How to Meet Cute Boys (25 page)

I told Chandra about my attempt to make Max think I was superpopular and thus didn’t have any time for him on the weekend,
and how my ruse backfired. I was hoping for some sympathy, and maybe some strategic advice. But I ended up listening to Chandra
rant about how we should stuff my pseudo-boyfriend’s body in a wood chipper.

“You have to fuckin’
leave his sorry white ass,
Franklin,” she insisted over her third sangria, alternating between the wine and her new inhaler. (She now has allergies,
she explained, they’re “serious,” and she’s never smoking again since if she does she will definitely end up with almost-emphysema
like Christy Turlington. Which, she added, was definitely going to happen to me.)

While Chandra ranted, I let my gaze drift over Beachwood Canyon, quilted with hills, valleys, and million-dollar mansions.
The eucalyptus trees were giving off a woodsy perfume.
This,
I thought, breathing deeply,
is what money smells like
. Not Collin’s money, of course. The house—and the view—belonged to his roommate, a famous nobody who got his start on a reality
TV show where he got buried alive with forty women in an underground town house, and had to marry the one he wanted to kill
the least at the end of the season. Since the hunk was away on his book tour—four weeks on the
New York Times
best-seller list—Collin decided to throw a party and pretend this was his place.

Still, the liquor was free and the view was pretty. It would have been fine if Chandra wasn’t crowing in my ear.

“Homeboy has
adult acne,
” she continued.

“Oh come on,” I said, snapping back to reality. “Max had
one
pimple the night you met him.”

“It looked like a
bacterial infection
.”

“You said you thought he was cute.”

“Who’s cute?” All night, Collin tripped over himself trying to horn in on our conversation. This time he was bearing a platter
of roasted tomatoes as his excuse.

“Not the punk-ass bitch Ben’s hooked on,” Chandra said.

Collin nodded, and I noticed that, now that she had an audience, Chandra’s voice got a
you-can-hear-her-in-the-cheap-seats
boom to it. The PIBs were starting to stare. “That fuckin’
bitch
treats her like fuckin’
dirt,
and she’s so
whipped
she’s willing to put up with it!” Chandra hollered. “What are you so afraid of, Franklin? That he’s going to go out with
some other ’ho instead of you?”

“Well, we
technically
haven’t broken up,” I said, “so I don’t think that’s exactly something to be worried about quite yet.”

“Yeah, well you’re
technically
not even together yet, either, so maybe
that’s
what you should be worried about.”

I looked to Collin for some assistance, but he just said, “You should listen to your homegirl.”

The rest of the evening Collin cock-blocked me. He kept Chandra—who technically was my friend date—locked into a conversation
by doling out compliments and generally kissing her ass. In the car on the way home Chandra kept talking about how “
ama
zing” Collin was.

“He’s fun,” I said, “but watch out for him.”

“Why?”

“He’s so networking-obsessed, he tries to get invited to the right funerals.”

“Girl, you are hi-larious!” Chandra whooped. Then, “Give me his number. I want to program it into my cell.”

Saturday morning I was awakened by Audrey, who saw no reason why she shouldn’t call me on her “Nokie” to discuss wedding drama
while stuck in traffic.

“Aud,” I said in the middle of her napkin-ring monologue, “I’m actually really busy today.”

She said, “Doing
what
?”

I said I was working on a story for
Filly
but in fact I had nothing to do. When I’d gotten home from Collin’s barbecue the night before, there was a message from Ashton
saying he wasn’t feeling well and wouldn’t be able to go to the party with me after all. I couldn’t believe Ash was blowing
me off. Anyway, he said we could maybe do something next weekend instead, which I figured would work because I was going to
have to full-life Max for a little longer than I thought.

This was how I ended up staying home on date night watching a
Touched by an Angel
rerun while writing clever Christmas cards to my editors in hopes that this would make them want to renew my contract in
the new year.

In other words, I persisted with my newer, fuller life.

The next morning, my insides felt like they were made of sharp rocks, so I decided to meet Nina at her Sunday rejuvenation
yoga class. It was in a trendy studio in West Hollywood where they played Sarah McLachlan in the changing room and burned
vanilla-scented incense.

“I keep forgetting to tell you I ran into Ashton last night,” Nina whispered, stretching into downward dog.

“You did?”
I mentally reran the apologetic message I got from him on Friday—not feeling well, terribly sorry, thinks it could be the
flu … “Wait”—I breathed into my hips—“where?”

“Some stupid party in Hancock Park I went to with the Producer. It was boring as lint.”

“And?” I tried to relax my shoulders.

“I told you, it was boring.”

“No, what happened with Ashton?”

We switched to lotus.

“What do you mean?” Nina closed her eyes.

“Did he seem sick at all?” I put my legs in a pretzel. “Did he look tired, or pale, in any way?”

“I don’t think so.”

I wondered if maybe Ashton had lied about being sick because he wasn’t over me—maybe seeing me was too painful to bear—so
I asked Nina if he seemed sad, or depressed. If he’d asked about me perhaps …

“Not once,” she said. “He was out with friends, having a good time.”

“Thanks,” I hissed.

Nina breathed in deeply, then exhaled. “What do you want me to say? Maybe the night before last he was sitting at a bar alone
and crying into his beer with grief, and I just didn’t run into him. All I know is that last night he seemed like he was having
fun.”

I tried to stretch my fingers to the sun, weighing whether or not I wanted to tell Nina that Ashton had told me he was sick.
I decided not, and said instead, “You’re not being very helpful.”

“Because you’re acting like a child.” Nina opened one eye at me. It had the beady look of the thoroughly exasperated. “
You
broke up with
him,
remember?”

I rolled my head one way, then the other. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, closing my eyes and straightening my spine,
which was as tight as a rubber band stretched from L.A. to Vancouver.

“What’s bothering you?” she whispered.

I kept my eyes closed. “Shush, I’m balancing my chakras.”

I could feel Dr. Nina inspecting me, looking for soft spots. So I curled my lips up slightly at the ends, relaxed my furrowed
brow, and tried to look rejuvenated. It was the most exhausting thing I did all weekend.

One time, when I was sixteen or so, I had to go to school when I suspected a boyfriend was going to break up with me. He was
so cool—owned a laminate machine, which meant he could make senior IDs for us so we could get off campus for lunch, and he
was a really good skateboarder. But suddenly he was pulling away. And he kept saying, “What are you doing for lunch
Thursday?
Let’s have lunch
Thursday
”—as though we didn’t have lunch at Dan’s Super Subs around the corner from school practically every day of the week. I told
my mom what I thought was going to happen on Black Thursday, and all she said was, “I wouldn’t wear mascara if I were you.”

This should explain why, instead of talking to the Mother, I drove over to Kiki’s, hoping my best friend would be home for
a change. Lately she’d been falling into the Curtis vortex—I’d call and get the voicemail pretty much every time. I wasn’t
mad or anything. But I have to say I couldn’t believe how much time they spent together. Days and days.
In a row
. Yet they never seemed to go anywhere, which was why I didn’t even know what Curtis looked like until he answered her door.
Standing in the entryway, I was suddenly aware I had on a mismatched sweatshirt over my pajamas, my hair was in crooked pigtails,
and I was clutching a pack of cigarettes in each hand. While Curtis gawked at me, I took a moment to give him the once-over.
Kiki’s descriptions were pretty much on the money: He had brown hair, blue eyes, horn-rimmed glasses, and a kind of prep-school-meets-indie-rock
vibe.

“You must be Ben,” Curtis said, stepping aside so I could enter. Inside, the lights were turned down low, and there were a
few lit candles scattered around. From the looks of things, they’d been snuggling on the couch, watching
Shakespeare in Love
—what is it with couples and that movie?—and I suspect they were actually enjoying it. I felt bad interrupting, but in between
my stammered apologies Curtis just smiled patiently while he put on his shoes and located his car keys. He didn’t complain
once before he cleared out so Kiki could administer some much-needed heartbreak first aid, so I figured he was a pretty decent
guy. He was cute. Quiet, but cute.

I hadn’t seen Max or spoken directly to Max in over two weeks. After that horrible weekend when I tried to full-life him in
hopes that this would get his attention, he’d left me another message saying that the Japanese were staying an extra few days
and he was “all booked up.”

I didn’t return the call.

This didn’t make him call again, though.

Where was he? What was going on? What did it mean? Every day I felt like I was being slowly squeezed to death. I couldn’t
breathe. I couldn’t eat. I didn’t sleep.

I thought about calling him and just asking flat-out what the deal was, but somehow I knew it would be a mistake. It was like
Max needed space, but the more I gave him, the more he needed. I kept going back to that night—the night
we
were watching
Shakespeare in Love
and he didn’t want to talk—and that hideous weekend in Palm Springs, which Kiki and I were now referring to as “The Debacle.”
How do you talk to someone who never wants to talk?

“So what are you going to do?” Kiki asked, closing the door behind Curtis with a wistful little breath.

“I’m going to fucking kill him,” I said, finding myself a place to sit in the middle of her cluttered floor, next to some
old newspapers and half a bag of kitty litter. “I know that Max does a lot of business with the Japanese but I mean, Jesus,
they have to have left by now, don’t you think?”

“Probably,” she agreed, blowing out the candles and turning on a light. She offered me a beer, which I accepted gratefully.
“So now what?”

“Maybe I should just go over there and say if this is the way he wants to treat me, then I’m out. I don’t have to take this.”

“What about the Full Life?” she asked.

I looked at her like,
You can’t be serious,
and said, “His is fuller.”

Kiki gave a small nod. She cleared away the newspapers, the litter, some shoes, and a raincoat so she could join me on the
carpet. Then she put an ashtray on the floor between us. We sat in silence for a minute, smoking and mulling over my options.
It didn’t seem like I had very many.

“Maybe I should gather up all those great gifts he gave me, cart them over to his house, and dump them on his bed,” I said.

“That works for me.”

“Or maybe I should just show up and start screaming at him at the top of my lungs until the neighbors call the cops.”

“Totally reasonable. Maybe you could, like, I dunno, B”—Kiki started to imitate Max, lighting another cigarette and schlumping
her shoulders forward in a slacker pose—“act like you’re really cute and sweet and harmless and then, like, take out a bowie
knife and rip his heart out of his chest and eat it.”

“
Hey
. That was good. Or I could like, bring an Uzi submachine gun, K, and totally, like, ram it up his butt and fire it.”

“Or know what, B? You could, like, replace all the fucking half-and-half in his refrigerator with like, skim milk and watch
him choke to death.”

“And you know what his last words will be?” I gasped.

We yelled together, “This isn’t cream, B!”

I rolled over on my back and tried to catch my breath. I had obviously been smoking too many cigarettes and it hurt deep in
my chest, but I couldn’t stop laughing—the kind of hysterical, all-in-a-whoosh laughing that, I imagine, people do right before
they jump off a bridge into an icy river.

“Hold on a sec.” Kiki went to answer her phone. It was Curtis. I could tell from the blissed-out look on her face. I looked
at the clock—they had been separated for exactly seven minutes. “You have?” she said, holding up her finger. “You
do?
” She started laughing. “Later. No,
later
. I will. I promise. ’Bye.”

“I should go, I barged in on you guys.”

“You’re not going.” Kiki sat back down in front of me. “Come on, he’s just being cute.”

“So things are good.”

“Amazing. Seriously. The other day, he told me he wants to come home with me for Hanukkah to meet my parents.”

“That’s so great. Meanwhile I can’t even get Max to try my dry cleaner.”

Kiki snorted. “So seriously, what are you going to do?”

“I have no idea.” I lay down on the floor again, stared at the cracks in the ceiling that had been there since the last earthquake.
“I don’t want to end it, but I can’t stand staying in it. Then again, if I
do
end it, I’m not sure I’ll be able to stand it being over.”

“You know I’ll be supportive of whatever you decide.”

“Oh, I know. Look, don’t worry about me.” I got up to leave. “I’m just going to go home and die alone so you two can get your
fuck on.”

I raised my eyebrow at Kiki and made my way to the door. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?” she said, just as her phone
started to ring again.

I assured her I’d just needed a quick chat and I was going to be fine. As a good-bye, Kiki punched me in the shoulder. Then
she gave me a hug.