Hot Mess (8 page)

“Heavy!” the laundry lady shrieked. “You come back tonight!” I nodded dutifully. I tried to ask her how much it would be, but she just pointed to the giant scale behind the counter and shrugged. What the hell was she talking about? Did they weigh my laundry? Whatever. How much could a suitcase worth of clothes possibly cost to wash?

I had intended to head up to Macy’s in Herald Square, but apparently ended up on an express train straight to the corner of Lost Avenue and Disoriented Lane.

I heard the subway conductor announce, “Next stop: Seventh Avenue.” Seventh Avenue? I was supposed to be going to Thirty-fourth
Street
. “Avenue” didn’t sound right to me. I rushed over to the map and tried to finger-trace my path, but I was so flustered that I couldn’t even find Union Square.

I turned to the fem man or manly woman—I couldn’t really tell—sitting near the map. “Um…hi. How far is Seventh Avenue from Herald Square?” I tried not to sound too much like a frightened tourist, but that’s exactly what I was.

S/he wrinkled her pierced nose. “Pretty far. First you’d have to get the train back to Manhattan and—”

“Wait.” I stopped her/him. “
Back
to Manhattan? Where are we?”

“Park Slope.”

I could feel a panicky fever spreading across my face, but it must have translated as blank confusion.

“Brooklyn,” s/he said.

I suppressed a horrified gasp and I tried to pretend that I had fully intended on ending up in another borough.

“Oh yeah, Brooklyn,” I said, waving casually with one hand while my other frantically pawed around my purse for my subway map, where I had highlighted the Union Square stop. “I’m totally here all the time. I just, you know, never hear people call it Park Slope anymore. My friends always say ‘The PS’ and stuff.”

S/he gave me a weird look and went back to her/his iPod.

I fumbled with my map as inconspicuously as I could, but couldn’t really figure out where I was. I leave the apartment one time in a week and end up in some park on the other end of the world that sounds like it’s full of hills. I totally wouldn’t have worn my platform flip-flops had I known today’s adventure would involve a nature hike.

By now half the train had taken notice of the ridiculous lost girl, freaking out and sweating at the thought of leaving Manhattan. I swear even the homeless guy singing “Amazing Grace” for nickels was ridiculing me with his eyes. I should have probably stayed on and tried to find a stop that linked to a train that would take me back to Manhattan. But the thought of going any deeper into Brooklyn was terrifying. What if I ended up in Queens or something?

As soon as the subway doors opened at the next stop, I bolted, with no clue how I was going to get back to Manhattan. I followed the crowd as it ebbed toward the exit—I didn’t see any signs for connecting trains and I was too embarrassed to ask anyone else for directions. Besides, everyone seemed to have a mullet and who would trust anyone with a carni-trash haircut? I took a deep breath and tried to pull myself together. I remembered reading in an article in
Cosmo
that Keira Knightley loved to go shopping in Brooklyn. So okay, I was lost, but maybe I could pick up some sweet outfits anyway? As Rachel always says, if life gives you lemons…stick them down your shirt and make your boobs look bigger! Too bad I might never make it back to Manhattan to show them off. “Them” meaning the clothes—I didn’t think I was going to find boobs in Brooklyn.

I emerged from the wet heat of the subway to the even wetter heat of the street, and Park Slope didn’t look much like a fashionista’s paradise. There was a faint smell of garbage wafting through the air, and I think there was some gang warfare going on across the street. Well, fine, it was teenaged boys in droopy pants hanging out on a sunny tree-lined block. But still, this was the closest thing to gang fighting I’d seen since the drama club put on
West Side Story
last fall.

I stood on the corner, trying to not make eye contact with strangers, studying my map. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw an old woman with a walker slowly making her way across the street and decided to ask her for directions. “Um, excuse me?” I said meekly. “Where is there good shopping?”

“What are you looking for, dear?” She stopped walking and turned her wrinkly face toward me.

“Uh, like, floaty tunics or something like that,” I stammered.

“What? Tuna? Oh there’s tuna over there at the Associated Supermarket.” She gestured down the street and then started creeping away in her walker. “Canned or fresh. Whatever you want,” she said as she passed me.

I thanked her quickly and scurried onward. I was frustrated, hot, thirsty, and embarrassed. Tears welled up in my eyes. Why did everything in this city have to be so damn hard? I couldn’t even find a stupid department store without ending up on the dark side of the world, turning to a human prune for help. I took off down the street, no idea where I was headed. The smart thing to do would’ve been to go inside a bodega, get a Diet Coke, center myself, then head back to a subway and ask someone how to get back home. But instead I wandered around sketchy Brooklyn for forty-five minutes, getting hooted at by guys on bikes, trying not to picture the headline “Suburban Teen Dies at Hands of Marauding Bicycle Gang.” I finally, finally came across a sort-of-cool vintage store and vowed to buy something to justify my totally failed retail-therapy adventure. Vintage stuff was never really my style, but I felt pretty good about my purchase of gray slouchy boots and a very J.Lo floppy hat.

My flip-flops had given me blisters, so I changed into the boots and threw the flops-o-pain in my bag. I put on my new hat, too, to complete my vintage-fab look. As I walked toward the subway—or at least what I was pretty sure was the subway—I checked myself out in store windows. Jayla and Rachel would probably freak when they saw my new makeover. They might even mistake me for a brunette Sienna Miller. Okay, maybe not. But still, I knew they’d totally be proud.

I sashayed down the streets of Brooklyn totally feeling like an old-school J.Lo video when I realized that the heel on one of my new boots was a little shaky. Eh, that’s the beauty of vintage, right? But my hat still looked hot billowing in the wind.

I was pretty sure that I was retracing my steps back to the subway and things were starting to look more familiar, but then again, every bodega pretty much looks the same, so who knows? I could have been halfway to Coney Island. Just as I started to get the feeling that I should probably ask someone for directions, I heard, “Arrrggghhh!” from a guy hollering across the street and decided that relying on the kindness—or even sanity—of strangers was probably not the best idea. He continued his crazy rant with “Thar she blows, matey!”

What a perv. Who shouts to young girls about
blowing
? As I craned my neck to throw the guy a dirty look, my ankle twisted and I wobbled back and forth, teetering on the brink of eating the sidewalk. I won the tug-of-war with gravity and managed to stay upright, but when I looked down, I saw my heel lying pathetically on the sidewalk. As in, it was no longer connected to the bottom of my shoe.

Effing great. The thought of subjecting my already raw feet to more time in my torturous J. Crew flops was worse than limping around on a broken heel. So I kept the boots on and walked mostly on my toes, hoping no one would notice. I only had to hobble a block more before seeing an entrance to a subway, thank God. If I didn’t think that I’d catch the herp, I would have kissed the grimy subway floor.

I swiped through the turnstile and just as I was stepping onto the Manhattan-bound platform, a train whisked into the station. I hustled in and sank into my seat, eager to get back to the safe TiVo-dom of my summer apartment.

“I wonder if she’s got a peg leg, too!” a kid sitting across from me sniggered. I whipped around to see if they were talking about a homeless person smelly enough to require a car change, but everyone on the subway seemed home-f and deodorized.

Two wrong subways and three connections later, I was finally hobbling back to my apartment. As I made my way down Fourteenth Street, I remembered my laundry and stopped to pick it up. My feet were raw and my calves were burning from walking on my toes like an idiot for the past hour and a half. I dug around in my purse for my laundry receipt.

“Oh hell,” I sighed with exasperation. “I’m sorry but I don’t think I have my ticket.”

“No ticket, no clothes!” said the old laundry lady firmly.

“But I see my stuff. It’s right there!” I pointed to a cube of what I guessed were folded clothes with
FREEMAN
emblazoned across the attached pink receipt slip. “See? Freeman, Emma Freeman.”

The laundry woman narrowed her eyes suspiciously.

“You have blood on pairs of underwear, yes?” she said much louder than necessary.

My face turned scarlet. Yeah, I’d had my period for about five years now, but for some reason, I still couldn’t accurately predict when it was going to arrive. Crucify me!

“Yes!” I hissed, leaning in close and hoping the family folding their clothes didn’t speak English. “It’s mine, okay? The bloody undies are mine. Are you satisfied?”

She smiled somewhat smugly and slowly ambled over to the garbage bag full of my clothes. I pulled out my wallet, ready to pay my fifteen dollars or whatever, get the hell out of there, and just mellow out on the couch for a while. A new episode of
Sunset Tan
was starting in seven minutes and some quality time with the Olly Girls sounded like the perfect remedy for such a fiasco of a day.

“Forty-five dollar,” said the old laundry lady.

“Huh? For what?” I looked incredulously at my bag of neatly folded clothes and wondered if they charged by the button or something.

“You drop off twenty pound laundry. Two dollar a pound! Plus folding, separate, softener.”

Was anything simple in the town? Or cheap? I only had about twenty dollars in cash, and there wasn’t an ATM in the Laundromat. I thought of my blistered feet, of the Olly Girls, and of my dad’s “emergency” credit card sitting comfortably in my wallet. I scowled and plunked down the parental credit card, mentally noting to tell Dad about this and pay him back as soon as I got home in August.

As I lumbered back home with twenty pounds of clean clothes over my shoulder, I kept thinking about my expenses. How was an unpaid intern supposed to survive in this city? No, not just survive—
be fabulous
? How was I going to be fabulous in this city when I couldn’t even afford clean clothes?

I was trying to calculate some sort of self-budget for the summer, but the thing about being unpaid was that you got paid nothing. And nothing divided by food and a new wardrobe and any partying I got around to doing was still nothing! I let myself into the apartment, scowling at how un-fab my finance situation was.

“Emma!” Jayla laughed as I walked in, sweaty and laundry-heaving in all my hat-and-boots glory. “Is that your booty, matey?”

“What?” I was honestly too sweaty and tired to care about how my butt looked.

“Yeah,” Rachel chimed in, peeking out from her room. “Arrrrggghhh ya free Saturday night?”

What was going on Saturday? Considering my entire social circle in the metro area was sitting in that room, of course I was free. I really hoped that she wasn’t expecting me to double with her and guys she met on MeetAFutureSexOffender.com. Then it dawned on me—the “Thar she blows, matey,” the peg leg, the booty—I looked like a pirate, not Sienna Miller.

“You guys!” I stomped my heel-less foot. “I got these in Brooklyn! They’re vintage! It’s boho chic, not pirate!”

“Domino, Domino, Domino,” Jayla sighed condescendingly, as if I was too idiotic to grasp the intricacies of dressing myself. “Boho is more like
no go
. There’s a reason you can only find that shit at flea markets and not at real stores.”

I started to say that it wasn’t a flea market but didn’t want to subject myself to any more ridicule. I barged past Rachel into her room and flopped on her bed. Her computer was, of course, open to JDate, with some sexy Semitic single’s page up. I was pretty much at my breaking point, and if Rachel left me alone again tonight, I might snap in a big way.

“Enough, Rachel. You can’t go on a date tonight. Tomorrow’s both of our first days at work. You’re not going to be able to nap at work, you know. And seriously, what happened to the great Rachel and Emma New York adventure? If I’d known you were going to just come here and prowl for guys all summer like some desperate ho, I’d have just let you go to camp and come here by myself.”

I knew as soon as the words hit the air that I’d crossed the line.

She rushed over to her bed and slammed shut her laptop, leaving Seth/Sam/Shlomo hanging. “Oh, really? That’s a really interesting version of how things went down. Because as I remember it, you were snotting and bawling and having a nervous breakdown over Brian McHerpes and practically begging me to come to the city with you. And also”—she paused for effect and I cowered slightly, knowing I was really going to get it—“I haven’t even kissed anyone here. You’re my best friend and I don’t need you of all people telling me I’m a ho.”

She was so right. This was about my total lack of social interaction combined with a rotten afternoon in the depths of Brooklyn, not about her.

“You’re right,” I peeped. “I’m sorry. I’m just kind of overwhelmed with being here and underwhelmed with how little I have to do, you know? And I miss hanging out with you.”

I could see her anger deflating. She sat next to me on her bed.

“No, I know. And I mean, I haven’t really been that considerate with all this JDate stuff. I know you just broke up and me dating like crazy probably isn’t helping you get over him.”

I sighed, not wanting to admit that she was right. A moment of silence passed between us and suddenly she brightened.

“Okay, enough of this
Dr. Phil
special. Let’s get some really professional-yet-cute day planners for our first day and then maybe a little sush to the bouche. Sound like a plan?”

Vague longing flashed across her face as her eyes darted briefly to her laptop, and I knew she’d rather be chatting it up online but, bless her heart, she was humoring me. Finally.