Hot Mess (4 page)

“For Christ’s sweet sake, Emma! Even
I
could’ve seen through that! Just please tell me that the other places on our list didn’t include the words ‘sucky sucky’ or ‘friends with benefits.’”

“No!” I said indignantly, and grabbed a honey packet from the sugar station and sucked it down. Maybe if Rachel had bothered to do some of the work in finding an apartment, she’d have room to get pissed. But her passing out and sleep-talking about Jared Leto didn’t qualify as “doing your part” in my book. I stayed silent, though, not wanting Rachel to blow up full throttle.

After a while, the icy AC air cooled my temper and I decided we should hit the pavement once again.

“Okay, quiet time’s over. Do you want to see any more apartments today or should we call it quits?” I looked at my watch. “We could probably make it back to the hotel in time for
The Tyra Banks Show
.”

“I say we keep going. We can’t let that be the last taste in our mouth for the day. Let’s just hope this next apartment is the Listerine to that one’s gingivitis.” We both laughed at her total nonsense.

“Okay, let’s see,” I said, looking at our dwindling list. “A place in Hell’s Kitchen. Eight hundred dollars each. The lady sounded really nice.”

“Oh my God! Hell’s Kitchen? Emma, I don’t want to end up in the river with my throat cut or sold into white slavery.”

“Hell’s Kitchen isn’t a bad neighborhood. My cousin Jacob lives there. He says it’s full of gay guys and vegan restaurants. And it might be cool to live near Times Square. We could totally stalk the cast of
Rent
if we were that close!”

“Really? Near Broadway? I think Fantasia is in
The Color Purple,
so famous people are definitely around there, too.”

After forty-five sweaty minutes spent asking homeless people for directions, we trotted up to an adorable brownstone with a white marble hallway, supercute doorman, and best of all, central air.

Rachel let out a loud sigh as we were buzzed through the front door and started up the stairs. “Central air? Who cares if this place is a Tic Tac box and our roommate is a legless taxidermy collector? Feel that air? I’ll take it!”

“Hi, girls!” an older lady chirped as she showed us in. “Come in and have a look around.”

It wasn’t a million-dollar loft in TriBeCa, but it was definitely cute. There was just one problem.

“Uh, I only see one bedroom.”

“Well,” she said slowly, “technically there’s only one bedroom, but you two would share this.”

She rounded the corner into the living room with two La-Z-Boy recliners and a clothing rack on wheels.

“Share what?” Rachel exclaimed. “The remote control? Are we seriously supposed to sleep in easy chairs?”

“They pull out so that they’re almost flat. And you can use this as a nightstand.” She pointed to the card table. “Travis is really nice, too.”

“Travis? I thought you were going to be our roommate.”

“Oh, no, no. This place is Travis’s. I just show it because he’s, well, not really what you’d call a people person. Well, actually not even a person. He’s my Pomeranian.”

“Hold up. You want us to live here over the summer, with a dog as a roommate.
And
give the mutt the bedroom?” Rachel said flatly. “I see. Do we at least get to use the toilet or do we have to pee in the sink?”

The New York real estate scene was starting to frighten me. I felt like every subletter we’d met could have had their own act in a carni freak show. We bolted again.

Back on the street, we decided to cool off with some Italian ices and give ourselves a pep talk.

“Our dream apartment is totally just a click away on craigslist. We’ve just got to keep on trucking,” I tried to convince Rachel…and myself.

“Yeah, this is the big city. It’s not supposed to be easy,” Rachel agreed. “If living here were easy, ugly people could do it. And who wants the most fabulous city in the world filled with fugs?”

But as the heat of the day peaked, our hopes wilted along with our ponytails. Things went from bad to worse. The apartments got smaller and smellier, and the parade of potential roommates started to resemble a
Surreal Life
highlight reel.

“I have my Wiccan sisterhood meetings here every full moon. That’s why I have this goat.”

“I have this lower intestine issue and I use a lot of toilet paper, but I barely use paper towels. So it evens out.”

“I cook with curry.”

Finally, as the sun started setting, we made it back to hotel, sweet hotel. We flopped down on our beds, exhausted and stressed.

“How long do you think we can stay in this hotel and then still have money for subletting an apartment?” I asked, starting to get stressed that we might be homeless at some point in the not-so-distant future.

“I don’t know, Em. We’ve already paid for tonight in this shithole, so let’s not think about it. I really want to hit the minibar, okay? Our parents would totally never know and it’s just sitting there, begging for us to drink some stuff.” She could reach the minifridge from her bed—that’s how small our room was. She started pawing through the mini-bottle selection.

“You go for it, Rach. I’m going to hit craigslist again and see if there are any serial killers, dominatrixes, or part-time mimes that are looking for summer roommates.” I tried to sound like I was joking, but seriously, I was starting to think that we should ditch the apartment hunt and just find us a couple nice refrigerator boxes and set them up next to some place that had free wireless.

But I continued to point-and-click my way through the posts, this time trying to be a bit more discriminating and avoid any overt pedophiles. By the time Rachel had downed her third mini-Malibu, I’d found three new apartment possibilities.

Six

I
woke up at seven a.m. to the sound of Rachel heaving her mini-Malibus into the toilet. I could have predicted the hurling from the second she opened the minibar. That girl knows her limits about as well as Britney knows her underwear. She limped out of the bathroom, almost folded in half she was clutching her stomach so tightly, and crumbled onto the bed.

“Put me out of my misery, Emma. Just do it.
Old Yeller
style. Do it ’cause you love me.” Her whiney voice, normally shrill, was husky with dehydration.

“Rach, I was just thinking back to that
Dateline
special—you know, the black-light one? Didn’t they say that the toilet was like the dirtiest thing in the whole room? Like, way worse than the ceiling.”

“If I had any energy right now, I’d come over there and smother you with your diseased pillow.” Then she went back to moaning and I rolled over and went back to sleep.

Three hours of slamming-bathroom-door-and-muffled-retching-interrupted sleep later, I was up for good. Rachel looked a little less green, kind of a washed-out taupe. But I was not going to let her self-induced ailments ruin my second day in New York.

“You know what you need?” I said way too cheerfully.

She shook her head and pulled the covers over her face, shielding herself from the light I knew was giving her a headache.

“Some ibuprofen and a greasy brunch.” She ignored me, still wrapped in her bedding cocoon. Having little sympathy for Little Miss I’m Going to Get Me Drunk and Not Surf Craigslist, I leaped over to her bed and started jumping up and down. “Greasy brunch! Greasy brunch!” I chanted over and over, bouncing her near-lifeless body up and down.

“Fucking, fuck you,” said a voice from under the blankets.

I stopped jumping for a second and pulled the comforter away from her face.

I got nose-to-nose with her and gave her my best puppy dog eyes and yelled, “Greasy brunch!” There was no way she was sleeping through the day and sending me out into the New York freakfest alone.

“Fine, fine.” Rachel got out of bed rather nimbly for the hangover she was nursing. That girl can be such a drama queen.

“Yes! Sweet!” I pumped my fist and felt like a fifth grader who just won the annual magazine sale. I tossed her some ibuprofens and a half bottle of Diet Sunkist I’d had since we boarded the train in Bridgefield.

We got dressed and headed out down Tenth Avenue. Turned out that finding a place that looked dirty enough to have a solid grease-laden brunch was not that challenging in this ’hood. Within half a block, we were in deep-fry heaven.

Over plates of scrambled eggs, fried potatoes, and pancakes, we discussed our options.

“So,” I asked seriously, “out of the crap shacks we saw yesterday, which one do you think is the least rank?”

“I will not even dignify that with an answer.” Rachel wouldn’t even look up from pouring syrup all over her pancakes. “Seriously, I cannot live in any of those dumps. We could stay in homeless shelters and live in that kind of squalor for free. At least then we’d get free soup and toiletries. And probably even get felt up nightly.”

“I know,” I conceded. But I really did want to know if anything we saw yesterday was an option at all in her mind. Today might pan out to be the same, so we did need some backup. “What about that last one? That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“Are you out of your mind? That was a prison cell. Literally, it was eight-by-eight and had no windows. And what? Were we both going to sleep in that twin bed? Dude, not going to happen.” A syrupy forkful went into her mouth.

I sighed heavily. Why was I doing all the work here? Like, yeah, I’d
kind of
talked Rachel into this, but now we were both here and if she was going to be so damn persnickety, she could stay up all night looking for apartments instead of getting wasted on rum like a pirate.

“Well, fine then,” I said testily. “What are we going to do? We only had two nights at the hotel, which are over. We can totally extend our stay there—I think—but we need to set aside some money for the rent that we will hopefully eventually be paying. I’m no math genius here, but that only leaves us with enough of the parents’ money for just a couple more nights in our shit-ass hotel. We have to find something fast.” Rachel nodded in silent agreement. One night in our rank room at full price cost just about as much as what I would have made in a week lifeguarding. Despite the one-dollar hot dogs, cash goes fast in this town.

I heaved a big sigh. “If I were home right now, I’d be lifeguarding with Brian.” Just because I was a little sad and a little hopeless and a little homesick, I let it slip out. I didn’t even really mean it. Or at least, I don’t think I did.

Rachel leaned forward out of her side of the vinyl booth and pursed her lips in a “Mama gonna set you straight, girl” kind of way. “Emma, seriously? If you were home right now, you’d be miserable. You’d still be fighting with Brian and crying about it to me until I left for camp. And then, once I was gone, you’d be crying alone, listening to Paramore and giving yourself some hideous emo haircut one night and I just don’t know if I could be friends with you if you looked like that.”

I smiled in spite of myself. She was right, I wouldn’t be thinking about Brian if this apartment hunt were going even just a smidge better. A few silent seconds of egg eating went by. “Well, I e-mailed three people last night while you were Malibu-ing yourself into a coma.”

“Don’t ever mention Malibu ever again. Ever.” And she really did go a little greener at the mention of it. “Not even if you’re in California and talking about the place, okay?”

The girl may not have a sense of her limits, but she at least has a sense of humor.

“Whatever, Pukey Brewster. Let’s go back to our penthouse suite and see if anyone wrote back. Then we’ll map out Mission: Apartment Hunt Part Deux.”

While Rachel showered off the hangover icks, I checked my Gmail. I’d gotten two answers out of the three messages I’d sent the night before. One was for a two-bedroom in Queens. In a moment of—I don’t know if it was weakness or reality—I broke down and boroughed it out. I’d come to realize that our limited cash flow was not going to get us anything close to livable on the island of Manhattan.

My plan was to take Rachel to the Manhattan rental first and it was sure to be a dump. I wanted to have how stinky and tiny it was fresh in her mind, and then take her to see the Queens apartment and hopefully wow her with cleanliness and space we could actually afford over there. The Manhattan craphole was a three-bedroom right on Union Square. The woman was renting the other two bedrooms for $750 each. After yesterday, I’d learned that if it sounds too good to be true, it certainly is. So when I clicked open the response e-mail about the place, I was expecting to see an embedded image of her with dozens of gerbils or a baby pool filled with ranch dressing or maybe an e-mail explaining that by “roommate” she actually meant “babysitter/ housekeeper/Scientology scholar.” But that totally wasn’t the case…at least as far as I could tell. As I clicked open the message from [email protected], I found no bestiality jpegs, no condiment ponds, and no mention of indentured servitude. She was twenty-one, a student at NYU, and looking for some chill roommates.

“We’re so chill!” I screamed into my computer screen.

In the e-mail, the landlady said she’d be home between twelve and three and we should just drop by. She gave her cell number just in case, which seemed pretty friendly to me. Jeez, how could my positivity be rebounding after yesterday?

Rach was sopping when she came out of the bathroom. “There’s a hand towel the size of a maxi pad for me to dry my entire body.” She wrung out her hair onto the floor. “This place blows.”

“Get dressed, babe. I have a good feeling about this apartment.”

“Didn’t you say that about the pedophile guy?” she asked, squishing gel into her curls.

“Okay, so we just hop on the blue one and go to Fourteenth Street and then transfer to the gray one. We’ll get off at Union Square and be right at her doorstep.” I finger-traced our route on the MTA map, which was nearly destroyed though we’d only had it for a day and a half. Rachel nodded as we stepped into the subway car. We got two seats next to each other in a really well air-conditioned car. Could this be going any better? Maybe today was going to be totally different from yesterday’s horrendousness. I was actually getting pumped about the Manhattan place, and I started building up the apartment. “It’s a real three-bedroom and two bathrooms. Meaning we’d have our own bathroom for you to puke in.” She gave me a fake glare. “Plus, Union Square’s supposed to be awesome. Jacob listed it as a cool place to go out when I e-mailed him.”

“I thought he was, like, captain of the geek squad. How would he know where to go out?”

“Well, yeah, he is.” I shrugged. “But, geek machine or not, he’s our only gauge as to what’s cool in the city and that’s what he said.” I couldn’t let my cousin’s dweeb-o rep wreck day two’s apartment search before we’d even seen a place. I continued with my virtual tour of the craigslist ad highlights. “And apparently the place was just renovated. So there’s, like, a new kitchen and everything. Which I know we won’t use for more than heating up Lean Pockets, but still. How awesome, right?”

“Nice! I likey!”

I started to go over the questions about utilities and whatnot that we needed to ask the landlady if we were going to love the place as much as I hoped, when Rachel interrupted. “Hey, you think Kyle’s doing okay at home? I mean, who is he hanging out with if we’re here?”

We rode along for a while debating the possibility of Kyle’s happiness sans our company. Rachel thought it was impossible but I thought that he would be fine without us. I went through every possible social outlet in Bridgefield where he could make friends.

“Ky’s not looking to meet divorced women who are too clumsy to scrapbook on their own,” she responded to my suggestion that he would take a crafting class at the Y to make new friends.

Valid point. I realized then that I hadn’t been paying much attention to the subway stops and we’d been on for a while. “Um, Rach, do you know what stop we just passed?”

“I thought you were Magellaning this expedition. I’m concentrating on not barfing in public.”

Not puking? Not really what I’d classify as teamwork in my book.

Just then we pulled into the 190th Street station. And I may not have gotten a 5 on my AP Calc test, but I know enough math to tell you that’s nowhere near Fourteenth Street. “Shit! Get out!” I yelled, maybe a little too frantically. Everyone in the car turned to see if I was having some kind of emergency. Aside from dying of embarrassment, I wasn’t really in critical condition, so I just looked at the floor and tried to be invisible until the doors opened and we shuffled out.

As we stood on the platform, trying to figure out how to get back downtown, I looked down at my watch—two-thirty.

“We’re never going to make it to this apartment by three,” I sighed.

“Should we skip this one and just move on down your list? We’re probably close to Queens already,” Rachel offered.

Actually, we were probably close to Kuwait, we were so far away from where we needed to be.

“I dunno, we could just skip it, but I have such a good feeling about this one.”

“Okay, well, then let’s head aboveground for some cell service so you can call and ask this chick if it’s okay that we’re late.” Rachel was being uncharacteristically flexible. Maybe I should get her hungover more often.

We climbed the stairs up to daylight and I dialed the number GlamnGlitterGrl had e-mailed me.

“Talk to me, babes,” came from the other end of the phone.

“Uh, hello? Is this Mrs. St. Clare?”

“Well, I’m
Ms.
Jayla St. Clare.”

“Oh, this is Emma. Freeman. And Rachel. We met on the Internet. Well, that sounds creepy. I just mean that we e-mailed, you know?” Why had I built this place up so that I was more nervous than I was on my first date with Brian? “Anyway, we’re on our way to see your place and I know you said to be there by three, but we’re superlost and are probably going to be late.”

“No worries, I’m actually still on my way back from the Hamptons, but I’ll be home in twenty.”

“Oh, right, the Hamptons!” I said, having only sort of heard about it on an episode of VH1’s
Fabulous Life of…
.“Um, hey, could you give us directions to your place from 190th Street?”

“Are you kidding? I didn’t know the streets go up that high. Call a car service, honey.”

“Oh yeah. Car service. Maybe we will. Okay, see you later, then. Bye.”

Rachel and I looked in our wallets. We hadn’t restocked on the cash this morning and only had twelve dollars between the two of us. “That’s only going to get us to like 189th Street in a cab,” I complained. So we turned around and headed back down into the sticky heat of the subway entrance to continue the voyage.

An hour later, with our bra linings totally soaked in sweat, we announced ourselves to Jayla’s doorman. Marble or mirrors covered every surface of the lobby.

“Ugh. I look like someone dumped a bucket of sopping wet ugly on me,” Rach said, checking herself out in one of the mirrored walls. I tried to avoid my reflection. There was no way I looked any better.

The doorman pointed us toward the elevators and mouthed “Thirty B” after a few seconds on the phone with Jayla. The elevators matched the lobby in their marbly mirrored–ness, and I couldn’t help but catch myself in the mirror. Waterfalls of sweat and cheap makeup was a less than flattering pairing—I looked like the love child of a marathon runner and a raccoon. I pushed the frizz back into my pony, using my sweat as makeshift hair gel.

Finally the elevator doors opened and my reflection thankfully disappeared. We moseyed around the tasteful but pretty plain white hallway, until we found Apartment 30B. Rachel rang the bell, we heard a “Come in” through the door, and Rachel pushed it open. All I could see from the doorway was insanely blonde hair. So icy pale and shiny, when it caught the light, I was temporarily blinded. I focused on the person attached to the hair and saw who I assumed was our landlady. She was gorgeous, and as I walked closer, I realized that her skin was so perfect, I swear she didn’t even have pores. She barely noticed us, she was so transfixed by the episode of
My Super Sweet Sixteen
she was watching.