The Awesome Girl's Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men (39 page)

Accept it. Those two words were ones that I had never considered before. Suddenly all the other paths I had been considering fell away, leaving only the original writing one. The one filled with money problems and living off boyfriends and borrowing money from Sharita and feeling like I would never be good enough to actually get paid for what I wanted to do with my life. A dark forest of a path filled with all sorts of monsters hiding in the trees and behind bushes.

Accept it.

Twenty minutes later, I emerged from the office.

“How did it go?” Mike asked me when I came back into the kitchen. He was at the table, reading the script for his next big-budget studio movie, which would start filming in two days. Frederic had left—probably in a huff—and the four pieces of cake were also gone, their empty containers the only evidence that they had ever been there in the first place.

I walked over to him and took his face in my hands. “I know you liked the cake, but, seriously, you’re the one who gave me the best Valentine’s Day gift ever.
Ever.
” I kissed him. “Thank you.”

“Wow, what did she say?” he asked.

I shook my head and pulled him out of his seat. “Too hard to explain, and I still haven’t given you the second half of your Valentine’s Day gift.”

“There’s a second half?” Mike’s eyes lit up and went to the refrigerator. “Is it ice cream?”

“No, it’s dry cleaning.”

“Dry cleaning,” Mike repeated, confused and perhaps a little bit suspicious.

But a few minutes later his confused look was replaced with one of boyish delight, when I opened the door to his bedroom to reveal a uniform, complete with a white button-up shirt and a plaid skirt.

“I think it’s time for you to finally bang your private schoolgirl.”

“Is this authentic?” he asked.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Choate didn’t actually have schoolgirl uniforms and that I’d had to scour the Internet for one that wasn’t obviously a Halloween costume designed to make grown women look like sexy schoolgirls.

Instead I started stripping out of the maxi dress that I’d worn down to breakfast. “You’re going to have to dry hump me first, then if my parents don’t catch us, maybe I’ll let you put your thingy in me.”

Mike stared at me for a long, serious minute. Then he said, “Girl, you out your damn mind. This is obviously the best Valentine’s Day gift anybody’s ever given anybody.” He rubbed his hands together. “And you’re the best girlfriend ever. Believe that.”

I laughed and forced myself to stay in the moment, refusing to dwell on the fact that he had stepped us up to girlfriend-boyfriend without a formal conversation, and trying to ignore the sounds of a far-off engine revving, of a car crashing through a divider, of the anticipatory quiet before the inevitable drop.

Two days later, Mike left to begin shooting his next movie, a caper film about two security guards at the Fort Worth Mint “who decide to try to rob the hardest building to rob in the world—unless you’re on the inside.” It was set in Fort Worth, Texas, but it was being filmed in New Orleans, a place with decidedly nice tax breaks for film productions.

Caleb had left once or twice to meet with directors on remote film shoots and I had missed him a little bit, but this wasn’t anything like that. While Caleb had called from the road every day that he was out of town, that wasn’t enough for Mike.

He brought his usual dramatics to the being-apart situation. The first day he was gone, the doorbell rang and it was a deliveryman with a large vase filled with flowers from Mike. The note attached said, “Miss you.” It was a very nice gesture and gave me a warm fuzzy. But then the next day, another vase of flowers came with a note that said, “Miss you,” and the day after that another vase with another note that simply said, “Miss you.”

“Are you serious?” I asked Mike on the third day. “You’re not going to send me flowers every day you’re gone.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because it’s a huge waste of money, it creates more work for your cleaning lady, and you really don’t have to.”

“You say I don’t have to, but I’m thinking you might start missing me, too, one of these days. And when that happens, I want you to know that I miss you back.”

See, the thing was that I had decided not to miss Mike. I was going to use the time apart to get at least three spec scripts in good working order and then I was going to start looking for an agent or at least a writing assistant job.

But that’s not quite how things went. The spec scripts were coming along, but the not-missing-Mike was going terribly. At first the flowers had been cute, but then they transformed from nice gestures to constant reminders that though I lived in Mike’s house and slept in Mike’s bed, Mike himself was not actually there with me. By March, it hurt to look at the vases of flowers spread out on every available surface in the foyer and living room, so I stopped answering the door and let Mike’s housekeeper, Griselde, decide what to do with them.

“Why aren’t you signing for the flowers anymore?” Mike asked me toward the end of March.

“How did you know I wasn’t signing for them?” I asked.

“Because the last two had something kinda cool attached, and you would have brought it up by now if you’d seen them.”

“Hmm,” I said, thinking that I was really going to have to learn some Spanish one of these days. That morning, Griselde, who didn’t speak English very well, had tried to tell me something about the flowers. Assuming that she was asking to take some of them home or something, I nodded and smiled in the vacant way of all Californians who were too lazy to learn Spanish or even try to comprehend a domestic worker’s Spanglish.

But going back over our one-sided conversation, I remembered Griselde saying something about a table. But which one?

It wasn’t the end table in the foyer or the kitchen table.

“Try the one in the den,” Mike said, laughing. He chanted, “Treasure hunt! Treasure hunt! Treasure hunt!”

“You could tell me what it said, you know,” I answered, heading toward the den.

“Nah, I’m having too much fun doing it this way.”

Sure enough, in the den there was a table with what had to be at least twenty small white envelopes on it. “They’re here, but they’re not in order. Can you just tell me?”

“C’mon, baby, that’s not how I work. Sorry, I know it’s hard for you writers to have to go off script,” Mike said.

“My question has always been, why go off script? Can’t you just read the lines as written, as slaved over by some poor writer … ?” I trailed off when I opened the eighth note card, which read, “Good news, the movie’s been green-lit. Miss you.”

“Wait, what movie? Our movie? Not our movie, right?”

“I like that you’re calling it our movie, now. And yeah, our movie. What other movie would you care about being green-lit?”

“Well, I’ve always wanted to see an Ida B. Wells biopic make it to the big screen.”

“So I’m assuming you’re not excited about this.”

I, for once, thought before I answered. “I’m excited for you?” I said, unable to come up with more.

“Your screenplay’s going to be a movie,” he said. “Be excited for yourself, too. Be excited for us.”

An image of Mike at a craps table rolling a set of dice across my Rick T script popped into my head. He had gambled and won. I wondered how he would feel about “us” when we got to the boring part, when there wasn’t a script to produce, after he finished playing the part of my father and the cutesy glamour of dating his daughter wore off.

“Didn’t you say there were two big notes?” I asked, changing the subject. Five note cards later and I found one that said, “Miss you. SW1729”

I squinted at the card. “I’m not quite sure what I’m looking at here.”

“That’s the flight number for your plane from Los Angeles to New Orleans. It’s leaving in two days. And it’s one-way.”

I didn’t realize how much I had been missing him, until a smile near about split my face from ear to ear. “I can’t wait,” I told him. “I miss you so much.”

My mother, I recalled after getting off the phone, also used to miss my father when he was on the road. They’d call each other every day. I could still remember all the postcards he sent from his concert stops. My mother stuck them to the refrigerator with magnets until the appliance became quilted with pictures of sunsets, famous landmarks, and cityscapes, until summer finally came back around and we were all able to travel with Rick T again.

When I had first started attending Choate, which was also a boarding school, I had wondered if my mother would pay the extra fee to have us stay on campus after Janine started her freshman year, so she could see my father more often. But then Brenda had come along, and according to my father, having family with him while he worked had become too distracting. They had argued about it, and my mother, who had transformed herself into a vegetarian pacifist, betrayed her ghetto roots, yelling with a finger raised in the air about how it had never been a problem before. “What’s changed, Richard, huh? What’s fucking changed? Or should I be asking who you fucking that’s changed you?”

“I’m not. Don’t accuse me of that,” he’d say, sounding impatient and weary. Like my mother was pulling conspiracy theories out of thin air. “I’m older now, more professional. Most men don’t bring their family to work. Keep your voice down. The girls will hear you.”

They’d go on, my mom loud and brash, not the mom we knew at all, my father quiet and reserved, not the Rick T his fans knew.

In the end, Rick T got his way and started touring without us in the summers. I remained a day student at Choate, even after Janine joined me there. Rick T stopped sending my mother postcards from the road. And eventually my mother drove herself off a cliff.

I pushed away the image of that refrigerator full of postcards that all said, “I miss you.” I reminded myself that Mike and I were just having fun. He might have called me his girlfriend on Valentine’s Day, but we weren’t getting married, and I wouldn’t end up like my mom. There was absolutely no reason for the mild panic that popped off inside my stomach whenever I tried to focus on our long-term picture.

Two days wasn’t a lot of time to prepare for a month-long trip, but I got all of my stuff together and even managed to fit in a trip to Target to stock up on a few toiletries that I’d need in New Orleans.

And lo and behold, who did I see as I was coming out of the checkout line but my old roommate, Benny. Seriously, I seemed to run into everybody at Target.

He was standing at the end of the checkout line, talking in Scottish to someone I couldn’t see because the candy stand was blocking my line of vision. His tone of voice was moderate, but his eyes were laughing and, quite frankly, I had never seen my grumpy roommate in such a good mood. Was it a new girlfriend he was talking to? If so, I had to get a look at the woman who had transformed Benny from a grouchy troll and into a happy brownie.

Hoping that the girl spoke Scottish and could translate for me, I waved and called out, “Hey, Benny! What’s going on?”

He waved back and said something completely unintelligible. It occurred to me that I’d also like to get his side of the story about the Abigail-Caleb reveal. Had he known they were having an affair of the heart? Did he even know they were together now? It didn’t hurt so much to think about Abigail and Caleb now that I was writing every day and had my weird setup with Mike to distract me, and apparently Benny had gotten over his ex, too. Walking up to him felt like approaching someone I’d known in another universe, many lifetimes ago.

Which is why when I got closer and found a sheepish Sharita standing next to him, it took me a moment to put two and two together.

SHARITA

I
hadn’t exactly planned to keep Ennis from my friends. I’d just been waiting to see where things were going with him before I made any big announcements. But then weeks started streaking by and I kept on not saying anything. And it sort of felt true when Thursday had asked me a few days ago if I had met anybody new and I had said no, there was no one new. After all, Ennis wasn’t new; we had been dating for three months now.

However, I began to see how bad this looked when my best friend ran us down at Target and didn’t have a clue who Ennis was—outside of being her old roommate.

“What are you doing here? This isn’t your Target,” Thursday said to me.

“Um, we were just about to see a movie. So we came to get some candy beforehand,” I said. I then proceeded to use all of my mental powers to telegraph to Thursday. “Shut up! Shut up! Don’t let on that you didn’t know we were dating.”

My telepathic powers were apparently not that great, because Thursday said, “Oh. My. God. You and Benny are together? Are we, like, in the
Twilight Zone
or something? I’m seriously looking around for some kind of blinking portal or fuzzy lines to let me know that we’ve entered a different dimension. I thought you were Ms. Black Love to the day you die.”

I found myself once again wishing that on my first day at Smith’s orientation program for new students of color, I had decided to align myself with a regular black girl who had been raised by regular black parents as opposed to someone who had been raised with so much self-esteem that she thought everything that popped into her head deserved to be spoken out loud.