The Awesome Girl's Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men (41 page)

And I answered, “I would fucking do anything for you, Tammy.”

Lisa was staring back at me in the mirror still. She wasn’t purposefully withholding Risa and, to her credit, she looked rather helpless behind that determined brown gaze.

“Will you really always love me?” Tammy asked the first time I told her that, the first time the two of us hooked up after the big breakup. “Even if I never come out?”

We were floating in the afterglow of makeup sex, and I said, “Yeah, okay, why not?”

Tammy giggled. And I thought for the first time that if I could just make my post–Sweet Janes career work out, then Tammy would come back to me forever.

But like Thursday had said, it had never really been about the fame for Tammy. Now she had terminal cancer, and if I pulled off tonight’s performance then I would be getting a second album deal, but I wouldn’t have Tammy, and it was all just so very fucked up.

I hated Tammy, I really did.

I squeezed my eyes shut. Tammy ruined everything. The last ten years of my life, my self-esteem, my music career, which, let’s face it, probably would have gone a little better if I had written about how much Tammy tore me up inside instead of not wanting to offend her in case she ever decided to take me back. Thursday had been totally right about her. Like that Ladytron song, that girl destroyed everything she touched.

And now she was destroying my career. Because after all those good-times flashbacks, another image burned itself into my brain: Tammy lying on the floor of her apartment. Dead and alone, because Thursday was right—Tammy would never stand up for me or anybody else … especially not herself.

And Tammy was also right—I had promised. And I might have been obnoxious like everybody said and I might have cussed too much and, okay,
I might have had an eating disorder. Whatever. But nobody had ever accused me of not keeping my promises.

I grabbed my short vintage rabbit-hair jacket and threw it on over my outfit, which I wouldn’t be wearing on stage that night.

“Are we going to the venue now?” The Lead Singer’s Girlfriend asked, closing the magazine.

“No, I’m going back to L.A.” When I said this, I looked at her in a way I’d never looked at her before: gently. And she freaked out.

“I thought you loved …” She didn’t finish, but her mouth set in a bitter line.

“Marry him,” I told her. “He’s good for you and he loves you. Also, he’s so scared that you’re going to leave him he probably won’t make you sign a pre-nup so, you know, win-win.”

I ignored her offended denials as I grabbed my wallet and headed for the door.

She broke off from accusing me of using her to ask, “How about your suitcase?”

I didn’t answer. I’d already given her a good set of last words, and I wouldn’t need most of those clothes anymore. They were my stage clothes and I definitely wouldn’t be performing for a while after everyone found out I skipped out on the concert, and the rest of the tour.

They might even sue me, but fuck it.

The One had cancer. Seriously, what else could I do but go to her?

At the end of the day, love is a decision—the most important one you’ll ever make.

—
The Awesome Girl’s Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men
by Davie Farrell

RISA

M
y iPhone didn’t have my full music collection or else I would have played that Roy Orbison song “I Drove All Night” on a loop during the four-hour drive in a rental car back to Los Angeles. Instead, I settled for Michael Jackson’s greatest hits.

It was Saturday night, and the roads weren’t too crowded. More people headed to Vegas than away from it. I sang along with Michael until my voice went hoarse and I was forced to listen to him, just listen to him asking how it felt to be all alone, like a stranger in Moscow.

Oh, Michael. I got angry at him, because if I’d had even an ounce of his natural talent, I would have lived forever, never dying, happy in my coal-black skin.

This thing with Tammy wasn’t going to be anything less than awful. I could already tell.

I arrived at Tammy’s condo a little after four a.m. As I got out of the car, I glanced at the clock and realized that it was April Fool’s Day.

Ha.

No answer when I buzzed up on the box. I’d like to believe that this was because Tammy’s family had come to get her, that she was lounging in some luxury hospice somewhere, blissed out on painkillers. But just in case …

I unlocked the lobby door with my extra key, which I kept right on my main key ring like Tammy and I were still in a relationship. As I made my way up to her apartment, I imagined her with her family, pretending to be straight until her last dying breath. She had been right about one thing: she wasn’t exactly what anybody would call brave.

I knocked on her door. Once, twice, before letting myself in with my other extra key. The entire apartment was dark. No television light,
nothing. Her family must have come to get her. And I would have left it at that, except it smelled horrible. Like lingering body odor, and food gone bad, and the staleness of not-having-been-open-to-the-outside-in-quite-a-while horrible.

I turned on the light and walked in for a look around.

Everything was a mess. There were Styrofoam delivery containers and empty junk-food packages everywhere. There was spaghetti sauce on the carpet leading to the living room, and a stack of pizza boxes near the couch. And as big as her family was on appearances, I’d figure that hiring a cleaning service would be the first thing they’d do after collecting Tammy.

I went to check the bedroom, which was also dark. But when I flipped on the light, I found the room surprisingly clean. The bed was neat and made. Except for a layer of dust, it looked like a Design Within Reach catalog layout. Odd.

“Is anybody here?” I called out to the empty room, already kicking myself for cutting out on my tour for a promise I hadn’t really needed to keep.

Nobody answered.

I was about to turn off the light and go when I heard a scratching sound and a voice said, “Risa? Is that you?”

The voice was muffled and thin with sickness, but I could still tell who it was. I turned around just in time to see Tammy emerging from the closet. I loved irony, and my first instinct was to make a joke about her coming out of the closet. But then I saw her. Really saw her.

All of her beauty was gone, as was all of her softness. Her cheeks and her eyes were both sunken in and her ears looked big, almost to the point of drooping off her thin face. Her full breasts, which I’d worshipped every time we’d hooked up, hung saggy and much withered underneath her T-shirt. She was not wearing socks, and her missing toe screamed its absence.

The only thing that remained the same were her eyes, which were liquid with happiness.

“You came,” she said; croaked, really.

“The front room is a mess. What happened to your nurse?” I asked her.

“I let her go,” Tammy waved a dismissive hand in the air. “I was sick of having her around, looking at me.”

“Tammy,” I said, my voice monotone with horror. “How have you been getting to your doctor’s appointments?”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m okay. I don’t need to go to the doctor anymore. I’ve got medicine for the pain. So I really don’t need anybody here. Just you.”

“You didn’t call your family,” I said, so mad at her.

“They think I’m in the Maldives,” Tammy said, rolling her eyes like her family members were just some silly rabbits and not people who were owed the truth. “I thought you were Veronica. She got suspicious the other day and came to check up on me. Luckily I heard her key in the door and got to the closet in time.”

“She didn’t think the messy living room was suspicious?”

Tammy chuckled. “See, you two never liked each other, but you totally think the same. She texted me about it immediately, and I told her I had a house sitter who was apparently taking advantage. That’s why I thought you were her. She was acting like she might come back over here and kick my house sitter out herself if she could ever find him.”

Seriously, I didn’t know how I had ever come to be in love with someone this stupid.

“I just need to …” Tammy sat down to rest on the side of the bed, wheezing. “Too much exertion,” she gasped, waving a skeletal hand to indicate that she was fine.

“I’m going to go clean up the living room,” I said.

“Thank you for coming back.” She looked up from her wheezing, skinny and pale and shiny-eyed. “It really does mean a lot to me.”

I shook my head. As soon as I finished the fucking hazmat-level job that would be cleaning up her condo, I planned to do what I’d been refusing to do for almost a decade now—tell on Tammy.

THURSDAY

I
picked up Risa’s call while walking toward the baggage claim area in the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, having just gotten off the red-eye from Los Angeles. “Hey what’s up? Guess where I’m at.”

“New Orleans,” Risa said.

My mouth dropped open. “How did you know?”

“Because you’re just pretending not to be in love with Mike Barker at this point,” Risa answered, sounding bored. “Is he with you?”

“No, but he’s meeting me at the gate. And by the way, I’m not pretending—”

“Sure, okay, whatever. Can you ask him for Davie Farrell’s number?”

“Why? Do you need a career consultation, because her waiting list is, like, a mile long. She only fit me in as a favor to Mike. Wait, aren’t you on tour? Why do you need a career consultation?”

“Actually, I kind of quit the tour. I’m back in L.A.”

I shook my head. “Why would you quit your tour?” Then I answered my own question: “Oh no, you’re back in Los Angeles for her, aren’t you?”

“I tried to do it your way, Day, but … she has cancer.”

“She used you. She let you dangle for years. Not weeks, not months, but years.” An ache started up in my neck from having flown on a plane all night straight into this conversation. “And she doesn’t care about anybody but herself. And let me just say, if you were in the same position, I don’t think she would do the same thing for you.”

“Day, I know she wouldn’t, but do you get that she has terminal cancer? She’s only thirty-three years old and she has terminal cancer. That’s a big fucking deal.”

My mother had been forty-three, only ten years older when she died. And yes, Tammy was dying, but Risa was being pathetic by going back to her after how Tammy treated her.

Then Risa said, “Anyway, she still hasn’t told her family, so I’ve got to call them and tell them what’s going on myself.”

“Oh,” I said, saddened that Tammy still hadn’t told her family about her cancer. “I’ll have Mike call you back with the number as soon as we’re in the car.”

“Thanks,” Risa said. She sounded tired. Then she hung up.

I walked a little faster to get to the gate, even more excited to see Mike, who might be a recovering gambling addict and overly dramatic, but at the very least, acknowledged we were together, unlike Tammy, and now I’d come to find out, Sharita.

“What! Sharita’s dating your ex-roommate’s ex-boyfriend now?” he’d said the night before on the phone, when I told him about Sharita and Benny.

Unlike Caleb, Mike loved gossip. Oh, at first he had claimed that he hated it along with the paparazzi, like he was above such things, but whenever I mentioned something I had read in
Celeb Weekly
or on a gossip site, he was all ears, and then he would dissect it from an insider perspective. And he especially liked regular-people gossip.

“Crazy, right?” I answered.

“I thought she was Ms. Black Love,” he said. Sharita’s love life had been a topic of conversation between us several times before.

“So did I, but he had his arm around her like ‘this be my woman.’ I was all, like, ‘Whaaaat???’ It was crazy. Then Sharita was all, like, ‘We’ve gotta go! We’ve gotta go!’ Like rushing out of there would make me tease her any less.”

“She must not have known who she was dealing with,” Mike said.

“I know, right!”

Thinking back on that conversation as I came down the escalator made me smile … that was until I saw not Mike but Mrs. Murphy standing outside the baggage claim area.