The Awesome Girl's Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men (50 page)

I thought I had poured my heart out on the guitar-driven record that Jam Rock would be releasing before the end of the year, but apparently I had even more to say. I spent a lot of time on top of my roof, strumming my guitar and writing down lyrics as I thought of them.

I grazed all day on things I liked: olives, cheese, bread, hummus, and salami. I hadn’t touched a cigarette since Tammy asked me to stop smoking. I often found myself watching DVR recordings of
Yo Gabba Gabba!
at four a.m.

I’d gained fifteen pounds, and despite the dull ache in my heart, I’d never been happier. Sometimes I even thought that I might be able to love somebody again. Maybe ten years from now, maybe ten months, maybe ten days, maybe ten hours. I didn’t know. I was playing it by ear.

The day of the wedding came faster than expected. This was my first time traveling outside of North America. I had always imagined that my first time would be on tour as a rock star. And I was a little disappointed, but ah, well … there was always next lifetime. The next time I’d do this life shit right, I decided. I’d pick up a guitar even earlier, I’d marry the reincarnation of Tammy, because gay marriage would be legal by then, and I’d travel the earth with her by my side. Next lifetime.

As it turned out, Ennis was, like, a rich Scottish lord or something or other, and I’d be staying in his family’s castle. Okay.

Thursday met me outside the hotel’s graveled entrance and hugged me while a bellhop took my bags upstairs.

“Can you believe this?” she asked.

“No, I can fucking not,” I said because, really, who fucking could? “Where’s Mike?”

“He got called in for some pick-ups at the last minute,” Thursday said. “So it’s just us.”

I was glad she didn’t bring a date, because for the next two days it was like we were in college again. Nicole, her husband, Graham, and Sharita’s niece did the whole tourist thing with Sharita’s mom, while the three of us did a bunch of leisure stuff, like getting massages and having long meals in the castle’s restaurant.

But mostly we talked about everything from politics to Tammy’s death to Thursday’s issues with not wanting to marry Mike.

“I mean, all I hear about are celebrities cheating on their wives, and falling off the addiction wagon,” Thursday said. “Why would I want to sign up for that?”

She had a point, but Sharita said, “If one of us was involved with somebody who refused to marry her like you’re refusing to marry Mike, you’d tell us to dump them.”

“True,” Thursday said. She got quiet and glum before saying, “Let’s change the subject.”

So we talked about stuff that wasn’t Mike. Then suddenly it was time for the wedding.

Thursday and me weren’t attendants, but we did help Sharita get ready. She looked beautiful in her lace sheath gown with her hair in a simple updo that I did for her the morning of, since Scotland wasn’t exactly overflowing with black hairdressers.

“You look beautiful,” Thursday said, echoing my thoughts.

Sharita looked at me. “Why are you crying, Risa?” she asked.

She asked because I wasn’t exactly one to cry at weddings, but I couldn’t tell her why I was really crying. I couldn’t say, “Because this is it. This is
where our friendship as we know it ends. No more sitting around, talking for the hell of it. You’ll have kids. We’ll probably never spend an entire day together again, unless we’re at the Smith College reunion, and even then it won’t be the same. This is the end of an era. The end of us. And I already miss you.”

Instead I looked down at my kilt-and-maroon-leather-jacket ensemble and said, “I’m crying because I would have looked so dope walking down the aisle in this.”

Everyone laughed and then everyone hugged. And I thought to myself,
This isn’t so bad. We had a good run.

A really good run.

THURSDAY

I
had seen some happy brides in my life, but I had never seen anything as radiant as Sharita’s face when she walked down the aisle wearing Benny’s blue-and-black plaid family tartan sashed around her lace-covered wedding dress.

She looked so content, so confident, like she knew that she was marrying the best person on the face of the earth. It filled me with both hope and jealousy. That’s what I wanted, to face marriage with certainty and without one ounce of fear that the person I was agreeing to marry would smash my heart into pieces. Love was supposed to be solid and comfortable. Davie Farrell had been right. Love shouldn’t be too much drama in the first few months. You shouldn’t have to compromise your friendships for it—even if Tammy had harbored ulterior motives for wanting to keep Mike and me apart. Love shouldn’t make you feel like you’re driving off a cliff. There were so many things wrong with Mike and me, so many things that could go wrong.

“
Don’t be pathetic!”
my mother reminded me in the wings of my mind.

No, I thought, as Sharita and Benny exchanged Scottish wedding bands, there was no way that I could marry Mike. So I think it was pretty easy to understand why my heart dropped into my stomach when I stood up to cheer after Sharita and Benny sealed their vows with a big kiss and saw Mike standing on the other side of Sharita’s sister and brother-in-law.

Our eyes met and he smiled, mouthing, “Surprise,” as a guy playing the bagpipe preceded Sharita and Benny down the grassy aisle.

Mike had finished the pick-ups in Louisiana earlier than anticipated. This never happened. “I mean, ever,” he said. “It must be fate.”

So Mike decided at the last minute to hop on a plane to Scotland and surprise me.

I was very, very surprised, but … “I’m glad you came,” I said, and I meant it.

Since it was Benny’s castle, we were able to use the private reception room despite our small number, and the castle’s on-call DJ even came around to play some music. So even though there weren’t that many people there to celebrate, after dinner and drinks and a heartfelt toast by Benny that I couldn’t understand, we all ended up on the dance floor.

About ten songs in, just when people were thinking about going back to their seats (Sharita and Benny) or getting more drinks (Sharita and Benny’s moms) or taking over the DJ duties (Risa), a Rick T song came on. This track was one of his few non-political ones. It was called “Challenge” and had been written by my mother specifically as an ode to b-boys. To this day, it could still be heard at breakdancing events across the world, and sometimes showed up in silly commercials or in movies where some kind of competition was involved.

“Are you ready for this challenge?” Mike yelled over the music, twisting into a classic b-boy stance.

I looked at him. “You know I’m Rick T’s daughter, right?”

“And I’m playing him in the movie,” he said. “I don’t care who you are. I can take you.”

Now these were fighting words. I mean, you could practically see a tumbleweed roll between us. Everyone stepped back off the dance floor to give us room, waiting with bated breath to see what I would do.

Well yeah, I loved Mike. And yes, I owed my entire career to him. But c’mon …

I wasn’t going to let him talk to me like that.

With precise movements, I took off my heels. A cheer went up from the other people on the dance floor, and they gathered around us in a circle, watching as I proceeded to match Mike, move for every eighties move. We waved, we cabbage patched, we wopped, we backspinned, we roboted. And maybe I was Rick T’s daughter, but Mike had grown up in
a place where breakdancing was a way of life. We were too evenly matched, and when the song was winding down, there was, alas, no obvious winner.

I stood there panting and laughing and feeling so silly, and Mike looked like he was in the same boat, but he wasn’t breathing as hard I was. In fact, when he hugged me to him, he was still able to talk. I knew this because he whispered two words in my ear. “Marry me.”

“
Don’t be pathetic! Don’t be pathetic!”

My heart sank, because I knew then that we wouldn’t even get to have the remainder of our time in Scotland together. “I can’t.”

He stepped away from me. “Hmm,” he said. Then he smiled, his lips tight, his eyes bitter. And he walked away. Just walked away.

The music was still playing, a mid-tempo track now: “Only You,” an English electro-pop song from the eighties that I distantly recognized.

But no one was dancing. They were all looking at me.

“Is everything okay?” Sharita asked.

This was Sharita’s special day. I didn’t want to ruin it. I wanted to smile and be happy, because that’s what my friend deserved. “I just need some air,” I told everyone and ran out.

“Don’t be pathetic!”
my mother warned me.

Something weird was happening. I came to a stop outside the reception room, and put my hands on my knees. It felt like I was having a heart attack, my chest had so tightly constricted. And I felt cold, woozy, and nauseated.

“Don’t be pathetic!”

But then the sound of Mike’s laughter after we finished dancing came back to me, which triggered another memory. My last comic gig, and the random guy laughing in the back. I had thought it had been Caleb at the time, but I now knew that Caleb would never have laughed like that at a comedy show. He was too cool for that, too reserved to ever risk be the only one laughing at a bombing comedian’s show.

No, it had been Mike. Of course it had been Mike. Mike who thought I was funny even when I wasn’t. Mike who had believed in me even after I had given up on myself. Mike who had supported my writing career no-holds-barred, even before I’d known that I still had one in me.

My mother was screaming now.
“Don’t be pathetic! Don’t be pathetic! Don’t be pa—”

“Shut up, Mom,” I whispered out loud.

The screaming voice in my head came to an abrupt stop, and I could feel her ghost staring at me from my mind’s eye.

“You’re dead,” I told her with more fierceness than I have ever told anybody anything in my life. “But I’m still alive. And you know what? Who cares if I humiliate myself loving Mike? Who cares if I agree to marry him and it blows it up in my face?
He’s totally worth it
.”

I waited for the voice to say something back, but for once my head was quiet. My mother had nothing to say. And I realized what I should have realized years, months, even just a few minutes ago. I was the only one in charge of my life now.

I ran after him, up the stone stairs to our room. But he wasn’t there. I ran back downstairs. He was Mike Barker, a huge black movie star; it couldn’t be that hard to find him in a castle in rural Scotland.

“Have you seen Mike Barker?” I asked the lady at the front desk.

The lady eyed me suspiciously.

“He’s my boyfriend,” I said.

The woman pursed her lips. “Well, he’s not on the premises right now.”

“Where did he go?” I asked, panic rising in my chest. I had to fix this. Like right now.

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“I’m his girlfriend,” I said again, hysteria closing in.

“Then you should know where he went, shouldn’t you?” she said, with a prim look.

Let me say this: I loved my time at Smith, loved the company of women. But while there, I had often observed that women liked to play by the rules. And if you wanted a rule broken, you usually had to ask a man, in this case a man who hadn’t been able to take his eyes off of my chest even as he was opening the door for me when I first came to the castle a few days ago.

So I took my barefoot self and my fourteen years of feminist training over to the doorman and said, “I will show you my tits if you tell me where Mike Barker went.”

I wasn’t sure if “tits” was a term they used in Scotland, but he must have gotten the gist, because he garbled something back in Scottish.

“What?” I said. “Speak really slowly, I don’t understand Scottish.”

“We sent him to the Hilton hotel in Edinburgh,” he said so slowly that he could have been speaking in slow motion.

“Thank you,” I said with the dignity of a queen.

Then I opened up the front of my shirtdress, lifted up my bra, and flashed him. “Do you mind calling me a cab, too?”

The clerk at the front desk of the Hilton wasn’t nearly as prissy as the one at Benny’s castle. “Oh, I’m sorry, love, you just missed him. He dropped off his bags and said he was going for a walkabout in the city.”

A walkabout in the city. I wished I could call him, but my phone didn’t work in Europe. Mike had offered to put me on his international plan, but I turned him down, not wanting to take on the burden of an expensive cell phone contract if we broke up.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. I had been so stupid about him.

I was about to start looking for an Internet café so that I could Skype him, when I rounded the corner from Lothian Road to Castle Terrace street and saw it.

I walked toward it, not quite believing what I was seeing. But as I got closer to the top of the street, I could see that yes, yes, this was a farmers market.

In a trance, I walked through the market, which was throbbing with tourists and locals alike, but in the distance I could see the back of someone’s head. He was wearing a suit, like the one Mike had been wearing, and a fedora, like the man in my dream had been wearing.