Skinny Bitch in Love (24 page)

When we got back to Ty’s with a dress I knew Sara would love—short, shimmery, and blousy and tight at the same time—and a cool, long necklace, Sara was smiling and shaking her hair around. It was still long, but fell in perfect, shiny, shampoo-commercial ringlets.

I made her close her eyes while I got her into the dress and her strappy four-inch sandals and clasped the necklace. We sat her back in the chair by the mirror, but swiveled her around so her transformation would be a surprise. I did her makeup, vamping her up a bit.

Swivel time.

“I. Look. Amazing!” she screamed, staring at herself, then going into Ty’s bedroom to look in the floor-to-ceiling mirror. “Where’d this dress come from?”

“I got it for you. For your birthday. And for kicking ass on the diet.”

“I love it!” she screamed again. “Are those my legs?” she asked, sticking out her gams in the hot four-inch-high platforms. “Where’d my fat calves go?”

“You look gorgeous, Sara,” Ty said, giving her a hug.

“Suck it, Duncan,” she said, making kissy faces at herself in the mirror.

Everyone brought a birthday present to that night’s final class. Including Duncan, who’d surprised me—and Sara—by actually showing.

“Wow,” he said, eyeing Sara up and down. “You look great.”

“I know,” Sara said, beaming. “Clem and her friend Ty glammed me up for my birthday.”

“Well, they did an amazing job,” he said. “I barely recognize you.”

“Meaning I looked like shit before?” she asked.

“Meaning you look great. That’s it. Jesus. Here,” he said, handing her the wrapped rectangle with a red bow on it.

His gift was a biography of Hillary Clinton and a Barnes & Noble bookmark. Sara thanked him, then rolled her eyes and put on the funky earrings Eva had bought her.

“You really do look incredible,” Eva said, spinning Sara around for the up and down assessment. “I can’t believe it’s you.”

“I don’t look
that
different,” Sara said. “Okay, I do. Clem’s makeup skills, Ty’s sister’s hair chops, and a great dress. And twenty pounds gone. But I’m still the same Sara I was last week.”

Duncan said something under his breath.

“What was that?” Sara asked.

“I said I can’t stay—I have, um, plans I can’t change,” Duncan said, smiling awkwardly at me. Then glancing at Sara. “But I wanted to say thanks to Clem for the great class. I learned a lot. And it was great meeting you, Eva. You’re really funny.”

“Yeah, I’m a shitload of laughs,” Eva said, grabbing him into a hug. She was in a very good mood and wearing her wedding ring again, so maybe things had worked out with her husband. She wore a low-cut black dress with thigh-high boots, and her usual bobbed hair had a more stylish edge.

“Can you stay long enough for the
L.A. Times
reporter to come and go?” I asked Duncan. “Since you’re here anyway. Then she won’t think I suck enough that a student dropped out.”

“Wait, what?” Eva said. “Why does the
L.A. Times
care about our class?”

I explained about Zach’s press release and the menus I was working on for the restaurants and my Skinny Bitch Bakes business taking off.

“Wow, Clem,” Duncan said. “Skinny Bitch is going to be famous. We’ll say we knew you when. I’ll definitely stick around—until the reporter leaves,” he added, glancing at Sara.

“Can I bash him over the head with the book he gave me?” Sara whispered as I set two butternut squashes on the counter. “Oh wait, it’s not even a hardcover. Just a cheapo paperback.”

“So what are we making?” Eva asked. “It’d better be something amazing for the
L.A. Times
.”

“It is,” I assured her. And a little bit of a fuck-you to Rain Welch and Emil Jones, too. My Butternut Squash Ravioli in Garlic and Sage Sauce. The very dish that had stolen my five seconds of fame in
L.A. Magazine
when Rain screwed me. And the very dish that I’d now show everyone was the best they’d ever had.

Stephanie Stemmel of the
L.A. Times
looked no older than Jolie Jeffries, but she wore a wedding ring, so I figured she wasn’t a teenager. Then again, Jolie Jeffries would be rocking a wedding ring any time now, so who knew? Stephanie showed up with a very tall cameraman and a hunk of Portuguese bread just as I was showing everyone how to roll out the dough for
the wonton wrappers. She made several raviolis herself, then helped cut up vegetables for the salad.

Stephanie had managed to interview me while we were cooking, so it really just seemed like talking. Eva made her laugh. Duncan had tried to flirt, which led Sara to fling a slice of onion at his back while he was sautéing garlic—and it had stuck there, too.

The camera guy, who told us to ignore him and act like he wasn’t there at all, took photos and shot some footage of the cooking class: chopping, sautéing, blending. I made a point of talking up how I made my garlic sage sauce—I wasn’t going to say a word about the incident that had gotten me fired at Fresh; my sister told me not to, but since the reporter asked, I told her exactly what I thought had happened without naming names. I grabbed my packet of recipes from the mail sorter holder on the counter and showed her the pages for my ravioli. Not a drop of butter. She even had the camera guy take some video of me flipping through the paper-clipped stack as though I was choosing what to have the class make. Then she interviewed me on how I chose the recipes for the vegan menus for the restaurants that were hiring me as a menu consultant.

The ravioli was done, so we plated it, dressed the salad, and sat down to eat.

“This is fantastic,” Stephanie Stemmel said, digging her fork into another ravioli. “Incredible. And I’m no vegan.”

Her camera guy took some photos and video of the reporter having an orgasm over her little plate, which I truly appreciated.

“Hey, Duncan,” Sara said. “I sure hope your ex-girlfriend doesn’t read the
L.A. Times
. She’ll see the pics of us and know you sent us into Ocean 88 to spy out why she dumped you.”

He looked kind of nervous for a second, but then shrugged. “Whatever. It’s not like I have a chance with
her
anyway.”

Sara rolled her eyes.

As the reporter and the camera guy were leaving, Duncan grabbed his messenger bag, wished Sara a happy birthday, and booked out of our apartment, the onion slice still stuck to his back.

I saw Sara’s face fall. No matter what she said about not caring or being over him, she wasn’t. “Forget him,” I told her. “He geeks out over eggplant. He wears bad shirts. And he’s a clichéd jerk who has sex with women and
then
decides he’s not interested. A jerk who smells like onions, too.”

“This,” she said, sweeping her hand up and down her body, “was supposed to be my in to whatever guy I wanted. It just sucks that it doesn’t matter what I look like. It means the problem is
me
.”

“Sara, it’s not you. Duncan’s just not your guy. That’s all it means.”

“He’s too much of a priss for you anyway,” Eva said, pulling out a compact and glossing up her lips. “Wait till you meet my husband—now
that
is a man. A man’s man.”

Sara burst out laughing and got a glare from Eva.

“I can’t
wait,
” Sara whispered to me.

The doorbell rang. Maybe it was the man’s man.

But it was Duncan.

“Um, Sara, can I talk to you for a sec?” he asked.

She raised her eyebrow at me and walked over to the door. I pretended to be busy cleaning up the counter.

“Wow, Sara, you really do look amazing,” he said, his gaze traveling up and down her body. “And I just wanted to say that after the party, if you want to stop by . . . ”

“I doubt the party will wind down till after one,” she said. “Maybe even two.”

“That’s fine. I’ve got plans tonight, but I should be home by one. Come by.”

Ew. This had booty call stamped all over it.

She was smiling at him. Shit. “Duncan, do you know what a Skinny Bitch is?” she asked.

“A vegan, I guess. Why?”

“Actually,” Sara said, “being a Skinny Bitch is about cutting the crap out of your life. So buh-bye.” She closed the door in his face, then turned to a very proud me. “Let’s get this party started!”

The buzzer buzzed a half hour later, and Sara perked up even more. Party time. Zach was away on business in San Francisco—something about meetings; he would have come otherwise. The first to arrive was Alexander with a bowl of salsa and a tray of mini veggie empanadas he’d made. Then Ty and Seamus showed up. Sara’s friend Trish from work and her best friends from high school. An obnoxious couple that Sara had
met last week in hot yoga who kept interrupting everyone to tell their own boring stories. Sara’s sister who lived in Malibu brought her boyfriend. The cute new guy on the floor above us in 3C stopped by with a bottle of wine and flirted with Sara, which made her very happy, but he left after a half hour. Jolie and Rufus came by with a coffee-table book called
Actors Through the Decades
with black-and-white shots of stars from the silent screen to a steamy one of Ryan Gosling. “This is so regifted,” Sara whispered. She got a ton of presents, everything from gift certificates to bracelets and a tiny red iPod from her sister.

Sara and I were hoping Eva’s husband would show up so we could get a glimpse of the man’s man—what a husband of Eva’s would look like, we had no possible clue—but he never did.

Finally, at close to two-thirty in the morning, the apartment cleared out and Sara had crashed. I was totally awake, though, and still had all this energy, so I figured I’d try an avocado paste as a layer for the lasagna. I made some black tea and went to get my packet of recipes from the mail sorter on the kitchen counter. But it wasn’t there. Just a cable bill and two casting-call notices.

Maybe Sara had moved it so it wouldn’t get splattered with the salsa that Alexander had brought. I looked all over the kitchen. Not there. The living room, under the magazines on the coffee table. Under the huge
Actors
coffee-table book. Under couch cushions. Under the couch. Found an old remote control and three bucks, but no recipes.

I looked in my room. Under my pillow. Had I totally forgotten putting the recipes away somewhere? Yeah, I’d had a couple of glasses of wine, but I wasn’t blitzed or anything.

I tore the place apart and finally, by the front door, I noticed the big green-and-white-striped paper clip that I’d used to keep the pages together.

As though someone had taken the too-thick packet and the paper clip had popped off as they were leaving.

Okay, did someone take my recipes? What the fuck for?

I opened the door into the dimly lit hallway. Just to the left of the stairwell was a piece of paper lying faceup. I went over to get it. My scratched-over recipe for Hungarian Mushroom Soup.

Okay. This made zero sense. Someone stole my recipes. Seriously?

As I stood there in the middle of the hallway trying to figure out what could have happened, a drunken couple started coming up the stairs, so I went back inside my apartment.

All that work—gone. And I had my first demonstration for Stark 22 in three days.