Hot Mess (3 page)

“Yeppers, nine a.m. on Sunday. I’ll be there and I’ll bring a thermos of coffee for all of the Golf Gals! Talk to ya then and thanks for this, Eileen.”

I could barely wait for her to put down the phone. “So, I’m set for the internship, right?”

My mom smiled and sat down at the table with me. “Eileen said that there’d still be openings left for interns. You can interview when you get to the city and are all settled in down there.”

“That’s great!” I was so stoked for the burb evacuation that I didn’t even bother to ask what kind of internship it was. As long as it wasn’t at the Bridgefield Swim Club, it would be perfect.

“Have you given any thought to where you are going to live, hon?” Mom asked.

Actually, not at all. “Um, maybe I could call Jacob and we could crash on his couch for a while?”

“
Both
of you on a sofa bed? In a young man’s apartment?” my dad scoffed as he waltzed into the kitchen, not at all embarrassed that he’d obviously been eavesdropping on our entire conversation. “That’s what we call a recipe for disaster.”

“First of all, I’m not one hundred percent sure what you mean by that, but still, gross. Let me remind you, he’s my cousin.” I shuddered. “Do you have a better plan?”

“Well, I’ll talk to Rachel’s parents and we’ll pitch in some money for you girls to get a hotel for your first few nights in the city. I’m sure that with Jacob’s help and a little hard looking, you ladies will have a place in no time.” Money and words of encouragement? This was the most un-Dad I’d ever seen Dad. I was completely speechless.

“And I’ll help you pack tomorrow, Em,” my mother offered.

Who knew parents were so nice when you did exactly what they wanted? Maybe I should try this more often.

Just then the phone rang and the caller ID read Mark Wolfe—it was Rachel. I flew upstairs to my room to talk in privacy. With a breathless hello I answered the phone, so excited to tell her all the details.

“Em, my parents are stoked,” she squealed. “My dad said he’d probably be able to hook me up with a sweet internship, too. We’re going to be working girls in the big city! I’m already practicing wearing my hair in a sensible low bun.”

“Right, once you get your hair-did figured out, we have to think about where we’re going to live.” Jaxy bounded into my room with the grace of a sumo wrestler on ice and hauled his slobbery self onto my bed. Finding New York digs would be like the first adult thing I’d ever done, and I was already getting nervous. I didn’t even know where to start.

“No worries. I’m thinking we’ll just find something off craigslist.”

“Okay, we can give craigslist a shot,” I said, petting my pet. “But we can’t just walk off the Amtrak and into an apartment. There’s going to be time right when we get to New York where we’re going to be looking for a few days. We need somewhere to stay. Are you sitting down? My dad told me that he’d toss in some cash for a hotel if your dad did. Weirdly generous of him, right?”

“Sweet! Let me see if I can get more.” I heard her holler across her house, “Dad, I need five hundred dollars for that New York thing I was telling you about. No, on top of my allowance.
No, not for clothes!
For a hotel. I’ll pay you back when I’m picking out your nursing home in like fifty years.” Then there were a few beats while I’m pretty sure I heard Mr. Wolfe groan and then reluctantly agree. “Cool, thanks, Dad.” And then she started talking back into the phone. “Cool, so we have five hundred bucks for a hotel plus whatever your folks are putting in. That should totally cover us for like a while, right?”

“Def. And that’ll probably buy us some room service, too. Do you think they card with room service? ’Cause we should totally celebrate our first night in the city with champagne!”

My New York summer was totally coming together and I was buzzed on the thought of it. I don’t know if the buzz came from being nervous or excited, but either way, I said my goodbyes to Rachel and hung up feeling like a rock star. A
boyfriendless
rock star, though. But didn’t Carrie Bradshaw always call the city her boyfriend? So, it could be mine, too. I guess that makes New York a polygamist. Whatever.

Four

B
rian didn’t call until he got back from his
whor
ientation.

I saw his name flash on my cell’s screen and I almost threw my phone out the window. I’d been expecting him to call for days and now that he did, I barely wanted to pick up. I decided to answer and give him a real-life example of hell hathin’ no fury.

“Hey, babe,” he said as I flipped open my phone.

“
‘Hey, babe’
? Did you just ‘hey babe’ me like I am the kind of girlfriend who would be okay with you frolicking with state school skanks and forgetting about me for three whole days? So. Not. Me.”

“What are you talking about, Em? What’s wrong?”

“Seriously, Brian? You don’t think that anything’s wrong here?” I screeched. “You go away to your college weekend, don’t call me for three days, and let drunken college sorority sluts answer your phone? So much is wrong with that, I don’t even know where to begin.” I tried unsuccessfully to sound like I’d been doing something besides cry on and off for the last seventy-two hours.

Brian pretty much stuck to his guns. “I mean,
jeez,
what else do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know. But, uh, not that.”

“Sorry, I can’t control who answers my phone,” he said.

“Of course you can! And you don’t sound very sorry. Just so you know, you can forget about our summer together.” I was in total ice queen mode, now that I’d cried out all of the water in my body. “In twenty-four hours, I am getting on a train, and I am getting away from here and away from you. Have fun frenching it with college girls. I hope they liked your lizard-tongue-down-the-throat move as much as I did! I can’t believe I ever even liked someone as lame as you.”

I slammed my phone shut and cried into my pillow for the millionth time since he’d left for that stupid orientation. I realized that I
really
couldn’t believe that I’d liked him, maybe even loved him. How could I have been so wrong about him for so long? Does that mean that I was wrong about other things? Should I have really got those wide-leg AG jeans last week? Wide-leg might not even catch on. But more importantly, what about my completely spontaneous New York summer plan? Was that a huge mistake, too?

I could totally feel a grade-A freak-out coming on, and even though I was about ninety-nine percent packed and ready to go, I called Rachel and made flimsy excuses to back out.

“Rach, are you having second thoughts about this New York thing? Why are we acting like this is the best thing that ever happened to us? Don’t you think that we’d have a good time even if we stayed in Bridgefield and just got really into a hobby, like karate or yoga or something?”

“So, let me get this straight,” Rachel said testily on the other end. “You want to cancel New York so we can stay here and take a jujitsu class?”

“Um, yeah,” I floundered. “I mean, why go aaaaalllll the way to New York and eat pizza all summer and get fat, when we can stay here and have a six-pack by fall?”

“Emma,” she said sternly. “You can fool your mom when you come home buzzed. You can fool your teacher when you cheated through the bio midterm. But you cannot fool your best friend. I know you’re having second thoughts about the Brian breakup and that totally makes sense. But I’m not letting you screw up both our summers so you can stay here and text him a hundred times a day and look psycho.”

“First of all, that wasn’t cheating. I just studied off a copy of last year’s midterm, okay? But I know, you’re right. I just feel like maybe I’m being too hasty. Like, don’t you think it’s weird that I broke up with him over one weekend of Bad Brian when I had like ten months with Good Brian? Well, like Medium-to-Good Brian?”

“Have you ever seen
Moonstruck
?” she asked.

“I—what? Yeah. Why?” I really wasn’t in the mood for a subject change.

“You know how Nicolas Cage is that tormented bread guy whose hand got chopped off? Cher told him that he did it to himself on purpose to get away from his fiancée. Like a wolf chewing off its own foot to escape.”

I didn’t get it. “If this is leading up to you wanting to go for pizza, I’m going to be pissed, Rachel.”

“No! Look, you are the Nick Cage, here. You are gnawing your way out of a trap. If you really, really loved Brian, you’d try to work it out. But I think deep down you’re happy that this happened, because now you finally have an excuse to leave. Well, for two months, at least.”

Tears welled up in my eyes. “You’re totally right. I did need a way to get out.”

“So, will you turn off the freaking Gavin DeGraw? Gav is clearly too much right now. Take a chill pill and get some sleep,” she commanded.

“Okay, fine. I’m just going to go cut myself to feel and flip through my copy of
He’s Just Not That Into You
.”

“That’s not funny. I didn’t want to resort to this but…
when the pimp’s in the crib, Ma.
”

I knew this was my cue. “Drop It Like It’s Hot” was our happy song. You just can’t sing it out loud and be bummed at the same time. It’s pretty much mathematically impossible.

“Drop it like it’s hawt, drop it like it’s hawt,”
I dutifully responded to each of her rapped-out calls until she ended with,
“We got the rollies on our arm and we’re pouring Chandon, and we’re movin’ to New York cause we got it goin’ on!”

I hung up still smiling and cracked open my journal, which I’d been ignoring for the last few days. I was avoiding writing about the Brian meltdown. Sometimes I felt like writing about something made it more real. But I finally put pen to paper, documenting Brian’s douchiness. And, yeah, I teared up again. How I wasn’t dying of dehydration from all of this crying, I don’t know.

But then I moved on to the impending New York summer and how effing excited slash nervous I was for it. I didn’t think I’d ever spent two nights in a row without my parents, so how was I going to do this alone? What if I forgot to eat or shower or sleep or breathe or something else important? At least Rachel and I would be together. I was lucky to have her in my life. I thought it was kind of lame how eighty-five percent of all
Sex and the City
episodes ended with the ladies announcing that they were each other’s soul mates. But maybe they were right.

Five

T
he train doors opened into the sweltering heat of New York City. We dragged our luggage out and stood on the platform.

“Here we are! The Big Ap—I mean, the city!” Rachel said, gesturing around the dank train station grandiosely, almost hitting a guy in a business suit.

“Watch it, lady,” he barked at her.

“Did you hear that? He called me ‘lady,’ not ‘girl’! I feel grown up already!” she exclaimed, completely oblivious to the fact that he didn’t mean it as a compliment.

I giggled and hoisted my luggage into rolling position. “Okay,
lady
, let’s follow the crowd and hope that takes us to a place where we can find a taxi.”

We made our way slowly through the station, stopping every five seconds to shift our laptop bags and purses.

“Hey,” Rachel whispered to me, “do you feel like there’s a weirdly large number of people napping here? Is that, like, a New York trend or something?” She tried to be inconspicuous as she pointed to a guy sprawled out on a sleeping bag.

“Yo, Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore. That’s not a trend. Those people are homeless.” I shook my head at her and plugged on.

“When were we ever in Kansas? That road trip with your parents three spring breaks ago?” Rachel asked as she trailed behind me.

We followed the signs to the taxi stand and stood in line, marinating in our own sweat. Since when did taxis have lines? Didn’t you just flap your arm out and holler and they came to you? Finally we made it to the front and piled our luggage into the trunk. I uncrumpled the piece of paper with the hotel address that Rachel and I (and my father) had Pricelined for the next two nights and yelled it through the plastic window at the driver.

As we drove through Manhattan, we pressed our faces against the windows and guessed what buildings were which. Rachel tried to say that most everything was the Chrysler Building and even called one skyscraper the Sears Tower.

“That’s in Chicago, Rach.”

Our cab pulled up to our new digs for the time being, a Best Western near Tenth Avenue. It wasn’t the Ritz, but it was cheap. Besides, it would only be a few days, probably less. I was sure we’d find a place in no time.

“Hmm, that’s weird,” Rachel said as I unpacked some of my stuff. “I don’t see a room service menu.”

“Rach, come on.” I bent down to the dingy rug near my bed and picked up a hair ball the size of Pam Anderson’s left boob. “It looks like they don’t even have a vacuum in this joint, let alone a working kitchen.” I flicked the triple-D’s worth of hair and fuzz at her.

“Ew! Gross me out, Emma! Uck, do you think this room is clean enough? I mean, remember on
Dateline
when they turned a black light on inside a hotel room and you could see, like, blood and jizz stains everywhere, even on the ceiling? I’m sleeping above the covers. God knows it’s hot enough.”

“Do you think we should do some exploring of the city?” I asked, ignoring her whining.

“It’s stinky hot out there. Let’s hang out in the AC for a little bit longer,” Rachel moaned as she dramatically fell back on her bed. “Actually, I’m going to take a quick nap before we head out and paint this town glittery!”

“A little bit longer” really meant all night. Rachel’s nap turned into a coma kind of sleep. Even when I shook her and demanded that we at least leave the room and get some authentic New York deli food for dinner, she just mumbled and rolled over. And there was no way I was heading out into the New York night solo. I’d probably end up lost and sleeping over with one of Rachel’s trendsetters in the train station.

So I sat on my bed and ate all six of the granola bars my mom had packed for train snacks and felt very un–New York. Carrie Bradshaw would so never binge-eat Quaker Chewies in a Best Western. Convincing myself that this was no indication for the rest of the summer, I unpacked my computer onto one of the particle-board nightstands and set up shop for the craigslist hunt.

Where was Rockaway? Wasn’t that where Jay-Z was from? I glanced over at Rachel, fast asleep in her “Princess” eye mask, and decided Brooklyn or Queens wasn’t exactly our taste. After hours of scouring the postings, I e-mailed six people about their summer sublets and made us a list of which places to visit first.

I finally closed the laptop and laid down in my probably-bodily-fluid-stained bed, listening to the sounds of the city. At one-thirty a.m., exhausted from a trip, a move, and the worst—fine, only—breakup of my life, the restless city was still too tantalizing for me to sleep. I was high off the energy and what tomorrow might bring. This was New York City! We could see Andy Samberg on the subway, sign a lease on a cute two-bedroom walk-up, and buy some imposter Chloé hobos all before noon! With all that bouncing around my head, it took me forever and a half to fall asleep.

We got up early and planned out our subway routes in advance so we wouldn’t look like head-scratching tourists in public. The first apartment was in TriBeCa. The place sounded really cool—big windows, huge rooms, washer and dryer, pretty inexpensive. And it was a loft. I loved that word.
Loft.
It was so Olsen-chic.

We walked up to the door of the building and punched in the intercom number the woman from the craigslist ad had mentioned in her reply e-mail. Something garbled and staticky came from the intercom, and then there was a buzzing sound.

“Shit, is that the fire alarm or something?” Rachel asked, face scrunched in concern at the sound.

“I don’t know what that was,” I answered, confused and waiting for a mass of people to come fleeing from the building, some of them on fire.

And then a voice, barely audible through the static, came from the intercom: “Are you guys coming up or not?” Even the static could not camouflage this woman’s bitchy-ass tone.

The horrible buzzing sound came again and this time we didn’t try to stop, drop, and roll. Instead we pushed open the front door and headed up in an elevator.

“Woah! This place is awesome,” Rachel exclaimed as we walked off the elevator and directly into the apartment. Yes, that’s right, the elevator opened right into the apartment, and the place took up the entire floor.

“Awesome” totally was the word. The place was as big as my house, with hardwood floors and a sick view of…some pretty tall important-looking building. It even had a baby grand piano and several pieces of, I guess, modern art.

We bopped around the place, squealing and clapping our hands.

“See, people are so wrong when they say rent is expensive in New York,” Rachel said. “I mean, eight hundred dollars each for all of this is totally not that bad from what I hear.”

After a lot of whining and several parent conferences, the foursome had given us a couple thousand dollars for the summer. We did the math and spending eight hundred bucks a month on rent would leave us plenty of leftover shopping money. So far New York really didn’t seem that expensive. The hot dogs on the street were only one dollar!

“Oh, sorry,” said the girl who was moving out. “I forgot to put the one in front of the rent on craigslist.”

“Oh, no. We got it. Each
one
of us is going to have to pay eight hundred. That’s completely reasonable,” I responded.

“No, you don’t
got it
. I don’t know where you girls are from, but eight hundred dollars for this place is obscenely ridiculous.” She rolled her eyes so far back, I think she could see her frontal lobe. “I mean the number one in front of eight hundred. As in eighteen hundred dollars.”

“Wait, eighteen hundred dollars? Each?” Rachel asked. My mouth was so open in shock, I’m sure my chin was resting on the padding in my bra.

“Uh, obviously!” she sniffed. “You didn’t really think a loft in TriBeCa was eight hundred dollars a person, did you? David Bowie used to live here.”

Our hearts sank and we exchanged brokenhearted glances.

“Um, thanks for your time,” I said quickly and pulled Rachel out of there.

We were completely deflated as we slumped into opposite sides of the elevator and watched the numbers decrease as we went down.

“What the crap?” Rachel screeched, breaking the silence as we stepped out of the front door and onto the sidewalk. “What shade of moron do you have to be to not proofread your posts? Didn’t we learn to double-check our work in, like, the third grade? And who cares that David Bowie lived there? He’s not even that famous.”

“Yes, he is, Rachel.”

“Okay fine, so maybe he is. But still, that’s just not cool. And if that place was a thousand dollars over our budget, does that mean we’re going to end up in a place that’s a thousand times less cool?”

I shrugged lamely, too hot to reassure her or correct her algebra skills. Even though we were really only two hours away, I swear, the city felt like the tropics compared to Bridgefield. I could feel the end of my ponytail sticking to my neck sweat. I was totally grossing myself out.

After sweating through only a two-block walk, we decided we needed something refreshing. We stopped into a deli to get some iced tea.

“Sorry, miss, no iced tea,” said the cashier man without looking up from his paper.

Rachel threw up her hands in disgust. “Oh, that’s great. Just perfect! We’re going to spend our summer drinking Mountain Dew in a shoebox.”

“Relax! We’ll find a cool place. That was only the first one. We have a million more to see. I mean, what are the chances that
all
of them are going to be heinous?”

“Fine. What’s next?” Rachel said, devoid of enthusiasm.

I handed her my Diet Mountain Dew to hold and pulled out my list of potential apartments. “A place in the West Village.”

Rach perked up. “That’s like celeb central. I think SJP lives there!”

“That’s the New York spirit, Rach!”

“Here, let me see the map. I’ll take the lead on this one, since you did the rest of the legwork,” she offered as we shuffled back to the subway station.

With Rachel at the helm, we MTA-ed uptown a bit and then, of course, got mind-bogglingly lost.

“Is it me or is every street called Greenwich here?” Rachel asked as she looked for street signs. “I can’t tell if we’re
on
Greenwich Avenue or
intersecting
it—that sign is on a weird diagonal.”

We asked about eleven people to point us in the direction of Christopher Street. I couldn’t tell if we were walking around in circles or if the West Village had a sushi place, an ironic T-shirt shop, and a nail salon on every single block. Just as I was about to ask a twelfth person for directions, we stumbled onto Christopher.

“Finally!” Rachel exclaimed. “We just need to walk west a little bit now. Did you see anyone famous when we were lost? I was too busy looking at the street signs. Jake Gyllenhaal could have walked right past me or something.” She was scanning the block with the intensity of a Secret Service agent.

“Celebrities probably don’t come out when it’s this freaking hot. Humidity does not mix with glam.”

Finally, finally, finally, we found the right building and were buzzed up by a man’s voice.

“That’s weird. The ad was for female students only. I just assumed it was going to be a girl.”

“Well, you know what assuming does? It makes an ass out of the both of us.” Rachel looked at me with all sincerity, adorably unaware of her fumbled joke. This one was getting into the Ivy League next year. I shook my head in disbelief.

We walked into an elegant lobby. I pointed to the brown leather comfy chair in the waiting area. “Me likey,” I said.

Rachel nodded and we hopped into a classy elevator that was dark wood and expensive looking. The elevator doors opened and a man was waiting for us in the hallway. He guided us two doors down into his place. As he turned to open the door and let us in, I surveyed his graying sideburns and leathery skin. This guy was about a jillion years too old to be a student. Rachel was too consumed by the grown-up awesomeness of the place to be concerned with our possibly forty-year-old roommate. “This is better than the last one,” she whispered to me.

I had to agree, the place was swanked out. “So, you’re still at the six-hundred-fifty-a-person offering price?” I asked, trying to sound businessy and older than almost eighteen.

“Yep,” he said, eyes glued to Rachel’s boobs. “But you would have to do your share of the housekeeping.” I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why, but he was totally giving me the yucks.

Rachel was examining some black-and-white photos of the New York skyline and she turned around. “Totally. I can do dishes or whatever.” She went back to checking out the apartment, dragging her finger along the windowsill and checking it for dust. I think she thought that made her look official. “I’m also not a big sprinkler when I tinkle, so no problems there.”

“Maybe I wasn’t clear. I assumed that you would have understood this from the ad. I expect you to perform these housekeeping tasks in the nude.” He said it with condescension, like we were idiots for not assuming he was a total perv.

I almost choked on my revulsion.

“What?” It came out of my mouth as a screech. I stuttered, trying to form a coherent reaction. I turned to Rachel, looking for some kind of help, and she bypassed her “let’s go” finger and gave the guy the middle finger instead. We ran out of there faster than Nicole Richie from a Vegas buffet and headed for the AC of the closest Starbucks. There was one right across the street, so we didn’t have to go far, but the creep-induced fight-or-flight adrenaline could have carried me to the Bronx and back. We collected ourselves at a table by the door, hoping the Birkenstocked college guy behind the counter wouldn’t notice we weren’t buying overpriced mochachocalattadadas.

“Ew! That was freaking scary, Em. I think I need a shower to wash off his creepiness. I swear I can feel it on me. It’s like a wet suit of perv. And what the hell is wrong with you? What exactly did his ad say, Emma?”

I scowled and looked away. “Uh, just that he was looking for ‘open-minded’ and ‘sexually liberated young women.’”

As the words hit the air I realized how absolutely stupid I was for not getting the meaning. I scrunched my face and waited for Hurricane Rachel to unleash its fury.