Messy (23 page)

“YEEEEEEE-HAAAAAAAW!” SCREECHED THE GIRL
on the mechanical bull, just before it bucked her off and she tumbled onto the padded floor in a flurry of limbs and toned belly flesh. There was a moment of silence as she rubbed her head before she threw up her arms and screamed, “Go Lakers! Touchdooooown!” The spectators ringing the bull pen toasted her and whooped.

And I didn’t think my life could get weirder
, Max thought.

When planning their date, Jake had suggested grabbing dinner at one of his favorite spots before they headed to the House of Blues for the band contest. This was how Max had ended up at the dreaded Saddle Ranch, a cheesy faux-Western tourist trap on Sunset, which Max knew of chiefly from its appearance in about eighty percent of all reality
shows—including, inevitably, its own. In fact,
something
was filming that night. Max knew she’d visibly balked when she saw the wide-area release—noting that simply walking inside was tantamount to consenting to appear on camera—because Jake had stopped to sling a supportive arm around her shoulder and say, “Now
everyone
will get to see how great you are.” Little did he know this was precisely Max’s fear. The idea of his friends, her friends, Molly’s friend Charmaine in Indiana—hell, even some random Jane in Topeka—watching her pretend to belong on the arm of the quarterback was vomit-inducing.

Everyone inside seemed a lot more enthused than she was. Mostly, they were already cast on the show, hoped to be on the show, or had already been on a different show. (Max recognized their waitress, Brandelle—a very skinny, very tan, very fake redhead in a pair of painted-on jeans—from
Real World: Daytona Beach
, on which she had filled up a hot tub with tequila, climbed inside with a straw and four people, and then drank it.) Everyone else was a mixture of sunburned tourists and Ed Hardy enthusiasts.

“This is… really interesting,” Max managed to say to Jake, slumping down in her seat reflexively as two cameramen followed a tattooed bartender and a screaming customer out onto the patio.

“I should’ve called to see if they were filming,” Jake said apologetically. “I just got excited. This is my favorite restaurant in Los Angeles, and Jen would never come with me. She said she was worried that she was going to catch a
fungus from the napkin dispenser.” He leaned across the table. “Are you okay with staying here? We can go somewhere else.”

Looking around the restaurant, with its sawdust-covered concrete floor and vaguely grimy walls, Max reflected that this might have been the only time ever that she and Jennifer Parker agreed on anything. But Jake’s face was so earnest; he was really trying to make her happy.

“No, it’s cool. The people-watching is great,” she offered gamely, watching as another drunk girl climbed on the bull, her lacy pink thong peeking out the back of her jeans.

“It really is,” Jake said, looking intently at Max. “And I am watching you look seriously awesome.”

Max felt herself blushing.

“Um, can you excuse me for a second? I’ll be right back,” she said.

“Sure!” Jake chirped. “I’ll order appetizers!”

“Great.” Max forced a smile and grabbed her caramel suede clutch (picked out by Brooke) before tottering down the hallway on her new knee-high boots (ditto) and banging through the ladies’ room door. She headed straight to the sink and leaned both hands on the cool porcelain, hoping that maybe it would unfluster her.

But the face that looked back at her from the mirror over the sink belonged to a stranger. Brooke had talked her into dying her hair a glossy, warm chestnut and then shaping it into a tidy banged bob that evoked an old silent-movie star from the 1920s; then she’d squeezed her into a
halter top and a pair of dark-wash skinny jeans that may have cost more than Max’s car. She looked sleek and polished, every inch a Maxine instead of a Max, which she imagined was exactly what Brooke had yearned for ever since they’d started this blog project together. Max felt sort of dorky for allowing this—she hadn’t had a hair color other than green in years—but Brooke had cut to her core when she talked about impressing Jake. In all her years of crushing on Jake Donovan, Max had assumed he was unattainable, and so never imagined what they’d do on an actual date. She cursed her lack of psychic powers.

I wonder what Brooke and Brady are doing.

Max rolled her eyes the instant she thought it. Who cared what they were doing? Jake was
amazing
. He’d been entranced by her makeover. Before they’d even sat down, he’d gravely asked Brandelle the Waitress to make double sure Max’s food wasn’t cooked within a foot of any meat. He’d held doors, pulled out her chair, and, best of all, chosen a polo shirt that was satisfyingly snug around his biceps. So the fact that Max had spent the last forty-five minutes feeling more awkward than pants on a cat was entirely her own fault. She silently cursed Molly for making her admit she’d had a curiosity about Brady.

Pull it together. This is what you’ve wanted since you were thirteen years old.
In fact, technically, this was Max’s first real, official, Drive Together in a Car Alone and Eat Dinner Together date.
So stop acting like you’ve been lobotomized and enjoy it.

She returned to the booth to find Jake sitting in front of two massive baskets of fried food. “I ordered curly fries and onion rings,” he announced with a mixture of glee and hesitation.

“Awesome,” Max said.

“Are you sure?”

“Well, yeah,” Max said. “I love onion rings.” She tried to grin. “No meat, right?”

Jake looked thrilled. “Jen always used to get upset if I ordered fried things for her. She said it made her wonder if I was trying to sabotage her diet, and if so,
why
.”

“I’m not on a diet,” Max said, picking up a ring and shoving it in her mouth.

“Good. You shouldn’t be,” Jake declared. His fingers inched toward hers, which had a vise grip on her water glass. “There is nothing hotter than a girl who will eat an onion ring in front of you.”

Jake’s eyes were glowing at her in a way that, even a month ago, would’ve melted off her matte black toenail polish, but tonight Max was grateful for the mouthful of food that kept her from having to respond to his flirting. She scanned the room for good conversation pieces, and settled on a girl wearing a terrycloth tube top who was drinking a Flaming Dr Pepper shot while six guys banged on the bar in unison. “I guess she wore the towel to catch the drips,” Max said. “By the end of the night you could probably wring that thing out into a glass and get drunk just off that.”

“I think I saw Chaz do that at a party one time,” Jake said. “But it was with the towels we kept around the keg.”

“Ew, really?” Max gaped.

“Really,” Jake said. “I think maybe the padding in his helmet needs to be thicker.”

“True.” Max felt that one word kill the momentum. “Um, so speaking of football, how’s that going? Spring scrimmages are soon, huh?” she asked, hoping that this sounded like a smooth segue.

“Yeah, but it’s hard to get motivated before, like, August,” Jake said. “I was supposed to go to the gym with Magnus today, but instead I stayed home and watched TV.”

“That sounds fun,” Max said. “What did you watch?”

He looked pleased. “You’re not mad?”

“Why would I be mad? TV is pretty much my number one hobby. Other than writing,” she added impulsively, as a test balloon.

Jake blew out a breath. “Jen always got on my case about not working out all the time!” he crowed, in his relief totally missing her revelation. “She said it was ruining my shot at getting recruited to a top-tier football school.”

No, being on a terrible football team is ruining your shot at getting recruited to a top-tier football school
, Max thought. Her inner monologue was crabby tonight.

“You have to take a day off now and again,” she said instead, trying to sound reassuring (rather than relieved he hadn’t picked up on her possibly premature comment about her writing aspirations).

“You are so supportive and nice.”

“Thank you,” Max said, feeling bad about her Mind Bitch. Her guilty silence ground things to a halt again.
How do people ever get married, if this is what dating is like? Is it too soon to decide to be a nun?

The girl on the bull was laughing uncontrollably, her giggles getting higher and higher in pitch until she was mercifully bucked to the ground and into silence. “She signed a release, right?” the bull operator called out, sounding kind of worried.

“I really like your hair,” Jake said. “It brings out your eyes.”

Max smoothed it down self-consciously. She kept forgetting it had changed, until she caught a glimpse of herself in random reflective surfaces. “Thank you,” she repeated.

Jake dug his cell phone out of his pocket. “Dude! I totally forgot to check in on foursquare,” he said. “What if some of my bros are in the area?”

Dear Jesus, please don’t let any of his bros be in the area.

“Check it, I’m the mayor of the Saddle Ranch!” Jake crowed, holding out his phone so she could see. “And my Facebook says, ‘Jake is having a great time with beautiful Max at Saddle Ranch!’ ”

Max took his phone from him and looked down at it. “And just now Jennifer commented that she hopes you get trampled by the fake bull.”

“Typical,” Jake said, taking the phone back and beginning
to tap at it furiously. “Oh, and Magnus wrote that he’s going to meet us at the concert!”

“Great,” Max said. She shoved an entire onion ring into her mouth.

“Yeah, he and Chaz went to elementary school with some dudes whose band made it, too. Unsinkable Panty Line.
Super
intense, although the name kind of sounds like something in the Victoria’s Secret catalog.”

“Wow.” Max let out a genuine giggle that, in her heightened nervous state, quickly turned bubblier than she’d intended.
Great, now I sound vacuous. And could I possibly manage to say more than one word at once?
“I’m not sure that Chaz and Magnus are going to be that into hanging out with me,” she ventured.

Jake set the phone down. “I know they’re jerk-offs a lot of the time,” he said. “But they’re not that bad once you get to know them, and they will like you because I like you.”

He flashed his heart-stopping grin. Max felt her Mind Bitch recede a bit. Okay, a lot.

“It’s so great going out with someone I can really
talk
to,” Jake said, his giant right hand finally making it all the way to her tiny left one, which he covered warmly. “I like that. Change is good.”

As she looked into his eager eyes, which pulled her in like a tractor beam, Max felt a tiny flare of optimism. Maybe he was right. Maybe Jake Donovan was the change she’d needed.

“And so then I was like, ‘Bro, he’s never going to learn the pistol offense
that way
!’ ” Jake burst into a truly delighted guffaw.

Max joined in, weakly, and then resumed playing with the straw in her lemonade while Jake launched into Chapter Two of this story, which had begun over s’mores at the Saddle Ranch and then continued as they trotted the half block west down Sunset and across to the House of Blues and found a table near the stage. It had something to do with his football squad, their coach, and the pistol versus the shotgun versus something else that wasn’t named after a weapon. And apparently it was very, very funny. Max couldn’t follow it at all, so she just laughed whenever Jake did. This must’ve been what it was like for Brooke whenever Brady tried to talk to her about, like, the tonal difference between Joss Whedon’s graphic novels and his movie scripts. Brooke hadn’t been kidding: It was
exhausting
pretending to know what someone else was talking about when in fact you were totally lost and thinking about shoes (although in Max’s case, these footwear thoughts were about why she’d let Brooke talk her into heeled boots, because her toes had already developed screaming blisters). Her earlier optimism had dampened somewhat now that she wasn’t under the thrall of his blue eyes. Had he
always
talked about football so much?

“I’m sorry, I must be boring you,” Jake said, as if he’d read her mind. “Blah blah blah about football.”

“Not at all,” Max lied politely, swinging her legs on the tall stool. She was too short to plant her feet against the footrest.

“I’d rather focus on you for a bit,” Jake said, his eyes twinkling. “You said something about writing at dinner, right? What sort of stuff do you write? Screenplays?”

“Oh, you know, just…” she began.

“
Jake!
Fancy meeting you here!”

Max looked up just in time to see a nearly six-foot blonde creature swoop over and plant her red patent clutch dead center on the tall, tiny cocktail table she and Jake had snagged near stage left.

Brooke.

And standing slightly behind her, looking slightly befuddled in cords and a close-cut navy sweater, was Brady.

AT THE SIGHT OF BROOKE
clutching Brady Swift’s arm to her chest like a child cradling a beloved stuffed animal, Max was torn: Part of her wanted to thank Brooke for sparing her any further uncomfortable one-on-one conversation with Jake, and the rest of her wanted to pull out Brooke’s hair for dragging Max into their evening and thus into something that would hurt a very nice guy’s feelings.