Hot Mess (21 page)

He sighed heavily and rested his head against my shoulder. “I think you might be the Antichrist, Emma Freeman.” He chuckled and shifted again in his seat. I had to get out of there or I was going to freak right out.

“Ooh, ha-ha! That’s me. Harbinger of evil.”

I gave him a quick peck and slid my cheek against his. He shuddered at my touch—which I loved. As we walked slowly out of the theater, his arm around my shoulder, I caught an old couple smiling at us as they sat in the back row, waiting for the crowd to clear out. The lady grinned at me as her husband patted her hand. I saw her mouth, “What a cute couple!” And the man nodded. I smiled back and looked up at Colin, who was saying something about having melted Raisinettes on his shoe. He was so adorable. I guess we did look like a real couple. A real grown-up, happy couple. My stomach sank suddenly. We looked like a couple—not like a nice, wonderful guy and a horrible, lying, vile teenager conning him into moderately priced lunches and midafternoon movies.

“So did you like the movie?” Colin asked as we stepped into the damp heat of the late afternoon.

“Oh yeah, those opening credits? Brilliant. And the music when the closing credits rolled? Also amazing.”

He laughed and I heard my text message alert go off.

“Ooh, one sec.” I fished into my bag as Colin joked about one of my many suitors blowing my phone up. And when I saw who was texting, my heart stopped. It was a text from Brian. Well, it came up as a text from “Do Not Answer This,” which is what I’d changed Brian’s name to in my cell.

Hows NY?

Blood rushed to my head and I snapped my phone shut before Colin could see it. Brian! WTF did he want? We hadn’t spoken since we broke up and
now
he’s texting me? This probably meant Skylar Dichter had dumped him. I glanced up at Colin, looking so perfect in his sunglasses and started crafting vicious Brian replies in my head.

Superfun! I’m dating someone hot and new and not you.

Who is this? I don’t have ur # in my phone anymore, jerkhead.

Great. Hows life with you, Mr. Dichter?

“Just my friend wanting to move our dinner date up,” I said to Colin, forcing myself to forget the Brian text and promising myself to just ignore it.

“Are you really married or something? Or are you just that popular?” He smiled and backed away a bit to step into the street and hail me a cab. With his muscled arm stretched out and his perfect posterior, he looked so yummy. He could have been a model.

“A little bit of both,” I said coyly, and pulled his face in for a big long goodbye kiss. “See you soon.” And I jumped into the cab that had pulled over and sped away.

By the middle of the week, I’d kind of brainstormed out my entire proposal, but hadn’t done much actual writing aside from what I’d originally done in my journal. I kept telling myself that I just needed one more great Derek anecdote to add in, something really insane and improbable. It was starting to look like I might have to just make something up, but since all my fiction skills were being used on Colin, I was running dry.

“Here we go, yo. Here we go, yo. So what, so what’s the scenario?”

Speak of the devil.

“Good morning, Derek.”

“Come on, Emma, don’t tell me you don’t recognize that song!” he said, caffeinated on life.

I shrugged.

“Um…Tupac?”

“Pffff! No! That’s a classic, it’s…um, A Clan Called—no no, it’s Grand Master—nope, maybe…”

Leaning over the cube wall, he drummed his hands loudly on the flimsy gray partition, not caring that with every slap he was wrinkling my magazine cutouts of Daniel Radcliffe. I rolled my eyes and sighed.

“Look, it doesn’t matter, that song probably was out when I was like five or something,” I huffed. I was pretty much through trying to be nice to him. He had worn me down to a nub of nasty quips.

“Yeah, you’re right. So, I’ve got something big for you, Em. Real, real big!”

If this was a new spreadsheet of the department’s half-birthdays, I was going to scream.

“You, missy, are coming with me to our regional advertising trade show!”

He paused expectantly, his face frozen in a manic grin, apparently so I could gasp with excitement and throw my arms around him in gratitude, like I’d finally been given the birthday pony I’d requested ten years ago.

I just nodded mutely.

He deflated instantly. “I’m serious, Emma, this is a huge deal for us. We need people who represent the company well and can handle some solo networking with our main clients. You’ve done a great job all summer and I’d like to give you a shot.”

“Really?” I was actually kind of surprised. Maybe this was the chance I’d been waiting for to do something beyond removing staples and counting sugar packets. I perked up slightly and began to feel a tad less bitter. Maybe this would be my chance to score that awesome college letter of rec.

In the taxi ride to the trade show across town, Derek regaled me with tales of his first two marriages, weekend gardening projects, and his most recent bout with gallstones. Manhattan had never felt so wide. The taxi was sweltering. Instead of blowing out cold air, the AC vent just blew the filthy dust around the floor mats and onto my last clean business-appropriate outfit. Derek was clearly feeling the heat, his pit sweat seeping into bigger and bigger wet stains as he talked in agonizing detail about the minutiae of his life.

When we pulled up to the Javits Center, he was midway through his college rush experience and I was at the edge of my sanity. Derek paid, we hopped out of the cab, and he immediately started sweating from his face. It was a gross sight, but if I were in ninety-degree weather in long sleeves, I’d probably have the face sweats twice as bad. We pushed our way through the revolving front doors and into some hardcore AC. Derek raised his arms slightly to let his pits dry out. As I averted my eyes from his now completely exposed puddles of sweat, I looked around the convention hall. Paunchy balding middle-aged men milled around as equally past-their-prime women sipped coffee and casually inspected each other’s laminated badges. Barely anybody was talking and absolutely no one was smiling. There were rows and rows of exhibitor booths with different companies’ informational pamphlets and promotional pens. Sensible shoes and boxy Ann Taylor suits that would’ve made Jayla’s eyes bleed were in abundance. Basically, everything looked so grim and boring, a funeral procession would have given this place more zip.

“Okay, Em, you can take this box and just start setting it up on our table here. From now on, you and you alone are in charge of its contents,” he said, tapping a box on the table in MediaInc’s dinky display booth. “Are you ready?” He looked eagerly at it and hovered dramatically over the lid. “You can open it.”

He said it with such seriousness that I imagined it full of PIN codes to the company’s accounts in the Caymans. I pried it eagerly open and found…

“Water bottles?”

“Yep! They’ve got our logo on it!” Derek puffed up with pride and grinned, looking like he’d just done something really impressive but creepy, like won a competitive eating championship. “You hand them out as people walk by, okay?”

“Wait, you brought me here to hand out water bottles? This was the big huge responsibility?”

I rubbed my temples and tried to imagine calm blue oceans, puppies, Adam Brody shirtless—anything not to totally flip out. Not because I cared at this point what Derek thought of me, but I really didn’t want to storm out and have to shell out fifteen bucks for a cab back home. Though on the bright side, I had found the last book proposal story I was looking for. I guess that meant that as soon as I got home, I should really start typing. I bit back the foulest words I could think of and spent the rest of the day hydrating boring shoulder-padded businesspeople.

By the end of the week, I’d hoped that
The Devil Wears Dockers
would be speeding toward New York’s top—and not-so-top—literary agents, ready to be celebrated and praised. But in reality, I’d barely even gotten through cleaning up the initial Derek interview story to a point where I wasn’t embarrassed to share it.

Still, even with it far from complete, daydreams about fabulous book parties and movie option offers were creeping in on my Colin fantasy time.

Rachel came home straight from work on Thursday and caught me tapping my way through transcribing a journal entry into my laptop. “You’re really doing the book thing? Not that I doubted you or anything, but, like, it’s just really unbelievable!” She kicked the door closed behind her with her foot and slammed down a bag of takeout food.

“Yeah, I can’t believe I’m giving it a try either. But the writing is taking forever.” I could smell something tasty all the way from the couch. “What did you get us for dinner?”

“Excuse me!
Us
?” She mocked shock, then smiled. “Actually, there’s plenty here and you know I’ll eat everything if you don’t stop me.” She held up a plastic fork and a tub of red bliss mashed potatoes. And I did the only thing I could do—I hurried over and dug in.

As we settled down with our food, Rachel rekindled the book convo. “Yeah, I guess writing a book is a long process. And doesn’t it take, like, a really long time to get a response from agents?” Rachel asked through a mouthful of biscuit.

“I don’t know,” I said, picking at the Trader Joe’s rotisserie chicken between us and realizing that my summer in New York was only weeks away from wrapping. “I hope not.”

I really wanted something awesome to happen with this book idea fast. I mean, how long did this kind of stuff really take? Was I going to have to wait until I was in college or something?

Nineteen

I
spent most of my time at work the next day trying to mentally write out the proposal and avoiding Derek. Both of which were nearly impossible.

“I know what Bo don’t know. Touch them up and go uhoh.”
Derek gangstarolled up to my cube and shoved a pen in my face, presumably as a microphone. “Show me what you got, girl.”

“Derek, I don’t know,” I started to say, snaking my neck around so that I wouldn’t be speaking into his Bic mike.

“You’re supposed to go,
‘Ch-ch-ch-chang chang!’
” Derek demonstrated. “Now you say
‘Murderer’
after everything I say, okay?”

“No, no, Derek. I can’t. I really need to get some work done so I can finally wrap up this birthday grid, okay?”

The Dorf threw his arms up in surrender and walked away humming what must have been the rest of whatever nineties rap song he was butchering. I looked down and realized that I’d dug my nails into my palms, leaving half crescents of suppressed aggression. Derek’s presence was more intolerable than Lindsay Lohan’s singing “career.” The last three weeks of my internship stretched in front of me—an eternity of Excel, collation, and outdated rap lyrics. But, I comforted myself, I felt the same sense of endless awfulness every night when that two-hour block of
Everybody Loves Raymond
came on TBS, and I made it through that somehow. I’d pull through these last weeks as well.

Walking into the apartment that night, I saw Rachel sitting on the couch, of course perched next to her laptop, searching for Inter-dates.

“How’s it going?” Rachel asked, not looking up, her eyes still on a Semitic stallion’s profile.

And I don’t know what got to me—the stress of lying to Colin, the idea that my awesome book idea was never ever going to get written, the fact that I’d barely seen my best friend all summer because she was so into boys she’d forgotten that this was
our
summer, or maybe just plain being away from home for too long—but I lost it. Completely.

“How am I doing? How am I doing?” I screeched, and Rachel finally looked up from her virtual love life. “Oh, great. Just great. It was great when I got to work at nine this morning and immediately started the miserable 480-minute countdown until I could leave. That was a great time! And then spending at least 240 of those minutes hiding from Colin and then the other 240 minutes hating myself for tricking such a beautiful boy. That made me feel great! And then coming home here to find that my book hasn’t written itself yet, also great news!” Cue the heaving sobs. The anger and dejection and tears and snot poured out of me. I kept talking, but even I couldn’t understand what I was saying. I was crying so hard that speaking real words hurt.

“You know, Em,” Rach said, moving toward me for a hug, “I could tell you that Babe Ruth held the record for most home runs in a season but he also held one for most strikeouts, too. And that big winners all have their big loser moments. But let’s be honest, that Babe Ruth thing is probably just some made-up Internet fact. And even if it is true, it’s not going to make you feel better. But you know what
will
make you feel better?” She paused and I snotted on my cuff. “Chunky Monkey!”

She got up and walked me back to the couch, depositing me like a sickly child, then dashed over to the kitchen, fished spoons out of the drawer, and plucked a carton from the freezer. When she returned, I was on the couch and my crying had simmered into snot-sucking sniffles.

“Em, just to show you how much I love you, boy or no boy, book or no book, sucky internship and all, I’m going to let you have that first bite.”

She pointed to a fudge chunk sticking out. Even though we’d stopped wearing our best friend necklaces in fifth grade, she was still so the “Be Fri” to my “st ends.”

I dug into the pint and she listened as I went on about the book. “It’s a really good idea for a book, I think. But writing a book is really hard. I just don’t know how to do it and those how-to books aren’t really that helpful. I’ve gotten so little done so far.”

To that Rachel jumped in. “Oh, I’d love to read the parts that you do have written. My boss has been letting me do some editing, so I could offer a pseudo-professional opinion—maybe it’ll motivate you.”

I nodded limply to the idea as “Canned Heat” rang from my bag. I cracked my first smile of the day. It’s pretty impossible to be mopey with Jamiroquai playing. I looked at the caller ID and my smile grew into a grin. It’s
very
impossible to be mopey with a summer crush calling.

“Hello,” I answered in my least snotty voice.

“Hi there. I’ve been doing some thinking.”

Rachel snuck off to her room when she heard it was Colin.

“Uh-huh,” I prodded.

“And you do that crazy dash thing every time I see you. And it started out kind of cute, but now I’m getting a little tired of it. So I have a plan. I was going to invite you over to my place to watch a movie tonight, but then I figured you’d bolt halfway through and leave me stuck watching the last hour of some Sandra Bullock DVD all by my lonesome. So instead, I’m thinking that I’m going to invite myself over to your place to watch a movie. That way, there’s nowhere for you to dash off to. What do you say?”

Honestly, before this phone call, I don’t think I knew what it meant for a heart to be “aflutter.” But now I totally did and mine totally was.

“I say that I would never make you watch a Sandra Bullock movie,” I answered.

“And?”

And? Come over? Now? Ahh! I was puffy and snotty and ice creamy. Then I remembered the secret weapon Jayla had introduced me to—the tube of Preparation H—and decided that my desire to see Colin outweighed the possible trauma he might suffer seeing me post-meltdown.

“And that sounds perfect.” I did my best imitation of cool girl casual. “Come on over anytime.”

“On my way,” he replied.

I clicked my cell phone closed and sighed deeply. A little snuggle session was just what I needed to get my mind off my failing author aspirations. I hopped in the shower and washed the mascara and tear tributaries off my face. Back in my room, I stood in front of my closet, leaving a puddle on the hardwood floor. I wanted to look casual and bedtimey, but not sloppy. A beater and velours seemed to be the answer.

Outfit selected, I stepped out of my room to dry my hair and ran into Jayla.

“Whoa. I didn’t know K. Fed was in the house.” She must have come home while I was picking out my apparently white-thug ensemble. Thank God. This was my first casual not-datey date with Colin and I needed to feel cute.

“Really? The beater is trashed out? I thought it was kind of hot.” Jayla shook her head in fashion contempt.

The phone rang as I turned to my room to find an outfit that made me look less like a wannabe gangster. I could hear Jayla pick it up, and from my closet, I heard her say the last four words I wanted to hear just then, “Sure, send him up.”

Wet hair? No makeup? Stay-at-home-husband attire? So not ready.

I ran out into the living room. “Oh my God! Colin’s here already? Since when has the MTA moved at the speed of light?”

“Chill out, lady. It’s just Jake,” she said. “I invited him over.” I breathed a sigh of relief as she fluffed her hair in the hallway mirror. “We’re going to watch season one of
Grey’s
.” She gave her boobs a final hoist in her dress before opening the door for Jake’s arrival.

I guess that they were kind of becoming an item and I should get used to it, but still, those two together made about as much sense as body glitter on a straight man.

In walked Jacob with an armful of cheap street flowers. “Beauties for you three beauties,” he said in a cheesy playboy voice as he handed the flowers to Jayla. Her lips curled in disgust at the sight of carnations, and she held the bouquet with only her fingertips, as if it were a bunch of poison ivy.

“Oh, Jake you…shouldn’t have.” Jayla thrust the flowers at me to deal with.

Then, ever the good hostess, Jayla perked herself up from the minor flora fiasco. “Make yourself comfortable on the couch, Jake. You have a ton to catch up on if you’re going to be my
Grey’s
-watching buddy this fall.” She dashed into her room to find the boxed set.

“
Grey’s
? You came all the way down here from Hell’s Kitchen to watch old episodes of whiny chick TV?” I asked. As far as I knew, he still hadn’t made a move. This was getting a little too pathetic and Duckie-like for comfort.

“Well, I, you know, should catch up on it, because you know…,” Jake stammered nonsensically.

“Come on, Jake. Just say it, man. You like her, right?”

His stammering stopped. So did his eye contact. “What? Pffffttt, no.”

“Oh, give me a break. Well, if you do like her, I’d say make a move. And soon. Otherwise you’re going to TiVo your way into ‘just friends.’ Ask her to Nobu and make this official. She would never say no to that.”

He nodded. I rolled my eyes at the fact that he needed love advice from a high schooler and then bolted back to my room to complete the cute but comfy clothes quest for Colin’s arrival.

I had just finished drying my hair and was wrapping the cord around the dryer when the phone rang announcing Colin. I ran over to the door and did the Jayla boob hoist in the hallway mirror. Except for with me, there wasn’t much to hoist, and even if there were, my shirt was so high necked, my boobs would have to be growing out of my throat to show cleavage. I pulled the incredibly short shorts I was wearing down a little bit so they would cover the line where my butt met my thighs, took a deep breath, and opened the door just in time to see Colin walk out of the elevator and turn the wrong way.

“Yo, Christensen, over here.” I waved and attempted to position myself sexily in the doorway without looking like I was trying to scratch my back on the frame.

“Hey, Emma.” He came in for a hug and kissed me on the cheek. “You got an itch on your back or something?”

“What? No, I mean, kind of yeah. It’s gone now, though.” I had about as much sexy in me as Clay Aiken’s lazy eye.

We tiptoed past Jake and Jayla in the living room. They were sitting on opposite sides of the couch, eyes glued to the flat screen. There was a full-screen shot of Ellen Pompeo walking out of the hospital alone. She looked skinny as hell and had on her trademarked just-sucked-a-lemon scowl. I couldn’t tell what episode it was because I’m pretty sure that shot is in every single one. I tried to mouth “Nobu” to Jake as Colin and I slipped past the TV and into my room.

Colin sat down on my bed and pulled a DVD out of his bag. “If you like
Napoleon Dynamite,
you’re totally going to love this.
Little Miss Sunshine
. It’s awesome.”

Even though he sounded a little like the recording on Moviefone, I didn’t care. It was so cute that he tried to find something that I would actually like instead of just bringing over a horrible alien apocalypse film…not like I’m talking from ten and a half months of experience with Bad Boyfriend Brian or anything.

“Awesome.” I took the disc from the case. “I hope it’s okay if we watch it on my laptop. Those two are hogging the big screen,” I said as I set up my computer on my chest of drawers and pressed Play.

Colin had already lay down in my bed. I was so unsure of where to put myself in relation to him. I mean, I definitely wanted to cuddle, but I wasn’t his girlfriend or anything, so I didn’t want to seem too comfortable. I decided to strategically position myself parallel to him, with several inches of room between us, but close enough that he could put an arm around me if he wanted to. And as soon as the credits started, he snaked his hand under my neck and closed the gap between us. His touch felt so good and right. The anxiety from my meltdown seeped out of me and all I could think of was him. I made myself comfortable in the crook of his arm and looked up to smile at him. His face was already moving toward mine, tilted in perfect kissing position.

The kiss melted me, sweetly gentle. I kissed back and the kiss kind of never ended. There were a few points where we took breaks and fake-watched the movie, but it pretty much was a make-out-a-thon. By the end of the movie, his arm was around me like a blanket and I had curled myself into his body. This is how I wanted to stay for the next three weeks I was in New York. No, actually, I wanted the three weeks to be a loop of the last two hours on repeat. Colin and me smooching up a storm. No internship. No stupid book idea. No roommates. No city.