The Awesome Girl's Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men (24 page)

And so on and so on. We argued about this all week, and it spread to the bachelorette party. Nicole barely thanked me when the stretch Escalade pulled up in front of her apartment to whisk us away for a night that was supposed to be fun. Then Nicole refused to eat at dinner because she didn’t want to look poochy for the wedding. “I’m three months pregnant, but if I eat all of this, I’m going to look like I’m eight,” she said.

She and all her skinny actress friends laughed, but I wished I had known Nicole wouldn’t want to eat before agreeing to pay for her and everyone else’s food. Then Nicole hadn’t liked the club I had picked based on Yelp reviews. So we ended up at another club that one of her actress friends suggested. And even though I rarely stayed up past ten most nights, I
nursed one Diet Coke after another until three a.m., while Nicole and her friends danced sexy with guys they barely knew.

The wedding ceremony itself had gone off without a hitch, but I had to put up with Nicole saying how much better the dress would have looked with our grandmother’s pearls as opposed to the diamond pendant that Graham had bought for her because he wanted to relieve her distress over her little sister’s betrayal.

Which was why I was now having a hard time figuring out which was worse. Spending a whole week having to revolve around my completely self-absorbed sister or Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Hell.

Our mother, who had not shown up until the day before, and whose plane ticket I had to pay for, and who had decided to wear a lime-green pant-suit ensemble so loud and bright that I found myself reflexively squinting whenever I looked directly at her, wasn’t making things any better. I could overhear her now, taking credit for the presents table, which I’d set up myself.

“Yeah, it’s nice, ain’t it? You know I wanted everything to be perfect for my baby,” my mama was saying to one of the relatives that had flown from St. Louis to attend the wedding.

“And don’t Nicole look good? She get it from her mama, right?” My mother stomped her yellow-heeled foot and laughed, loud and bawdy. “See, they say they ain’t any good black men out there. But look at my baby. I don’t know why Sharita can’t find a nice man like that. You know, maybe I do. She got that independent head problem. Don’t know how to let a man be a man and a woman be a woman. And she picky, too, like all these little girls want to be these days. But at least she getting paid. I thank the Lord for that, poor thing.”

That was when Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Hell lost. I switched from Diet Coke to champagne. And what seemed like only a few minutes later it was time for the toasts.

I’d tried to beg off from doing one, since I didn’t like speaking in front of large audiences. But Nicole had insisted, so I made my way to the front of
the room, a little unsteady on my feet. However, to my surprise, when I started talking, the words flowed out, clear and excited.

It started out as a warm speech about how happy I was to welcome Graham to our family. But then I saw my sister’s hand move to her chest, as if to say, “These should have been Big Momma’s pearls. Poor me.”

The next morning, hungover on the plane back to L.A., I wouldn’t remember much about the rest of the speech. Only the words “lucky bitch,” “leech,” and “ungrateful”—all used more than once.

And now Thursday had some company. Because my sister wasn’t talking to me either.

Think about the long run. If you got fat, would this man still want you? If you were diagnosed with some disease and couldn’t cook, clean, or have sex for a year or more, would this man stand by you? If anything goes wrong, does this man have your back? If the answer is no, let him go. You know how rappers are always looking for a ride-or-die bitch? You should be looking for one of those, too.

—The Awesome Girl’s Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men
by Davie Farrell

EVERYBODY

W
ith less than three weeks until Risa was to leave town, she had become giddy. As in, played certain cheesy songs despite herself, because they were the tracks of her youth: music by Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Biggie Smalls, all the Bs of the nineties. They provided an optimistic soundtrack for success while she waited for the “Hide Your Frat Boys” tour to begin.

Instead of packing, she scheduled lunches and watched movies and worked on new songs “for the road.” She celebrated quitting her night job to fully pursue her passion with noisy drinks with Thursday and quiet, coffee-soaked brunches with Sharita. Her life felt crazy and full, and she loved it, even though she knew that this was just a dinky little college tour. For the first time since the Sweet Janes broke up, she felt like something was about to happen. Something huge.

When Risa was a teenager in Orange County, she skipped school with a bunch of friends to surf at Huntington Beach. The surf forecast on the radio had said that the waves were supposed to be puny that day, which was why she brought her longboard as opposed to her shortboard. It was more fun to longboard on the smaller waves. But when she paddled out she saw that the next wave was bigger than she’d expected. A hell of a lot bigger. Bigger than anything she had ever surfed on her banged-up Stewart. Her friends stopped when they saw that wave, and then started paddling furiously toward the horizon so as not to get eaten alive by the monster. But Risa didn’t. In fact, she turned her board toward the shore and paddled hard to catch it. She was that sure she could handle anything the ocean threw at her.

The ocean thundered around her as she popped up to her feet and rushed down the face of the wave. Next, she was in the barrel of the wave,
surrounded by water. For a few moments, all she heard was the sound of ocean, but then there appeared inside her head the opening notes of a song with a hard-driving guitar riff. She eventually shot out of the wave, riding the shoulder of it into calm water, before it crashed onto the sandy beach. And when she looked back to the horizon, she saw her friends in the choppy water, hollering and cheering like she was some kind of superhero. The song the Universe delivered to her inside the wave would later become the lead single and the only Top 40 radio hit on the Sweet Janes’ only official album. It still got played on L.A. radio to this day.

Right now, it felt like Risa was paddling out to meet a set of waves, and they looked small, but wait for it … the big kahuna was coming to meet her.

There was just one problem. She’d said good-bye to Thursday and she’d said good-bye to Sharita, but Tammy hadn’t been returning any of her phone calls. So she hunted her down, motorcycling over to her condo and using the call box outside the front doors to buzz her apartment. Tammy didn’t answer. So Risa tried her phone again. Straight to voicemail.

And she started to get a bad feeling, because she hadn’t spoken to Tammy directly since Sharita’s intervention back in May. She was starting to think that maybe she should call her family, just to make sure they’d seen her lately, when—

“What are you doing here?”

She turned around to see Tammy at the bottom of her steps in a light-pink tracksuit. “You coming back from your afternoon jog?” Risa asked her.

But then she saw the cane Tammy was leaning on with her right hand, and the oversized orthopedic shoe she was wearing on her right foot. And why, she wondered, her brain sluggishly working to catch up, was Tammy wearing a scarf around her head?

“No, I had a doctor’s appointment,” Tammy said. She looked around, at the tiled steps, at the palm trees, at the sky, at the other people walking by, everywhere but at Risa.

Risa’s hands fell to her sides. She didn’t want to know. She really didn’t want to know. But she had to ask, “Yo, what’s up with the cane?”

Sharita didn’t know whether to be pleased or annoyed that Risa was the only one calling her for non-work-related reasons these days. On one hand, it was nice that she still had one friend left. On the other hand, Risa never called just to shoot the breeze, which made accepting a call from her feel like the equivalent of opening herself up to an adventure. And she’d never been a very adventurous girl.

Sharita answered anyway. “Hey, Risa.”

“I need you to come over to Tammy’s. Like, right now.”

“Is Thursday going to be there?”

“Yeah, I called her, too, because it’s important.”

“Another intervention?” Sharita asked, her tone bitter.

“No,” Risa said, but she didn’t explain any further.

“Risa, I’m in the middle of
Warehouse 13
. And I’m tired. And I don’t have time for your games. Especially if they involve Thursday, so can we not do this tonight?”

“Tammy has cancer. Is that important enough? Now get the fuck over here.”

Then she hung up before Sharita could answer. Sharita frowned. She had to be joking. Risa had to be joking … right?

But just in case, she got her purse and headed out the door.

When Risa called and told Thursday to meet her over at Tammy’s because it was important, she suspected it might be a joke, too. But Caleb was working on his latest huge project. He only ever seemed to get assigned huge projects these days. This was good, since Thursday still hadn’t been able to find
another job and wouldn’t be able to pay her half of the rent until further notice, but he never had time to hang out like they used to. So joining Risa for whatever crazy scheme she had up her sleeve this time seemed like a good enough way to spend the evening.

“I’m going out to meet up with Risa and Tammy on the Westside,” she called to Caleb.

“Okay,” he called back from behind his work partition. “Have fun.”

“Love you,” she said.

“Love you, too,” he said back.

What she had with Caleb was very cozy. She loved their life together and how comfortable they had become with each other. The complete opposite of her father and mother. It was so nice. Nice and cozy, just the way she wanted it.

So why, she wondered as she walked down the stairs to the parking lot, was she so bored?

Maybe this was what healthy love was supposed to feel like. Like one long, lazy afternoon that would never end. She had never been in love before, had never even been in a relationship that lasted this long, so it could be.

The night before, Caleb mentioned in passing that they should do something really special for their one-year anniversary in October. That was what he’d said. Really special.

And a few weeks before that, when they were shopping at Target together, he’d asked her whether she wanted her future husband to pick the ring or if she wanted to pick it out myself.

“I’d let him pick it,” she’d said, wondering why her heart hadn’t even skipped a beat at that question. “Why do you ask?”

He lifted his eyebrows and answered, “No reason,” in a pretty obvious way.

So she and Caleb were definitely on the marriage track. This was good. He was exactly what she wanted, a low-drama, no-crap, incredibly
supportive white boy. Maybe, she thought on her way over to Tammy’s, I’m trying to sabotage myself with these thoughts of boredom. Yet again. According to Mike Barker, she was really good at that.

She shook her finger at the dark thoughts crouched in the back of her head and let them know,
I’m watching you
.

And later that night, upon her return from Tammy’s condo, in a flood of tears, she found herself especially glad that she had beaten back her doubts about Caleb. Caleb, she decided anew, was extraordinary, the kind of guy who wouldn’t dump her for any petty reasons, the kind of guy who would stand by her through thick or thin. It was in his arms that she spent much of the night crying, unable to wipe the image of Tammy in her pink tracksuit, sitting on her white couch looking tired and haggard, from her mind.

Tammy didn’t actually tell Sharita and Thursday herself. It was Risa, standing behind the couch, who delivered the bad news. Tammy just nodded at the right parts and gave Risa gentle corrections, like, “I only saw four doctors, not five.”

She also said, “Yeah, we sorta do,” when Sharita said, “But black people don’t get skin cancer.”

Tammy, however, didn’t tell them or Risa the full truth of the cancer: that she stubbed her toe while rushing out of the restaurant after her brother told her she would no longer be a spokesmodel for Farrell Cosmetics, more than a year ago. How she’d covered the black sore that appeared on her toe with black nail polish and had begun opting out of pedicures or bi-monthly spa visits. How when the black sore began to spread beyond the cuticle of her big toe, she had started wearing gladiator sandals as opposed to going to a doctor.

She didn’t tell them she spent the past year yearning to be the woman everyone thought she was: beautiful, famous, and carefree. How could she explain that the thought of her doctor, a woman who had been on the USC Song Girls cheerleading squad with her, seeing this ugly mark on her otherwise flawless body filled her with a paralyzing dread?

She didn’t tell Thursday, Sharita, or Risa any of this. Instead she made it seem like a flighty oversight: “The only reason I finally got it looked at was that a head-to-toe physical was a condition of my new contract with Farrell Cosmetics. Yes, it was getting kind of gross looking, but I didn’t think it would be such a big deal. I mean, my toe didn’t even hurt that much.”