“No,” I say, pushing him off me, and pulling my legs up to make a barrier between us. “I don’t … I don’t want to be here.”
Stef sits back and quickly arranges his hair. Always the cool guy, clearly. “No problem. Where do you wanna go, babe? I’m heading to the Bahamas on Friday, why don’t you come with me?”
“No,” I say, climbing unsteadily off the sofa. Where are my boots? “I want to go home.”
“Fine,” he says, flicking a switch that takes him from caressing to cold. Spoiled brat guys do that, I’ve noticed, when you tell them you’re not going to sleep with them. They think it’ll make you feel bad and immediately yearn for approval and kindness again by dropping your panties. Sadly for him, I’ve played that game too many times. He gets off the sofa. “I’ll take a leak, and we’ll talk about it.”
The moment Stef is in the bathroom, I leave the apartment. It’s past 5:00
A.M
. I was awake and working this time yesterday. God, that feels so wrong. I should be at work now. I should be picking Toto up from the commissary, making her salads, driving to Manhattan.
I’ve really fucked up.
The Manhattan streets are gray, windy, and freezing, and by the time I find a cab and get back to Rookhaven, the sun is up. Oh, God, I meant to work today. I need to work every minute I can to earn enough to pay Cosmo back. How can I have not even have thought about that once all night?
Shivering, I tiptoe into Rookhaven.
Shit. Voices in the kitchen. Madeleine and Julia, I’d guess. I try to sneak up the stairs without being heard, but then—
“Pia? Wow, looks like it was a good date!”
I turn around. Madeleine and Julia, both in jogging gear, ready to hit the streets in their perfect and capable way, and then go to their jobs that they’re perfect and capable at and come home to their perfect and capable lives.
“No,” I say. “It wasn’t. I fucked the date up, and he’ll never talk to me again, then I went drinking, things got crazy, I did drugs and went home with some random dude, and now I’m missing a day of SkinnyWheels, so Cosmo will probably just slice off my toes one by one or something. Hey, if you’re going to ruin your life, do it properly, right?” They are both staring at me, open-mouthed with shock. I can just imagine what they’re thinking. “Yes. I’m a fucking loser, okay?”
Before they can reply, I turn around and march upstairs to my room. Somehow I get the energy to shower and wash the stickiness of the night away and then—finally—I climb into bed.
The confident coke buzz is long gone, leaving me exhausted, but my brain is still racing in that jittery, anxious, cokey way, not settling on any one thought for long, just spiraling ever-downward. Aidan, Eddie, Toto, Mike, Jonah, Bianca, Julia, Angie, Madeleine, Coco, Cosmo, Nicky, my parents … I can’t find a single thought to comfort me. Everything is too complicated, too hard.
My mind continues to jump unhappily from thought to thought until, sometime around 7:00
A.M.
, I edge into a dreamless sleep.
CHAPTER 23
It’s early evening, and I haven’t gotten out of bed yet. I’ve been awake for an hour. Maybe two or three. I can’t tell. All I know is that the light was coming in the window when I woke, and now it’s not. I can’t bring myself to move.
There’s a knock at my door.
“Pia?” It’s Julia. “Emergency house meeting. Kitchen. Now.”
I open my mouth to talk, but nothing comes out.
“Pia? Are you awake?”
“Yes!” I finally get the words out. “Just getting dressed.”
That confirms it. A house meeting in my honor. I fucked up.
Again.
I haven’t exactly been a stranger to feeling bad over the past few weeks. Just about all of it self-inflicted and avoidable. But nothing compares to this. It’s a mixture of self-pity, regret, self-flagellation, and good old-fashioned misery, with a dash of hangover for added spice.
Without thinking, I pick up
The Best of Everything
from my nightstand and open it.
“Whenever you’re miserable,” Sidney said, “it seems as though you’ve always been unhappy and you remember all the bad and disappointing things that have happened to you. And whenever things are going wonderfully well it suddenly seems as though life has never been so bad.”
Goddamnit. This book keeps reading my damn mind.
I get up and pull on jeans and a frayed men’s Prada shirt that I think Angie stole from an ex-boyfriend. Oh God, last night. Oh God, today. Oh God, my past and my future are a mess.
I’m on the edge of an abyss, staring down, about to fall in, and I’ll never find my way back, ever, ever again.
Jules probably wants to kick me out. I bet that’s what the house meeting is about. I wouldn’t blame her.
Sighing, I head downstairs. Everyone is sitting soberly around the kitchen table, staring at me.
“Pia…” starts Julia.
“Is this an intervention? I swear I don’t need one,” I say. No one laughs.
“We just wanted … we wanted to talk to you,” says Julia gently.
“I’m sorry I was rude this morning. I wasn’t, um, myself.”
“We’re worried about you. We feel like you’re having…” Jules bites her lip.
“A breakdown,” says Madeleine.
I close my eyes and sigh. “It’s not a breakdown. It’s just … I fucked up. Again.”
Coco hands me a chocolate chip cookie still warm from the oven. Sweetness means love, I think, and smile at her. She smiles back.
“Thank you. I thought I was a new, improved Pia, but I’m not. Everything I touch turns to
merde
.” I sigh. “I’m just gonna call my parents. I can’t do it. I can’t make the money back.”
“Why do you think that now? You were so positive all week!” says Coco.
“I don’t know.” I stare into space, thinking. “I guess seeing Eddie reminded me of how I felt when he rejected me.…”
“Who the hell is Eddie?” asks Julia.
“Just a guy. A guy I went out with a long time ago. A mistake. Just like going on a date with Aidan was a mistake, and the loan was a mistake, and SkinnyWheels was a big giant fucking mistake,” I say. “You wanna hear something funny? Eddie dumped me on August 26, which is why I always get as drunk as I can on the anniversary. That was the night of the housewarming, which was why I was dancing on a table while deep-throating a bottle of Captain Morgan, which got me fired, which got me the job at Bartolo’s, which got me to the Brooklyn Flea, which was why I ended up buying Toto and getting into debt with a loan shark. It’s like a chain reaction from hell. Mourning Eddie on August 26 is why I’m in this whole entire mess.”
“I think you’re wrong,” says Angie quietly.
“What?”
“You’re wrong. I don’t think you mourn August 26. You celebrate it. You just don’t realize it, because it suits you, in some fucked-up way, to pretend Eddie was the perfect guy who looked into your soul, or whatever the hell you think he did, and saw that you were undeserving of love. But it’s not true.” She pauses. “He was an uptight control freak, Pia.”
“What? No he wasn’t!”
“He made you a study timetable and updated it every night.”
“He was helping me be a better student!”
“He kept you away from me that entire ski holiday.”
“He didn’t like drinking!”
“He chose what you wore, he made you check every decision with him first, he tried to control everything you did! If you ask me, the only reason he broke up with you was because he knew it would be too hard to monitor everything you did when he was at Berkeley and you were at Brown. He was a fucking pain in the ass, Pia. And he didn’t know you. Because anyone who really knows you can’t help loving you just the way you are.”
Silence. And suddenly, I don’t know what to say. Because she’s right. He did do all those things. And yet …
“I was a mess.” I sound as uncertain as I feel. “I was a total mess, and he fixed me, I was a fuck-up, I was—”
“You were a normal kid, Pia. A teenager doing her best to survive her reality, that’s all.” Angie’s voice is shaking with intensity. I’ve never seen her like this. “You know what I think makes you act like this? Your secret belief that you’re not worthy of happiness. You’ve gotta forgive yourself for the coke and the cheating and all that shit, Pia. You bury it so deep that I bet you never even really let yourself think about it, and yet that guilt influences everything you do. No one cares what you did when you were fourteen.”
“My parents do,” I say in a tiny voice.
Angie sighs. “They care more about what you’re going to do with the rest of your life.”
Julia clears her throat. “Uh … excuse me? What coke?”
“What cheating?” asks Madeleine.
“And exactly what happened with Eddie?” says Coco.
Two hours later, I’m all talked out. And, for the first time in years, I feel light.
“It won’t happen again,” I say. “No more drugs. Ever. I promise.” Suddenly, what I’ve done really sinks in. “But I can’t believe I missed another day of SkinnyWheels. I’ve only got two weeks to make thirteen thousand dollars.” I let out a hysterical laugh. “Let’s face it. It’s not gonna happen. I can’t do it.”
“Of course you can!” says Coco.
I shake my head. “I’m gonna call my parents. Get them to bail me out. Pay off the loan. Go work as a PA or whatever the hell they want me to do. This food truck thing was just a really stupid idea.”
“That’s it! I am so fucking over your attitude!” exclaims Angie, standing up so fast her chair knocks over.
“What?”
“I’ve known you for twenty-two fucking years, Pia, and I’ve never seen you as happy as you’ve been the past few weeks. So excuse me if I don’t want to sit here, listening to you make pathetic excuses and accepting failure as inevitable because you don’t want to try. You’re the master of your own downfall, Pia, you always have been, and you are again.”
I want to say something, but I can’t talk. I just stare at her, helplessly.
Angie walks to the doorway, turns, and looks at me. “Call me if you decide to stop feeling sorry for yourself. I’d love to help. In the meantime, I’m out of here.”
She disappears, and a few seconds later I hear the front door slamming.
Julia, Coco, and Madeleine look as shell-shocked as I feel.
“She’s right,” I finally say. “She’s totally right.”
Julia looks at me. “You should…”
I nod. “Yeah. I know.”
When I get to the front door, Angie’s already at the bottom of the stoop, lighting a cigarette.
“Angie!” I shout, running down the steps. “Angie, you’re right. I know you are. I’m going to try. I promise.”
Angie takes a drag of her cigarette, without looking at me. “Sorry I lost it in there. It’s so not me.”
“No, it was the right thing to do.”
Angie grins wryly. “That’s why it’s so not me.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“Do we have to hug now, or some shit like that?”
“Yes,” I say. “We do.”
Angie rolls her eyes, but we lean in and hug each other tightly. Angie’s so much slighter than I am. I always think she’s taller and bigger because of her personality, but she’s so thin I can feel her ribs and shoulder blades. Suddenly I feel protective of her.
“Can we talk about you now? And you can tell me what’s been going on with you?”
“Fuck, no,” she says. “Everything’s fine now, anyway. I’m meeting up with Mani in half an hour. I’ll see you later.” She hoists her bag over her shoulder and strides off down Union Street.
I’m walking back up the stoop when I hear a voice behind me.
“Pia!”
I turn quickly. It’s … skank-face Bianca?
What does she want?
“You’re okay,” she says in relief. “When your Twitter went silent today, I thought maybe…”
Suddenly I see that she’s a mess: pale, jumpy, with mascara smeared around her eyes.
Looking over her shoulder, she runs up the stoop and pushes me into the house, closing the door behind us.
“Cosmo,” she says. “Cosmo told me you borrowed from him, too, and I’m so sorry you found him through me, Pia, I really am.”
“What?”
“I’m leaving,” she says, her voice shaking. “I borrowed over eighty thousand to start Let Them Eat Cake. Originally I was just going to make artisan cakes, I swear, but then I heard your low-carb high-protein idea and I knew it would work, so I copied you, too. Anyway, I’ve already missed an interest payment, and I can’t … I can’t face him again. I’m not making money as fast as I thought I would, he’s already increased the amount I owe, and then he … I’ll never…” She swallows anxiously, unable to get the words out.
“He hurt you?” I finally say. “Nicky? Was it Nicky?”
“Nicky? Nicky’s the nice one,” she says, taking a packet of cigarettes out of her satchel with trembling hands.
Bianca’s not just upset, she’s terrified.
“Where are you going?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “I just wanted to tell you to watch out. Don’t miss a payment, don’t let him get anything on you, and most of all don’t let him into your house. Okay?”
“Okay,” I say.
“Promise me!” she says. “He’s not what he seems. Just pay Nicky and get it over with and get away from him.”
“I promise!” I say. “I’m sorry, but why are you telling me all this? Last time I saw you, you weren’t exactly my biggest fan.” I pause. “And I’m pretty sure you destroyed my truck the other night.”
Bianca sighs. “I don’t have a lot of, uh, women friends. That’s just the way it is. And yeah, the red paint thing was me. I’m not sorry. It was revenge for Let Them Eat Cock. But being responsible for bringing …
that
into your life…” She shudders. “I had to warn you.”
And with that, she opens the front door, runs down the steps two at a time, and jumps into a waiting cab.
Now I know what I have to do.
I have to work harder than anyone has ever worked before.
CHAPTER 24
This is it.
My last day of working under the shadow of my debt.
The last two Sunday payments were flawless: I opened the door with all the girls standing behind me, handed Nicky the envelope, watched him count it, and watched him leave. Without saying a word.
I’ve worked twelve hours a day, every day, with Jonah (my new employee) by my side.