh, I don’t know. He looks…good. Good, um, hitting skills.” I was a soccer chick. I didn’t know the first thing about hockey.

“Yeah, Wyatt’s slap shot is strong but he’s lousy at defense. Here, check this out.” He fast-forwarded through the rest of Wyatt’s—seriously, that was the worst name I’d ever heard—shooting drills and I saw with a sinking dread that the video was thirty-seven minutes long.

“I mean, do you think he’s got what it takes to be the next Crosby?” Derek stared at me intently as I fumbled for an answer.

“Well,” I said slowly, “that depends. Is he good at standup? There can only be
one
Bill Cosby, right?”

Derek laughed—I wasn’t really sure why—and slapped me on the back. “Oh, Emma, that sense of humor of yours! Man, I’m writing that one down,” he chuckled. “But seriously, sit on down here and tell me how you think he stacks up against Sid the Kid, because I gotta tell ya, Wyatt is freaking unstoppable in his Junior League games. Just last week that Anderson brat, James or whatever his name is, tried to hip check him and
bam!
Wyatt just went in for the—”

“Derek,” I cut in, trying and failing to keep the exasperation out of my voice, “I really don’t know anything about hockey. I don’t even know who Sid Kid is. And I’ve got kind of a lot of work, so…”

I made a move to leave, but no such luck.

“You don’t know who Sidney Crosby is? Do you live under a rock? He’s going to be the next Gretzky.” I tried to feign recognition but it was too late. I thought that maybe my total hockey ignorance could get me out of home video hell, but I was wrong, wrong, wrong. Instead I got an even more in-depth lecture on Wyatt’s skating skills and an exhaustive biography on this Canadian hockey prodigy, Crosby. By the time he was done, I was actually glad to get back to my desk and stare blankly at my computer screen. At least then I didn’t have to pretend to look interested.

That evening, I trudged through my apartment door, wondering how I could be so tired from a day spent entirely sitting down. Rachel was in the kitchen cutting up an apple.

“Question,” I said exhaustedly, flopping my bag on the ground, too tired to care if anything got smashed. “How many times does a person have to sing the
banana fanna fo fanna
song before it’s considered fighting words?”

Rachel laughed, spreading peanut butter on her apple slices.

“Because after the third time Derek passed my cube singing it, I honestly thought about tripping him. And have you ever heard of this hockey player, Sidney some-thinerother?”

“Ooh!” squealed Jayla from her room, busy re-BeDazzling her iPhone. “I love him! He was always so sweet to me.”

Rachel and I just rolled our eyes and smiled—was there anyone famous that girl didn’t know?

“Em, your Derek stories are seriously hilarious. You should write a book or something,” Rachel said as she headed toward the couch to eat and watch
Friends
reruns.

A book? That would be awesome. Like,
The Derek Diaries
or something.

“You think? Well, I have been writing most of them down. I feel like if I don’t, they’ll slowly poison me to death. He has to be the worst boss in the history of the universe and I feel like it’s my duty to catalog all of this douchiness. Like a time capsule of idiocy or something.”

Rachel stopped in mid–apple bite and turned to me, her head cocked with curiosity.

“Em, I didn’t know that. Can I read what you’ve written? I’m sure you could turn them into something ridiculously hilarious.”

I felt my face flush with embarrassment at the thought of showing someone my journal. Not because I was a bad writer—which I probably was—but because I just wrote in my journal to get my thoughts down, not for it ever to be read. What if I showed the journal to Rachel this once and then from forever on, instead of just writing to write, I’d be writing thinking it was meant to be read? That would just change something in a weird way. Like, instead of writing for myself, I’d be writing for someone else.

“Um, yeah. Maybe I’ll show it to you. Not now, though. Let me polish the stories a little bit more.” I stole one of her peanut butter slices and changed the subject. “I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever. How have things been going on the JDate front?”

She clicked off the TV just when Ross and Rachel were about to get back together for the seventh time and slumped into the couch cushion.

She turned to me with a pained look. “Things are a mess. Remember the future love of my life from Saturday night?” Dramatic sigh. “He never called, which I totally don’t get. Is it possible for me to have an amazing let’s-be-together-forever-and-name-our-kids-Jordan-and-Seth time on a date and the guy to not even want to spend another three hours with me?”

Mute and clueless Emma strikes again. I sat there making an empathetic face.

She went on, “So, whatever. I had that other date with another guy last night. And it was every shade of awful.”

“Was it really? Worse than going halvsies on the Indian buffet?”

Her tone turned solemn. “He picked me up at the apartment and then made me take the subway uptown with him.”

“Rach, that’s not so bad. Don’t let too much of Jayla rub off on you.”

“No, that wasn’t the bad part. I didn’t have my Metrocard with me because I was just carrying a clutch and didn’t think we’d be commuting to dinner. And I was totally willing to buy one. But he was like, ‘No, use mine. It’s unlimited. You just have to wait eighteen minutes for it to be valid again.’ And, like, he really wouldn’t hear of me buying my own. So we stood there for eighteen minutes in the rain forest of humidity that is the subway, him on one side of the turnstiles and me on the other. Obviously, I offered to pay for the cab home.”

“Wow. Okay, yes, that is worse than Indian food, my friend. That’s like something out of a budget sitcom or something.”

“Tell me about it, total CW nightmare,” she said through a mouthful of peanut-buttered apple. “How are things with you and your geriatric lover?”