Wicked Jealous: A Love Story (27 page)

He nodded again.

I couldn’t believe it. Blush had a
date
. With a
girl
. A very pretty girl. Who he had never mentioned to me before. “Oh. That’s nice,” I said. “So it’s a date.”

He blushed deeper. “I didn’t say it was a date. We’re just . . . going together.”

“Are you going in the same car?”

He shrugged.

“Then it’s a date.”

“Why does that make it a date? You and Jason are going in separate cars, and it’s a date. If you and I were going in the same car to the opening, would that make it a date?”

Now I was the one who blushed. “We’re not talking about me and you. We’re talking about you and Aleka. Your
date
.” Okay, why was I getting so upset about this? Had I not just been thinking about the fact that, because he was so cool, Blush didn’t just deserve a date, but a girlfriend?

“Why are you getting all upset?”

“I’m not getting upset,” I replied. Not only was I getting upset, I was lying about it. “I’m just being clear. Clarity is very important.”

“You’re right. It is.”

“Plus, why would I be upset? I have no reason to be upset. It’s a free country. You can go to a gallery opening with whoever you want,” I continued.

He shrugged. “Okay.”

“But what’s making me upset is the fact that you think I’m upset,” I went on. “Because I’m not.”

“Yeah. We’ve established that.”

“Good,” I said as I stood up and marched out of the room, as fast as my heels would allow me.

“Okay, so let’s go over this again,” Max shouted as we drove down Venice Boulevard in his Volvo later toward the gallery, making it so the little bit of maintenance I had put into my hair was completely whipped out by the wind coming from his open windows. “What do you do if he offers to get you a soda?”

I turned to him. “Huh?” As much as I was trying to put it out of my head, I couldn’t stop thinking about Blush and Aleka. She wasn’t even
tall
. She was my height.

“A soda, Simone. What do you do if he offers to get you a soda? We’ve been over this.”

I rolled my eyes. “I thank him and tell him that while that’s very generous, I’ll get my own, so that way he doesn’t have a chance to slip some sort of weird drug into it.”

He nodded. “Very good. And what else are you going to drop into the conversation?”

“That I have a black belt in karate and recently completed a forty-hour self-defense course. Even though that’s not the truth.” Kind of like saying that if you were a guy and you were going with a girl to a gallery opening in the same car but it wasn’t a date wasn’t the truth, either.

He nodded. “Excellent. And if he—”

“Okay, you know what? You need to stop,” I interrupted.

“Okay, okay.” We drove in silence for a bit. “Did you bring a whistle by any chance? I meant to stop at CVS and get you one—”

“Max, I’m serious. You need to stop this,” I said. “You saw his Facebook page. He’s a totally normal high school junior. Not a serial killer.”

“Do you know how many serial killers look totally normal?” he demanded. “Two words for you: Patrick Bateman from that movie
American Psycho
.”

“That’s seven words.”

“Whatever.” He sighed. “I just don’t want to see you get hurt.”

“How could I? You’re probably not going to let Jason get near me.”

“That’s not what I mean. It’s just that . . . he’s, you know, a . . .
guy
.”

“And the point that goes along with that would be . . . ?”

“I just don’t want him to pressure you into doing anything you’re not ready to do. Because it’s the ones who look the most normal who are the best at doing that.”

I looked at him.

“Not like I have any experience doing that,” he added nervously.

“You better not.”

“All I’m saying is that if he’s a good guy, he’ll be okay with going slow.”

While I was grateful to have a brother who cared so much about me (and my virginity), this was getting uncomfortable. “Max, I love you, and I totally get what you’re saying, but can this please be the end of the Very Special PSA?” I asked. “’Cause you’re kind of starting to creep me out.”

“Okay. Yes. Probably a good idea we stop here,” he said, swiping at his red face with his hand. “But you hear what I’m saying.”

“I do.”

We went back to being quiet.

“It’s just that sometimes guys lose the ability to think with their heads, and they—” he blurted.

“Max!”

“Okay, okay.”

Turning on the radio helped stop the conversation. As did the sight of the paparazzi when we arrived at the gallery. (“I guess the fact that Ashton Kutcher tweeted about the fact that he just bought a bunch of her prints gave it a boost,” Max said.)

Inside, the place was packed. Each person was hipper and more beautiful than the last. It was like being on the Ramp at school, but with Botox.

“What a
fabulous
dress!” exclaimed a very tall older woman wearing something that, in most places, would probably pass as a beach cover-up but that here in L.A. constituted high fashion. “Very Joan Holloway from
Mad Men
.”

Apparently, I was going to have to start watching that show, because she was like the fourth person who had compared me to this Joan chick

“I find it very exciting to see young women embracing their full figuredness.”

Unfortunately, because her facial expression remained blank because of the Botox, I was just going to have to take her word about the fact that she was excited. I smiled. “Thanks,” I replied, pretty sure it was a compliment.

“And your hair. Just fabulous.” She pulled over an equally old, equally blank-faced woman who was examining one of Zooey’s photographs with a short bald man wearing a pink-and-white-pinstriped suit and debating what the one-butt-cheek-in-shadow-one-in-light might signify on a psychological level. “Diedre, doesn’t this young woman remind you of the model we had on the cover of the March 1968 issue of the magazine?”

Nineteen sixty-eight? My mother hadn’t even been born then. Exactly how old were these women?

Diedre squinted. Minus any lines around her eyes or between her eyebrows. “She does. She’s like . . . Audrey Hepburn. But with breasts and an appetite.”

As I stood there while the two of them examined me from head to toe as if I were a piece of livestock, I learned that Fiona—the beach-cover-up-wearing woman—had been the editor of
Au Courant
, a fashion magazine similar to
Vogue
way back when, and Diedre had been her second-in-command.

“Beautiful bone structure,” Diedre went on as she took my face between her hands (even her liver spots were elegant) and moved it from side to side.

“Oh, you’re so sweet to say that!” came a voice behind me. “I think she takes after me on that front.”

My eyes widened at the same time as Max’s, who was walking toward me. I knew that voice . . . but why was it in this gallery at this moment? The gallery where I was meeting my date?

A hand shot out in front of me. “Hillary Stone, senior VP, Production, LOL Films. And you ladies are?”

Diedre and Fiona were so confused, there was actually some lineage on the foreheads.

Max stepped up next to me. “Hillary. How’d you—”

“—manage to get on the list after my stepson-to-be told me that he couldn’t get anyone else—not even his
parents—
on the list, even though this is considered
the
social event in town tonight?” she finished. “Easy. I told my assistant to take care of it or she’d be fired.”

“Is my dad here?” I asked. Just what I needed—for my date to meet my entire family.

“Yes. He’s over there in the corner being antisocial,” she replied.

I turned to see his fingers flying along on his phone. From the way that he was breathing through his mouth, I knew that he was probably writing a script.

Hillary took out her own BlackBerry. “I need to add that to the list of things to have this new shrink fix in him—the antisocial thing.” When she was done, she slipped it back in her purse and gazed at me. “Did you get that dress from that bedbug place?”

I nodded.

“It looks—”

“Divine? Don’t you think?” Diedre asked.

“I love the contrast of the blue against your lips. It gives them such a rich color,” Fiona said.

Hillary whipped out her snake compact and a tube of lipstick and quickly put some on. “How about mine? I just got this at Neiman’s.”

The women looked at her. “There’s a somewhat . . .
green
undertone to it,” said Fiona.

As Hillary began to wipe it off with a tissue, Jason walked up to the group. “Hey,” he said.

I turned to face him. His faded-just-right jeans and sapphire-blue polo shirt totally matched his eyes. Did guys think about that stuff as they were getting dressed? I made a mental note to put that on my Things-to-Ask-Blush list. Before I remembered that I had gotten all huffy during our last conversation and probably owed him an apology first. I had Blush on the brain so bad that I had almost forgotten that I had a date with Jason. Which was not cool, seeing that (a) Blush was my friend, and (b) any moment would be walking in with
his
date.

Like, say,
that
moment.

With her long black hair rippling down to her butt, and the pink gardenia that was tucked behind her ear, and the purple sundress that wrapped around her curves just right, it was hard not to notice Aleka. Especially with someone as tall and, frankly, cute as Blush next to her. I waited for her to do something annoying, like flip her hair back and giggle, but she didn’t. Instead, the two of them looked a little uncomfortable with the way that everyone stopped what they were doing to look at them.

“Simone?” I heard Jason say.

I turned to him and smiled.
Focus, Simone,
I said to myself.
You’re on a date with a Testosterone Twit. Tons of girls would kill to be in your position
.
So what if Blush is with a totally hot girl who will probably win the Nobel Prize one day. It’s not like
you
could ever like him. Plus, you need to pay attention to make sure Hillary doesn’t embarrass you.
“Yeah?”

“You look way hot,” he said.

Way hot. I knew it was a compliment, but somehow, when I had allowed myself to fantasize about what my hypothetical boyfriend would say to me, “way hot” was not part of the equation. “Way hot” was way not romantic.

“I’m so glad you appreciate my handiwork,” Hillary said.

I turned to her. “
Your
handiwork?”

“Well, yes. Remember how I took you shopping that day?” She looked at Jason and smiled. “Hillary Stone, senior VP, Production, LOL Films. We met briefly in the parking lot that day. By the way, I’m a
big
fan of your father’s work.
Huge
.”

“That’s cool. You’ll be able to tell him in person, actually.” He turned to me. “I didn’t know when we talked, but it turns out my parents already had plans to come here.” He smiled and lowered his voice. “I told my mom if they embarrass me, I’d kill them.”

As Hillary began to yak away to Jason about Italy, I kept stealing glances at Blush and Aleka. Luckily, there was no PDA going on, but the way that she kept putting her hand on his arm so that he’d lean his head down to hear her seemed awfully familiar. Once when he caught me looking at him, he smiled, and I gave him a (fake) smile back before I put my hand on Jason’s arm. Or meant to put it on his arm.

“Uh, Simone?” I heard him say.

“Yeah?” I said, fake smiling at Blush.

“You, uh . . . I’m not sure . . .”

I turned and saw that I had overshot his arm and my hand was clutching his chest.

“Whoops. Sorry about that,” I said, quickly removing it.

“Hello! Hello!” sang Cheryl as she made her way through the crowd, dressed in a bedazzled Indian shirt over black leggings (“You think with all the Zumba-ing, I’m not going to show off these things?” she said, when Marcia commented one day at coffee that Cheryl never wore anything else). I guess because he had won so many Academy Awards I had thought that Jason’s dad would be, I don’t know, dressed head to toe in black or something equally . . . Academy Award–like, but the guy who was trailing behind Cheryl looked more like a balding chemistry teacher.

I squinted. “Your dad has a pocket protector?” I asked.

Jason sighed. “I told him to leave that at home tonight.”

“Honey, look at how
gorgeous
you are all dressed up!” Cheryl cried as she smothered me in a hug. She let me go. “G-o-r-g-o-u-s!”

“Cheryl, you forget the ‘e,’” said Stan. “There’s an ‘e’ before the ‘o.’”

As an excellent speller myself, I already liked Jason’s dad a lot.

“Stan, sweetie, this is the girl I’ve been telling you about—my Zumba friend.”

Hillary laughed. “I just think it’s
so
cute how Simone is so into irony.”

Because she was so tiny, Cheryl made up for her lack of height with a very loud voice. That, even though the gallery was packed, was loud enough to make a few people turn. Including Diedre and Fiona.

“Oh, we Zumba, too,” said Diedre.

“I find it to be just divine!” said Fiona.