Текст книги "Luckiest Girl Alive"

Автор книги: Jessica Knoll

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

CHAPTER 11

It was an e-mail that, had I been twenty-two years old, fresh out of college, desperate for a job, I would have called up Nell to read aloud. “Oh my God, listen to this!”

Dear Ms. FaNelli,

My name is Erin Baker, and I’m the HR coordinator for Type Media. We have an opening for the Features Director at Glow magazine, and we’d love for you to come in and interview if you are interested. Could I take you to coffee to discuss this week? Pay is competitive.

Warmly,

Erin

I closed the e-mail. I was in no rush to respond because I was not interested in the least. Yes, features director was a major step up from senior editor and I could make more money, but I didn’t have to worry about money, not really. No matter how much they offered me, it would never be enough to make a move to a magazine exactly like The Women’s Magazine, only not nearly as iconic, when LoLo had dropped the fucking New York Times Magazine on my doorstep like a house cat does a headless mouse.

Even though I had written the words “his member” far too many times in my tenure at The Women’s Magazine, there was a recognition in the name that offered me protection, much like my engagement to Luke did. When I tell people I’m in magazines, and they ask where, I never, ever get tired of cocking my head modestly and answering in my best uptalk, “The Women’s Magazine?” That inflection in my voice—have you heard of it? Like those smug Harvard bastards—“Oh, I went to school in Cambridge.” “Where?” “Harvard?” Yes, we’ve all fucking heard of Harvard. I got off on that instant recognition. I did enough explaining in high school, to justify my peasant presence among kings—“I live in Chester Springs. It’s not too far. I’m not too poor.”

I signed out of my e-mail. I’d write this Erin Baker back later, some bullshit, “Thank you so much for thinking of me but at this time I’m very happy in my current position.”

I tapped my moss green fingernails on the tabletop, wondering where Nell was. Several minutes ticked by before I knew she had arrived. The heads turning by the entrance to the restaurant were the first sign. The second was the top of Nell’s head, the most shocking shade of blond steering her right at me.

“I’m sorry!” She folded into the seat. Nell is so tall her spindly legs never fit under the table. She crossed them in the aisle, one bootie dangling over the other, the heel sharp and thin as a talon. It was one of those nights. “I couldn’t get a cab.”

“This place is a direct shot on the one from your place,” I said.

“Subways are for people who work.” She grinned at me.

“Asshole.”

The server came by, and Nell ordered a glass of wine. I already had one, half down. I’d been trying to make it last, since I was only allowing myself two, essentially dinner.

“Your face,” Nell said and sucked in her cheekbones.

Finally. “I’m starving.”

“I know. It sucks.” Nell opened her menu. “What are you getting?”

“The tuna tartare.”

Nell looked confused as she scanned the menu, small as a prayer book in her hands. “Where is that?”

“It’s under appetizers.”

Nell laughed. “I’m so fucking glad I’m never getting married.”

The server returned with Nell’s wine, asked what he could get for us. Nell ordered a burger because she’s a sociopath. She wouldn’t even eat the whole thing anyway. The Adderall would have her disinterested after a few bites. I wish that worked for me, but whenever I took one of Nell’s blue pills, even the occasional night that coke turned into morning in the blink of an eye, my appetite always clawed its way to the surface. The only thing that worked for me was pure, hard discipline.

When I placed my order the waiter said, “Just so you know that’s a very small dish.” He made a fist to show me.

“She’s getting married.” Nell batted her eyes at him.

The waiter made an “ahh” noise. He was gay, tiny and pretty. Probably had a beefy bear he’d hook up with after his shift was over. As he took my menu he said, “Congratulations.” The word was like an ice cube held to an exposed nerve in a tooth.

“What?” Nell gasped. My forehead had creased into that V shape, which it always does right before I cry.

I covered my eyes with my hands. “I don’t know if I want to do this.” There, it was said. Out loud. The admission like the one tiny pebble that dislodged, tumbled down the mountainside, so insignificant it didn’t seem possible the thrashing white avalanche that followed.

“Okay,” Nell said, clinically, her pale lips pursing. “Is this a recent thing? How long have you felt like this?”

I exhaled through my teeth. “A long time.”

Nell nodded. She hovered her hands on either side of her glass of wine, staring into the red depths. In the dim restaurant there was no sign of blueness in her eyes. Some girls need that light, those two bright pools, before you can decide, yes, she’s pretty. But not Nell.

“How would you feel,” she said, and there was a quick flare of her nostrils, “if you called it off. If Luke was one day just some guy you used to know?”

“Are you actually quoting Gotye?” I snapped.

Nell tilted her head at me. Her blond hair slid off the side of her shoulder and dangled, glinting like an icicle on the edge of a roof.

I sighed. Thought for a moment.

There was this one night, not too long ago, when some belligerent guy had called me an ugly whore because he thought I’d cut him in line at the bar.

“Fuck you!” I’d sneered at him.

“You could be so lucky.” The chain around his neck was dancing silver in the lights, and his reptilian skin folded in places it shouldn’t have at his age. If only he had resisted the local Hollywood Tans like I had.

I’d held up my most important finger. “You’re adorable, but I’m engaged.”

The look on his face. That ring’s almost magical powers in the way it emboldened me, protected me from the hurt.

I said to Nell, “It would make me really sad.”

“What about it makes you sad?”

Because when you’re twenty-eight and you live in a doorman building in Tribeca, step out of a cab, Giuseppes first, and are planning a Nantucket wedding to someone with the pedigree of Luke Harrison, you’re thriving. When you’re twenty-eight, single, and look nothing like Nell, hawking those same pumps on eBay to pay the electric bill, Hollywood makes sad movies about you.

“Because I love him.”

The next two words sounded innocent enough, but I knew Nell, and they’d been chosen for maximum impact. “How sweet.”

I nodded an apology at her.

The silence that followed seemed to hum, like the highway behind my house in Pennsylvania. I grew up so used to it I mistook it for quiet. Only noticed it when I hosted a sleepover for the first time with my Mt. St. Theresa friends. “What is that noise?” demanded Leah, wrinkling her nose at me accusingly. Leah was married now. Had a baby she dressed in head-to-toe cotton candy pink for her Facebook albums.

Nell brought her hands together in one last plea. “You know, people don’t care about you as much as you think they do.” She laughed. “That sounded bad. What I meant was it might only be in your head that you have something to prove.”

If that was true, it meant deposits returned, a Carolina Herrera gown sulking in my closet. Doing this documentary without my four-carat tumor, evidence that I was worth more than my previously determined value. “It’s not.”

Nell bore into me with her ink-colored eyes. “It is. And you should think about that. Hard. Before you make a big mistake.”

“This is rich.” I laughed aggressively. “Coming from the person who taught me how to operate every single person in my life.”

Nell’s lips slipped open, moving around words she wasn’t saying. I realized she was repeating what I had just said, back to herself, trying to make sense of it. In a moment her expression changed from frustration to amazement. “Because I thought this”—she circled her hands frantically, calling up all “this” I’d mustered for myself—“was what you wanted. I thought you wanted Luke. I thought this little charade made you happy.” She clapped one hand to the side of her face and sputtered, “Jesus, Ani, don’t do this if this doesn’t make you happy!”

“You know?” I layered one arm over the other. Each a carefully placed barrier to keep her out from where it mattered most. “I asked you here hoping you’d make me feel better. Not worse.”

Nell sat up, cheerleader perky. “Okay, Ani. Luke’s a great guy. He sees you for exactly who you are and accepts you for it. He doesn’t expect you to be someone you’re not. By golly, you should really thank your lucky stars for him.” She glowered at me.

Our adorable waiter reappeared with a basket in his hands. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “You probably don’t want this. But, bread?”

Nell gave him a dazzling, infuriating smile. “I’d love some bread.”

He visibly cheered in her spotlight, the blood dashing to his cheeks and his eyes brightening, sharpening, the way everyone’s do when Nell tosses out a handful of her fairy dust. I wondered if he felt it when his arm bisected the space between the two of us, when he placed the basket in the center of the table. The way the air crackled there, warning.

The weeks passed, pushing New York further from the summer, September only halfheartedly fighting the heat. Filming was scheduled to start, whether I was ready or not. I had a dress fitting, and the seamstress marveled at the gap between my waist and the size six bodice. I’d balked when I first ordered it. A size six? “Wedding gown sizing is completely different from the sizing of regular clothes,” the salesgirl had assured me. “You may be a two or even a zero at a place like Banana Republic, but that makes you a six or an eight in a wedding gown.”

“Don’t order the eight,” I’d said, hoping my horrified expression also explained that I would never shop at Banana Republic.

I was driving “home” to the Main Line on Thursday evening. First day of filming was Friday. The documentary team hadn’t received permission to shoot inside the school, something that brought me relief, but not for obvious reasons. Bradley wouldn’t want any negative press, and my story would certainly give it to them, so that implied the angle the documentary was taking was more in line with my own. I wondered who else the team had gotten, besides Andrew. I’d asked, but they wouldn’t tell.

I’d pillaged the fashion closet the day before I left: Dark waxed jeans, Theory silk tops, suede booties that were neither too high nor too low. I got the accessories editor to lend me a lovely little necklace: delicate rose gold chain, a small bar of diamonds glinting in the middle. It would pick up nicely—tastefully—on camera. I had a professional blow out the messy, trendy waves in my hair that afternoon. The goal was to look simple and expensive.

I was folding a charcoal-colored blouse into my weekend bag when I heard Luke’s key in the door.

“Hi, babe,” he called.

“Hi,” I said, not loud enough that he could hear me.

“You in there?” Luke’s Ferragamo shoes clicked closer, and soon his frame filled the open doorway. He was wearing a spectacular navy suit, narrow pants sewn from a fabric so rich it shone. He put his hands on either side of the frame and leaned forward, his chest expanding.

“Nice loot,” Luke said, nodding to the pile on the bed.

“I didn’t have to pay for it, don’t worry.”

“No, that wasn’t what I meant.”

Luke watched me transfer piles of clothes from the bed into the gaping hole of the bag.

“How are you feeling about this?”

“Good,” I said. “I feel like I look good. I feel good.”

“You always look good, babe.” Luke grinned.

I wasn’t in the mood to joke. “I wish you could come with me,” I sighed.

Luke nodded sympathetically. “I know. Me too. But I just feel bad because I don’t know when I’ll get a chance to see John again.” Luke had been all set to go with me this weekend, but a few weeks ago he’d found out his friend John, who’s been feeding orphans in India or some shit that makes me feel like a plastic bitch for what I do, was coming to New York. He would be here only two days and then he was back in India for another year. He couldn’t even come to our wedding. He was bringing his fiancée, another volunteer named Emma, who was twenty-five. I was instantly wounded by her beautiful name and her perfect age. I still couldn’t believe I was going to be thirty in two years. “Twenty-five?” I’d snorted to Luke. “What is she, a mail-order child bride?”

“Twenty-five’s not that young,” he’d shot back. He’d heard himself and added, “I mean, to get married.”

I understood how important John was to Luke. Even though things were chilly between Nell and me right now, if she moved across the world and came back to New York for two nights, I would drop everything to see her too. That didn’t bother me. What did was Luke’s palpable relief that he was off the hook. That was a pain I couldn’t lie away. I e-mailed Mr. Larson, thinking, You drove me to this. “Want to get that lunch on the Main Line?”

“I love you though,” Luke said. It came out like a question: “I love you though?” “You’re going to do so great, babe. Just tell the truth.” He laughed, suddenly. “The truth shall set you free! Man, I haven’t seen that movie in so long. Whatever happened to Jim Carrey anyway?”

I wanted to tell him that’s a line from the Bible, not Liar Liar. To just take this fucking seriously for once. I was going into the lion’s den with nothing to protect me but a few old green carats on my finger. How could that possibly be enough? Instead, I said, “He did that Burt Wonderstone movie. It was actually pretty funny.”

When I’d asked the director, Aaron, what hotel he’d booked me, his eyebrows had jumped halfway up his forehead in surprise. “We just assumed you would stay with your family.”

“They live pretty far out,” I’d said. “It would probably be more convenient if you got me a hotel in the area. The Radnor Hotel is pretty reasonable, I think.”

“I’ll have to check to see if that’s in our budget,” he’d said. But I knew it would be. No one had said this to me, but I suspected my story was the pin holding this whole thing together. There was no new light to shed on the incident without my version of events. Also helpful was my chest, which Aaron’s eyes seemed to flick to involuntarily.

I hadn’t slept in my childhood bedroom since college, and even then it was only sporadically. I interned every summer, in Boston the summer of my freshman year, and then in New York after that. I tried to spend the holidays with Nell’s family as much as possible. My sleep was heavenly at Nell’s house.

It was an entirely different experience at my parents’ place, where I would oftentimes lie awake almost all night, gripping a silly tabloid magazine in terror. I didn’t have a TV in my room, and this was before colleges dealt out laptops like free condoms at the health center, and the only way I knew how to distract myself from the galloping anxiety, from the disgust that this room, this house, dredged up from the shadowy mine of the past, was to read about the Jennifer Aniston–Brad Pitt–Angelina Jolie love triangle. For me, the only worthy competitor of bleak, starless memory is superficial fluff. The two are successfully and mutually exclusive.

As I got older, and as I made more money, it was like an epiphany—I can actually afford to get a hotel. It was easy to blame on the fact that, when I came home, I brought Luke, and my parents wouldn’t allow us to sleep in the same room. Not even now that we’re engaged. “I just don’t feel comfortable with the two of you sleeping in the same bed under my roof until you are married,” Mom said, demurely, narrowing her eyes at me when I laughed.

I didn’t tell my parents that Luke had backed out of the trip until the very last minute. And over Mom’s hollow insistence that I stay at home, I calmly explained that the production company had already paid for the Deluxe Guest Room at the Radnor Hotel, and it was more convenient for me anyway since it put me only five minutes from Bradley.

“It’s more like ten,” Mom pointed out.

“It’s better than forty,” I snapped. Then felt bad. “Why don’t we go out to dinner on Saturday night? Luke’s treat. He’s sorry about canceling.”

“That is so sweet of him,” Mom gushed. “Why don’t you pick the place?” Then she added, “I do love Yangming though.”

And so I tucked my withering body into Luke’s Jeep (our Jeep, he keeps correcting me) on Thursday evening. Proud of the New York plate. Proud of my New York license. The streetlights caught the bauble on my hand every time I spun the wheel, the collision creating a burst of jade light so sharp it could blind. “Philadelphia. Just a hop, skip, a cab, a Metroliner, and another cab away” from New York City, Carrie Bradshaw said once. It felt so much farther than that. Like another dimension, like a life of someone else who I felt sorry for now. She had been so naive and unprepared for what was to come, it hadn’t just been sad. It had been dangerous.

“So what we’ll have you do first is state your name, age, and how old you were at the time of the”—Aaron fumbled for a word—“the, uh, incident. Let’s refer to it as the date it happened, maybe. So how old you were on November twelfth, 2001.”

“Do I need more powder?” I fretted. “I get really shiny on my nose.”

The makeup artist approached and scrutinized the stage layer of foundation. “You’re good.”

I was sitting on a black stool. The wall behind me was black too. Friday was the day we filmed in the studio, a cavernous room above a Starbucks in Media, PA. The whole place smelled like the burnt, overpriced fuel of diabetic Americans. I would tell my story here, and on Saturday morning, when the students were sleeping off the previous night’s antics, we’d get some shots of me around the outskirts of Bradley. Aaron said he wanted me to point out “places of interest.” The navigational points at which my life became an average before and rarefied after were places of interest now, I supposed.

“Just pretend like it’s you and I, having a conversation,” Aaron said. He wanted to get this all in one take. I should keep going, from start to finish, without any break. “The emotional continuity of the story is important. If you feel yourself getting teary eyed, that’s okay. Just keep going. I may jump in here and there to keep you on track if I feel like you’re digressing. But we want you to just go.”

I wanted to tell him I wouldn’t get teary eyed, but I might get sick. Heaving clear syrupy bile into the toilet, my hand, out the car window had been my way of coping for a long time. (“It’s normal and nothing to be concerned about,” the grief counselor had assured my parents.) I took a deep breath. The buttons pulled on my silk blouse as my chest expanded and retracted.

“So we’re just starting with the basics, like I said.” Aaron pressed the bud in his ear and said in a low voice, “Can I get quiet on the set?” He looked at me. “We’re just doing a thirty-second sound check. Don’t say anything.”

The crew—about twelve of them—fell silent as Aaron counted on his watch. I noticed for the first time he was wearing a wedding ring. A gold one. Much too thick. Did his wife have a flat chest and that was why he couldn’t keep his eyes off mine?

“We get it?” Aaron asked, and one of the sound guys nodded.

“Awesome.” Aaron clapped his hands together and backed out of the shot. “Okay, Ani, when we say, ‘Take,’ I want you to state those three things—your name, your age—oh! And this is important. It should be the age you will be when this airs in eight months—”

“We do that in magazines too,” I babbled nervously. “Use the age someone will be when the issue hits the newsstands.”

“Exactly!” Aaron said. “And then don’t forget to add how old you were on November twelfth, 2001.” He gave me a thumbs-up.

In eight months I would be twenty-nine. I could hardly take it. I realized something that made me brighten. “My name will be different in eight months too,” I said. “Should I go by that?”

“Yes, absolutely,” Aaron said. “Good catch. We’d have to film that all over again if we didn’t get it right.” He backed away from me and gave me another thumbs-up. “You’re going to do great. You look gorgeous.”

Like I was there to shoot a fucking morning talk show.

Aaron nodded to one of the crew members. The room was solemn as he said, “Take one.” He cracked the clapboard, and Aaron pointed his finger at me and mouthed, “Go.”

“Hi, my name is Ani Harrison. I’m twenty-nine years old. And on November twelfth, 2001, I was fourteen years old.”

“Cut!” Aaron shouted. Softening his voice, he said, “So you don’t need to say ‘Hi.’ Just ‘I’m Ani Harrison.’”

“Oh, right.” I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, that sounds stupid. Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize!” Aaron said, much too forgivingly. “You’re doing great.” I swear I caught one of the crew members roll her eyes. The woman had a bouquet of frizzy curls framing her narrow face, the cheekbones probably more pronounced in adulthood, the way Olivia’s might have been.

When they yelled cut this time, I got it right. “I’m Ani Harrison. I’m twenty-nine years old. On November twelfth, 2001, I was fourteen years old.”

Cut. Aaron falling all over himself to tell me what a great job I did. That woman definitely rolling her eyes.

“Let’s do a few where you just state your name, okay?”

I nodded. Quiet on the set, Aaron pointing at me to go.

“I’m Ani Harrison.”

Aaron counting on his fingers to five, pointing at me to do it again.

“I’m Ani Harrison.”

Cut.

“You feel good?” Aaron asked, and I nodded. “Great. Great.” He was all fired up. “So now you’re just going to talk. Just tell us what happened. Better yet, tell me what happened. You don’t have to look directly into the camera either. Just pretend like I’m your friend and you’re telling me this story about your life.”

“Got it.” I fought hard for the smile I gave him.

Quiet on the set. The clapboard came down like a guillotine. Nothing left to do but to tell.