Hidden Gem Short Story Collection (9781301405985) (10 page)

The Durt

July 9

We see plenty of Hollywood
party girls go from the glittering 20-year-old stars of nightlife
to chic 30-somethings who we forget are that old since they still
look and act like teenagers.  Their tabletop dancing still
manages to be kind of cute and sexy.  But then they turn into
40-somethings with too much Botox in their waxy foreheads, who
leave the club at 3AM with their C-list daughters.  And that’s
when you know – they’re one of
those
.  The ones who simply
refuse to grow up.  The former It girls who thought it’d still
be cute to be perma-wasted at forty-six.

Sooo
, raise your hand if you also thought Harper Gunn would be
one of those.

Ha.  See? We weren’t
the only ones.  But boy, has the girl proved us all wrong –
and how!

Not too long ago, Harper
was the wild child whom we spotted at some of New York’s hottest
clubs at as young as sixteen.  When we started seeing pictures
of her smashed or halfway passed out on the front pages of
Pop Dinner
, we said,
“Well, she never really had a chance.”  Her father opened half
of those clubs she frequented and less than thirty years ago, her
mother had been one of the city’s most photographed party girls
herself.  And then there was that messy public divorce of
theirs which saw Harper bouncing around homes for a little bit (and
by homes we mean cushy Upper East Side townhouses, but
still).  We figured Harper was a lost cause.

But not so.  Since
leaving rehab four years ago, Harper has reinvented her life. 
She has written a
New York Times
bestseller on diet and detox and is one of
Manhattan’s youngest but most beloved lifestyle gurus. 
Publications that once ridiculed the girl now gripe about how hard
it is to get reservations at her newly opened restaurant, Agno –
the raw vegan eatery in Flatiron that was recently awarded a
glowing two stars from the
New York
Times
.

Considering her name was
featured on every nasty blog’s annual “Predicted Deaths For Next
Year” entry, it’s pretty amazing that Harper is now known for
promoting life, health and beauty – both inside and out.

Kudos, Harpie, we’re proud
of you girl.  You used to give the gossip world some pretty
hilariously bad headlines but hey, turns out it’s pretty fun to see
you on the good side.

Standing before the clear fridge, Harper
pressed between her eyebrows with her ring finger, flattening
whatever wrinkles were forming thanks to her frown. For beauty
reasons, she made it a point not to frown but today, it couldn’t be
helped.

Normally, she rose exactly ten minutes
before her alarm but this morning, she had woken up right as it
sounded. For her, that was odd. So was the fact that she’d spent
ten minutes rifling through her walk-in closet for an outfit when
for the past three years, she’d been setting one out on a padded
hanger the night before, so she wouldn’t have to think about it in
the morning.

While pulling on her yoga pants, she had
faintly grinned to herself over her dream despite having forgotten
what it was about. And upon ambling downstairs to her glittering
glass and steel kitchen – which she’d designed every inch of
herself – she had walked around aimlessly for a minute, opening her
cupboard to look for the lemons that she kept in the fridge.

Something was just… weird. It wouldn’t sound
all that peculiar to anyone else but to Harper, having something
even a hair off about her morning was bothersome. Disturbing, even
– mostly because every last minute and detail of the past
thousand-plus days had gone exactly according to plan.

While routine generally
bored her fellow twenty-four-year-olds to tears, Harper took
comfort in it. After five straight years of flirting with arrest
and overdose, routine was what kept her trouble-free and healthy
and
alive
– even
if it earned her the label of “a very old twenty-four,” as
described by her best friend, Zoe. Considering the human wrecking
ball she’d been between the ages of fifteen and twenty, she was
more than okay with being called “a very old twenty-four.” It meant
maturity and maturity was the only reason she could, at her young
age, have a bestselling book about diet and detox under her belt as
well as her raw vegan restaurant, Agno, the debut culinary venture
that had recently earned two stars out of a possible four from the
New York Times. Maturity and sobriety had been the main factors in
her road to those successes.

And her famous last name probably did help.
But considering how much it had initially hurt, Harper considered
it a fair tradeoff.

The name Gunn was synonymous to food in New
York, thanks to her father, Hudson, who had spent the past thirty
years opening Manhattan’s most raved about hotspots. That, of
course, included the famous West Village restaurant and lounge,
Lilac. Having spent every weekend of her teenaged years at the
celebrity-frequented spot, Harper had grown up around great chefs
and good food.

And strong drinks.

Drink
, Harper urged herself, staring into her usual but
unappetizing glass of aloe vera juice, lemon, Spirulina and green
tea extract. With a long silver spoon, she mixed together the
components of her daily breakfast concoction. It was what she’d
been forcing herself to down every morning for a year.

But today, the light clanking of the spoon
flashed her back to Lilac – to being the only fifteen-year-old
allowed in the place, swigging the same gin-based cocktails as the
otherwise adult clientele. Then, her father had turned his head
from more than a few displays of her questionable behavior.
Following a messy public divorce from Harpers’ mother, Nadine,
Hudson had suffered from extreme guilt and as a result, years of
chronic parental judgment lapses. Thanks to those episodes, he had
let teenaged Harper into Lilac on Friday nights. He had let her
drink. He had let her claim to have spent weekends at her mother’s
Upper West Side townhouse despite knowing that she’d actually been
elsewhere. He’d also been too lenient about her consistent absences
from school.

But most importantly, he’d let her go on
that fateful trip to Los Angeles alone. Scheduled as just a
four-day visit, he probably hadn’t anticipated it to change the
entire course of Harper’s life.

Standing at her glass
kitchen counter, Harper pressed between her eyebrows again,
laughing at herself despite her frown.
What is going on today?
She had yet
to even bring her drink to her lips and already, she could taste
the lemon. Along with the phantom taste, she was also detecting a
non-existent hint of almond. Cherry, too. And something else.
Harper wet her lips, trying to identify the juniper flavor dancing
on her tongue.

Shit
.

Gin.

Gin, lemon, Maraschino liqueur and Crème de
violette. Her taste buds were hallucinating the zing of her choice
cocktail from the days of Lilac. Back in the day, she had favored
the martini-like drink to such a point that some regulars had
abandoned its formal name – the Aviation – and begun referring to
it as The Harper. Which was kind of horrible considering she was
only fifteen when she’d made the beverage her signature order.

Okay, no more tripping
down memory lane, psycho,
Harper scolded
herself as she downed her aloe and Spirulina. Something was most
certainly off about her day if her mind was delving into memories
of the shameful past she had worked so hard to forget. Especially
with such a busy schedule ahead.

It was Monday, which meant a private session
with her Pilates instructor at 8AM, a 10AM shift at the organic
food co-op, a noontime lunch with her publisher about her next
book, a 4PM phone interview with a Los Angeles yoga magazine and an
evening drop-by of Agno since the kitchen was transitioning into
its seasonal summer menu. There were things to do and people to
see, which meant no time for nostalgia – if her days as a child
alcoholic could really be considered nostalgia.

“
So sunny today,” Harper’s
driver, Ron, remarked as she climbed into the backseat of her Audi,
dressed head to toe in Lululemon with the rest of her day’s outfits
zipped into garment bags and laid out in the trunk.

“
Gorgeous,” Harper
replied, smiling her thanks through the rearview mirror as Ron put
on the usual music she preferred for weekday mornings – a playlist
of downtempo electronic that always set the mood for her Pilates
sessions.

This morning, however, it did nothing for
her. In fact, it made her feel oddly tense – the opposite of its
usual effect. Gazing out at the clear blue sky, Harper took in a
deep breath, trying to remain calm and fight the strange feeling of
a buzz in her head.

“
Shoot,” Ron suddenly
clucked. “We might be a minute late, Miss Gunn. I gotta take Ninth
Avenue down,” he said, nodding at the construction obstructing
their usual route to the Pilates studio.

“
Oh. Okay,” Harper
responded quietly, trying not to look completely horrified by the
prospect of being late. She was never late. Being late was no
longer her thing.
Bad
omens
.
Bad omens
everywhere
.

As the car crept down the odd traffic
cluttering Ninth Avenue, Harper kept her eyes out the window,
determined to soak in the summer sun and find the unflappably
chipper zeal that she usually woke up with.

But her plan backfired when her eyes flew to
the large iron and steel door at the very end of the block.

The Green Room – a club known for its
rooftop pool, wild clientele and frequent celebrity catfights.
Harper had discovered the place at sixteen, during a summer when
Zoe visited from the West coast. It wound up the venue where she
would hold her farewell party a year later, when she decided to
move from New York to Los Angeles.

“
So I can be near you,”
Harper had said to Zoe, feeling only slightly guilty about the
lie.

Fidgeting with the elastic foldover of her
yoga pants, Harper stared at the unmarked façade of the club.

Once upon a time, it had been her second
home – her first home being Lilac. By sixteen, her weekends and at
least a few of her weekdays had consisted of Lilac followed by The
Green Room and then some other spot or two in the Meatpacking
District before the night got taken back to someone’s
apartment.

Back then, Harper’s Mondays had followed a
drastically different schedule. After rising between noon and 2PM,
she and whichever friends she’d woken up around would smoke a joint
and spend an hour deciding on which burger place to go to for a
hangover fix. With day-old makeup caking her face, Harper would
scarf down as many as two burgers since the combination of her
metabolism and partying kept her slim. Then, sometime after her
meal, she would shower and “put on her face,” as Zoe called it. By
as early as 4PM, she would be drinking again.

It was a much looser schedule than the one
she abided by now. Much looser, far less healthy and totally
reckless – and somehow, it had managed to get even worse upon
moving to Los Angeles.

“
Darling. I think we
should skip today or reschedule.”

Harper blinked, her focus suddenly adjusting
as she knelt in front of her Pilates instructor, Elsa, the
rail-thin yet ultra-toned forty-year-old whom she had known her
whole life since her mother had taken private sessions with her
during her modeling years. Harper frowned, hardly remembering when
she’d gotten into the studio. It was as if she had blacked out.

“
You’re off today. It’s
driving me insane,” Elsa said. She had never been one to
sugarcoat.

“
Oh God, I’m sorry,”
Harper apologized hastily, squeezing her eyes shut for a second and
touching between her brows. “How long was I spacing for? I’ve been
all… weird since the moment I woke up.”

“
Did you drink last
night?”

Harper’s eyebrows darted up with surprise.
She blinked. “Um. No, I don’t drink anymore.”

“
I know but you’re acting
off enough for me to suspect a thing or two.”

“
What? No, no, no.” Harper
shook her head so adamantly that her tight topknot unwound. She
gave a bit of a sigh as she gathered her long blonde hair into the
kind of loose ponytail that she usually hated seeing on people.
“No, I definitely did not drink. I promise. You would’ve read about
it in the papers this morning if that happened.”

“
You used to drink alone
in your apartment. Where no one could see.”

“
Elsa.” Harper shot a hard
look. Sometimes she forgot that Elsa was one of her mother’s
closest friends, that she knew more about her than Harper was
comfortable with. “Do you really think I had a drink last
night?”

Elsa shrugged her sinewy shoulders.

“
I wouldn’t,” Harper
insisted, stern. “Life is entirely too good right now for me to
screw it up with even one sip. I’m just having a weird morning,”
she said. “Those happen sometimes,” she added, trying to convince
herself of it as well.

Because it wasn’t just a weird morning.

Her head was light and
foggy – but not unpleasantly so. There was a giggle trying to
escape the back of her throat. She actually did feel kind
of…
tipsy
. But it
didn’t make sense. She hadn’t consumed any substances in the past
four years let alone the last night. Last night, she’d been sitting
among heirloom cucumbers and fennel on the rooftop vegetable garden
of Agno, discussing the new menu options with her head chef and
sous chef. She’d had a bottle of Perrier. She hadn’t even finished
it.