Just A Small Town Girl: A New Adult Romantic Comedy (12 page)

 "Ow."

 "Yep. Shit sucks."

 "Relax," said Steve. "You have to take the rough with the smooth, the peaks and the valleys, the yin and the yang - it's totally Zen. So you're in a valley now but I think I can get you to a peak."

 "Dude, that sounds so incredibly gay I can't even..."

 "...no, not in a gay way." Steve snorted. "Holy crap, man - even if my toast was buttered that side you think I'd wanna wake up every morning looking at your ugly mug? Listen, I have some really good news. Get your ass round here and bring Bog. By the time we're done you'll have forgotten all about your little novelist manqué and her emotional issues. Besides, if she's the chick I think she is then what the
Twilight
hell has got into you? The antique store girl? Little Miss Mope and her three layers of flannel shirts? If we were in Oregon right now she'd take up passive-aggressive cliff-diving. Talk about the whine dark sea." 

 I called Bog and met Steve at his place. Steve met me with red eyes and a slightly paranoid grin on his mug. He slapped a stack of bills across my palm. "Finish your floor repairs," he said. "Or get the hell out of Trailer Town. Whichever."

 I flipped through the pile of twenties. "Holy shit."

 "Your cut," said Steve. "And all you had to do was baby-sit a Hawaiian hybrid for a couple of days. Don't tell me I never do anything for you."

 "What about Psycho Bob?"

 Steve narrowed his eyes. "Always worrying. You need to relax more."

 "I'll relax when you tell me that an insane Hell's Angel doesn't want to kill me."

 "Why would Bob want to kill you?"

 "I don't know. Maybe he found out you were cutting the stuff with catnip."

 "Maybe," said Steve. "But why would anyone tell him that unless they were so far round the fucking bend you could use 'em as a hairpin?"

 "Is this what they call a rhetorical question?"

 "Damned skippy," he said, opening the fridge and tossing me a beer. "Now start drinking, hit the bong and put a GPS tracker on your wallet. We're gonna go make it rain for some of the most talented ladies in Vermont."

 I knew right away what he meant. Twenty-four hours ago I might have given a shit about digging myself deeper with Lacie, but it had gone way past that point. That's how I ended up in a titty bar, trying to look enthusiastic as a chick in a leopard print thong and Lucite heels shook her well-shaped ass over my lap.

 She turned to face me, straddling my knees. Her thong was a little wisp of nothing and I wondered just how much she had to wax - probably everything. She cupped her naked breasts, tossed back her long dark hair and pouted. I glanced over to see how Steve was getting on with his dancer.

 A hand smacked me lightly across the face. The girl was glaring down at me. "Hey! No touching!" I said.

 "Pay attention," she said. She was no longer pouting. She just looked pissed. "You think I'm doing this for the sake of my health?"

 "Right," I said. "Sorry. Carry on."

 "Thank you." She started writhing slowly to the music once more, squeezing her tits, running her hands all over her body. I looked at her and tried to look appreciative, but it just made me look weird and made her uncomfortable.

 "Okay, I'm sorry," I said. "This isn't really me."

 "You gay?"

 "No!"

 She raised her eyebrows. "Homophobic?"

 "No! Of course not."

 "You sure? Because you sounded a little defensive there when I asked you if you were gay." She turned her back to me again, her ass in my face. She could arch her back so far that the ends of her hair brushed the top of her butt.

 "I'm sorry," I said, again. "I've just got a lot on my mind."

 "Don't we all, baby? Don't we all."

 She bent over. Really bent over - like practically folded herself in half. I could see the tiny little leopard print diamond of her crotch, and see where the fabric went in at the cleft. Oh yeah. Maybe this wasn't so bad after all.

 "Would you be really mad at me if I called you Princess Fuckpants?" I asked.

 She glanced over her shoulder at me and shimmied her butt. "For an extra fifty bucks you can call me Gerald if you want."

 "Gerald? Your name is Gerald?"

 "No. It was an example," she said, turning back round in a silken swish of shiny hair. "Your head's really not in the game, huh?"

 "It's really not," I said. "Can we just talk?"

 She gathered up her boobs and pinched her nipples. "Nope."

 "Are those real?"

 "Nope."

 Her hands traveled slowly down her body once more. She played with the waistband of her tiny thong.

 "Why can't we talk?" I asked.

 "Because I'm a lap dancer. I'm paid to lap dance. Not talk."

 "So stop fucking talking," I said, annoyed. The words were barely out of my mouth before I realized how bad they sounded. "Not that I think of you as a sex object," I said, quickly. Oh God. Now she was giving me a look that could strip paint. "Not that you're not very good at being a sex ob...um...I mean, sexy. Lap dancer. I mean, it's cool. It's very empowering, right?"

 "Nope," she said.

 "It's not?"

 She stopped gyrating for a moment and glared down at me, hands on her hips. "Look, for an extra hundred I will take off this thong and do it bottomless on the pole. It doesn't matter how many times they spray that pole with disinfectant, because I will always be thinking of the hundreds of snatches that slid against that pole before mine, okay? There is nothing empowering about that thought, especially when you have mild to moderate OCD like I do."

 "Right. Sorry." Why did I have to get the touchy dancer? Bog was having a lovely time somewhere under a pair of redheaded twins.

 She started to sway and rock her hips to the music once more.

 "Just so you know," I said. "I don't want you to do that. Bottomless, I mean. Not if you find it degrading."

 "Honey, just stop," she said. "You're giving me douchechills. Who's your friend over there, with the hat?"

 "With the redheads? That's Bog."

 "Bog? Does he ever take the hat off?"

 "Not that we know of. You'd like him - he's a direct line descendant of Genghis Khan."

 'Gerald' took herself off to poach on the twins’ turf, while I took myself to the bar to carry on drinking.

 When I woke up the next morning my pillow felt a lot like pizza, mainly because it was. I picked the worst of the mozzarella out of my hair and drove reluctantly into Westerwick. The only thing keeping me going was the knowledge that Gus had a fridge full of Diet Cokes in the workshop - right now cold caffeine sounded like heaven.

 Cassandra was already there, raising the garage shutters with a clatter fit to wake the dead. "Oh dear," she said, when she saw me wincing at the noise. "Who's living the life of Reilly then?"

 I didn't say anything, mostly because I was worried that if I opened my mouth something other than words would come out. Cassandra looked me up and down, frowned and reached up to my face. Like some kind of gross magician she produced a piece of pepperoni from behind my ear. "So," she said. "Let me guess - in order to celebrate your first fight with my niece you went out and got hammered. Am I right?"

 I nodded. "Breakup," I said, taking a deep breath. "She pretty much...broke up with me."

 "Right," said Cassandra. "That explains why she's gone running off to New York."

 "New York?"

 "Is there an echo in here? Yes. New York."

 "Oh my God," I said. "What am I going to do?"

 Cassandra poked me in the small of the back, pushing me into the workshop. "You want advice?"

 "Do you have any?"

 "Sure," she said. "Same as I gave her. Stop being an asshole."

 Chapter Seven

Lacie

I was lost in a forest of beauty.

 I was like a hobbit in Lothlorien. All around me were impossibly tall, slender creatures with huge eyes, dewy lips and astounding cheekbones. They wore ridiculous runway make-up - splashes of red and purple that made them look as though they'd been punched in the face, insane beaded lashes and crayon brows - but even with the outlandish cosmetics they were still beautiful. The kind of beautiful that hangs off the cheekbones, fine, sweeping cheekbones that delicately cradle the perfect sockets of enormous eyes. The kind of beautiful that makes men stupid.

 I'd never been to a fashion show before, let alone backstage. It was a kind of screaming, gorgeous chaos that made me wonder if the term 'hot mess' had been coined at such an event. The models came flying in and out and as soon as they did the dressers descended on them to tear the clothes off their backs and fasten them into the next outfit. The only time they seemed to stop moving was during these costume changes, when they stood strangely inanimate as the make-up artists and dressers attacked them with hairpins, brushes and powder. Haute couture, Courtney explained, was Art with a capital A, and I could kind of see it in these moments. The model was nothing more than a canvas, a block of marble from which a vision had to be freed.

 Someone crashed into me from behind - a guy with platinum hair arranged in Jean Harlow waves. "I need two bottles of Cristal and an eyelash curler," he said, in the same way an ER doctor might ask for two units of O-neg and a crash cart.

 "I'm sorry..." I began. "I'm not...er..."

 "Then what the hell are you doing here?" he said.

 "Um...I'm a writer?" Fake it ‘til you make it, right?

 "Out," he said, and pushed me through the door.

 Ugh. Great. I stood and stared for a while. I tried to explain to anyone going through the door that I was supposed to be backstage with Courtney, but everyone just blasted past me like the White Rabbit past Alice. Eventually I skulked back into the show, where thin girls in giant hats were pacing back and forth to an earsplitting Lady Gaga remix. The endless camera flashes lit up the darkness of the front row beyond the catwalk - a row of celebrity skeletons clutching 'goodie bags' full of expensive crap that cost more than most Vermonters made in a year.

 When Courtney came out I almost didn't recognize her. She looked like some kind of alien beekeeper, in a giant white plastic hat that curved high above her head to fall to her waist in a net veil. Her lips shone bright red through the veil and the white dress she wore had a kind of translucent top, with big red sticking plaster x's where her nipples should be.

 "Madonna/Whore," someone said, behind me.

 "Obviously. God, they're still trying to recycle the 1990's, aren't they?"

 "Get over it, honey. It already happened."

 "Ugh, I know, I know. I just don't think Courtney Love should be
encouraged
. Who's the model?"

 "No idea. Generic. As. Fuck."

 Anger flared like acid under my breastbone. I hated them. I hated that thing they made Courtney wear. I hated that they treated girls' bodies like meat. I wanted to leave, but I was here for support, to tell her she looked thin and looked beautiful, and that she didn't need to be any thinner. The bodies I saw backstage had shocked me.

 The models tore off their clothes so fast between changes that sometimes they were walking about in nothing but their make-up, and yet there was nothing sexual about their nudity. I couldn't understand how they represented desire - they put the stark in stark naked, breastless, hipless, sexless. Some of them looked so close to starvation that I was reminded uncomfortably of the photos taken when the Allies had liberated Auschwitz - of human beings who stood denuded even of the simple cover of flesh, so that nothing but horror remained.

 When it was over Courtney came out looking so much like herself that it all felt like a strange dream. Her face was scrubbed clean and her hair bundled up in a messy knot at the back of her head. She wore her usual skinny jeans and Converse and if it hadn't been for a stray fleck of gold leaf on the side of her neck I would never have believed she was up there at all. "No new messages," she said, phone in hand. "Great. So much for exposure."

 "You can have some of mine," I said.

 "Shit. Is he still calling you?"

 I nodded. "Court, be honest - do you think I'm a bitch?"

 She blinked at me. Even freshly scoured of mascara, her lashes were so long as to look unreal. "You," she said, slowly. "May be the least bitchy person in a city of so many bitches I can't even count. Did he say that?"

 "No. He didn't. He just...I don't know. He makes me feel like one."

 "Why? What did you do? Shoot his dog and stab his grandmother? Look, if the guy's guilt tripping you that hard over not wanting to see him any more, then all the more reason not to buy into his bullshit. Passive-aggression is the pits; you end up spending fifty years stewing in your own juices and then wind up on the news as a grisly murder/suicide."

 She navigated the crowded sidewalk like she'd been born to it. I was still getting the hang of things. After the first day hoofing it around at a New Yorker's natural pace, my calves had ached as if I'd done ten sessions of step aerobics.

 "It's just that I sometimes feel he has a legitimate grievance," I said. "You know me - I'm not exactly the most open person."

 A cab stalled and kangarooed halfway across the crosswalk, almost knocking us down. The driver stuck his head out the window and yelled something unintelligible. "Go fuck yourself, asshole!" said Courtney.

 "Rude," I said, laughing.

 "What? We had right of way. What's so funny?"

 "This from the girl who used to play whale-song all night." When I first met her, she'd had a dream-catcher hanging over her bed and a collection of rocks from Sedona, Arizona. Because of the vortexes, she'd said.

 "I know," she said. "If the modeling thing doesn't work out I'm going back to California to sell the New York stress relief method to unwary rich hippies. Fifteen sessions of expensive therapy, just to teach them to tell people to go fuck themselves. Where do you want to get dinner?"

 Dinner was a slice of pizza, folded over and washed down with a diet soda, as if the fake sugar somehow cancelled out the calories in the dough and the greasy, stretchy cheese. It was disgusting but irresistible, like the hotdogs that Courtney told me were made entirely of pig lips, assholes and nitrates. "You can't fucking eat those things," she'd said. "Seriously. Never." Except about five seconds later 'never' had turned to 'once' and 'once' turned to 'sometimes' just as soon as we were chowing down on a couple of dogs heaped high with onions and sauerkraut.