by Zara Lisbon
“Remember to call Dr. Campbell if you need refills.”
“I will. Mom, I gotta go, is there anything else?”
“Have you heard from your dad?”
“Nope.”
“Really? He said he’d call you.”
“Hasn’t yet.”
“I’ll make sure he does.”
“No need. Really. Love you, Mom, call whenever, okay? I’ll be here.”
“Bye, angel face. Remember the SPF! Less than 50 won’t do anything for you. But check the bottle for parabens first, you have to check for parabens, otherwise you might as well not wear anythi—”
I hung up and said “Goddammit” to myself, but out loud, then hurried to my feet because the truth was I had run out of my various meds five days ago and had forgotten to get them refilled. I could be forgetful, she was right. I pulled a Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra sweater over my pajamas and clipped a leash onto Princess Leia’s collar. I had an hour and fifteen minutes until the pharmacy closed.
* * *
With its fluorescents and glittering linoleum, the Walgreens on Lincoln Boulevard was the definition of a clean, well-lighted place. For that reason, I felt extremely safe there. Even with the homeless men just outside who towered above me red-faced and practically drenched in cheap vodka. I walked down the middle aisle past rows of brightly packaged razor blades tightly held behind lock and key to the pharmacy where Ruth, in a white medical jacket, saw me coming and unhooked my plastic medication bags off the rack, started ringing them up one by one. Ruth and I were so practiced at this routine that we could do the whole thing without speaking once: credit, yes, I decline to be counseled by a pharmacist, yes, signature, enter, cue receipt print. She put the receipt into a white paper bag with my meds and folded it up neatly, handed it to me with that matte pink smile of hers and a nod.
“Oh, oh, and did I tell you?” A girl in athleisure wear was speaking to another girl in athleisure wear (maybe in their early twenties) near the blood pressure machine with shopping baskets hanging from the crooks of their elbows. Spandex-cotton-hybrid leggings enveloping their sculpted bubble butts, hair wrapped up high in messy buns tied with flat cotton-candy-colored bands. TOMS shoes. Both had nude gel manicures.
“Tell me what?” This girl was wearing blue leggings and an array of rose-gold bangles.
“Guess who moved to Venice?” This one was wearing black leggings and a bronze anklet around her bronze ankle.
“Who?” Blue Leggings asked.
“Eva-Kate Kelly,” Black Leggings said deviously, clearly expecting a reaction.
“Oh, duh. I knew that.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“I thought everyone knew.”
“I didn’t.”
“Why do you care so much?”
“Don’t you remember? She slept with Blake. My ex-boyfriend Blake. While we were still together.” Black Leggings pouted.
“Isn’t she like twelve?” Blue Leggings asked.
“Seventeen now. And kind of a slut.”
“So, what? You’re worried now she lives in town she’s gonna steal your new bae?”
“She wishes,” Black Leggings said with a tinge of concern.
“I dunno, man, she did just break up with Rob Donovan.”
“So?”
“So she’s single and at large. Probably looking for a rebound to mend her broken heart.”
“Oh please, she’s not brokenhearted, they break up and get back together every five minutes.”
“I heard this time’s different.”
“Different how?”
“I heard this time he broke up with her because he fell in love with another girl.”
“Really? Who?”
“Liza.”
“Liza … as in Liza McKelvoy?” Black Leggings gripped on to her shopping basket with both hands.
“Yes,” Blue Leggings assured her, caring a whole lot less.
“No!”
“Yes!”
“Liza fucking McKelvoy? Damn, Eva-Kate must hate that. She must be losing her mind.”
“Probably.”
“Oh my God.” Black Leggings shook her head and exclaimed, “I don’t believe it!” Then the two broke out in a fit of infectious—dare I say malicious—laughter.
I realized I was eavesdropping and receiving information I didn’t want. I slipped away into the open and elegant aisles of Walgreens and surveyed it like a kingdom.
The way Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s feels about Tiffany’s, that’s how I felt—and still do feel—about Walgreens. Nothing very bad can happen in the aisles of Walgreens. I could block out whatever unsettling gossip I had just heard in Walgreens. I walked with Princess Leia past my favorite attractions:
1. The boundless array of hair care products—Pantene to Paul Mitchell to Kérastase—each one promising some form of damage repair or healing properties, the word miracle written frequently, most often in gold.
2. The oral hygiene aisle, almost entirely white, rows of tubes and bottles and boxes that looked like teeth, promising death to germs, radical, inhuman levels of cleanliness, and most importantly, the promise of WHITE, WHITE, WHITE.
3. The face wash aisle bursting with the names and colors of exotic fruits, exotic chemicals. WITH this, WITHOUT that, the labels bragged. Promises of tightened pores and speedy zit reduction and miracle wrinkle zapping. That miracle word again. So many miracles, so many promises. I didn’t care to find out if they’d hold up. I didn’t have money to buy these products, so I was perpetually in a state of having promises being made to me and never experiencing the heartache of having them broken.
See, the zoned-out tranquillity bubble I achieved from roaming the Walgreens floor plan would be popped instantly were I to buy anything. If I bought anything I’d have to go up front to the cash registers, where an infantry of fashion magazines stood tall and proud, displaying the faultless faces of those with fresh fame in various evening-gown-and-diamond combinations, in various power stances and/or elegantly abstract hand poses. Nothing in this life makes me feel so hopeless as these A-list celebs with their big, glossy magenta mouths and their immaculate, satiny skin. They were the gorgeous gargoyles guarding the entrance to Celebrityland, refusing to let me in.
I walked home in the dark with Rob Donovan’s “Your Secret Paradise” stuck in my head and wondered if what I’d heard was true. Had he left Eva-Kate for another girl? Did she hate it? Was she losing her mind? She’d seemed fine to me. What did those girls know, anyway? Eva-Kate Kelly wasn’t the type to get her heart broken, she had more important things to do. Those girls were misinformed, I decided, and resented them on Eva-Kate’s behalf.
CHAPTER 8
DGAF
(Or, Kanye West and Taylor Swift Will Never Have Sex. Like, Ever.)
In a dream, a furiously gloomy dream in translucent shades of green, I was following Eva-Kate out onto the end of the Santa Monica Pier. She wasn’t afraid to step among the rusty hooks and fish guts. She looked out onto the mossy ocean and drained it like Moses. Then she jumped. I woke up sweaty, sick with the feeling that I had lost her.
It took me a moment to get back to reality, and when I did I decided I needed a bath. Our bathtub was Pepto Bismol pink. The tiles around the tub had cracks running through them and the cracks had dirt and mold running through them. I hated this, it made me feel so dirty, but no matter how hard I scrubbed, the dirt always reaccumulated, the mold and moss always grew back. I liked my bathwater scalding hot to the point where I thought maybe it was actually cold, where the water was so hot that it set my nerves ablaze and all I felt was a tingling, buzzing sensation like a million simultaneous pinpricks. It was the exact type of intensity and confusion I needed to shut my mind off, to make me forget the hooks and the fish guts, that I had lost Eva-Kate Kelly, that she was a seventeen-year-old with a mansion and a face that had been broadcast across the planet, that maybe if you think something is true and believe it is t
rue, then it is true. Like my mom: She was having an affair with a patient but telling herself that she wasn’t cheating on my dad. She said if a tree fell in the woods and nobody was around to hear it fall, it did not make a sound, and took this to mean that if she had sex with her patient but nobody ever found out about it, then it didn’t happen. Of course then I found out, and that’s when she explained all this to me, while I sat nestled deep into the couch in her office, like I was just another one of her many patients whose minds she was paid to professionally iron out.
When I started thinking like this, suddenly there would be no up and no down, and I’d gradually, day by day, feel more and more like a sentence written down at the bottom corner of a page, jumbled and slippery and in danger of sliding right off. So I tried to keep straight with the truth, stay on good terms with reality, because let’s just say for now that it was real unpleasant the one time it got away from me.
* * *
Anyway, so I was in the bath and I could see these plump juicy clouds outside the window, dark and marbled, and I hoped it would rain. I remember this because I remember everything about that day, and I remember everything about that day because it was made up of what I now consider to be my last mundane moments of life. I didn’t know it then, but I was about to slip off the bottom of the page and into an incoherent vastness of supernovas, ultraviolet and infrared bursts of gaseous light, nothing solid or substantial to grip or grab on to. Imagine Alice falling down the rabbit hole and the moment she begins to wonder if her feet will touch ground ever again after all.
I washed my hair and soaked until my fingers wrinkled, then drained the tub and dried off, wrapped myself in a fuzzy purple robe from Old Navy. Despite the hot bath, my mind was still reeling, sizzling, so I put Gossip Girl on the living room flat screen and tried to zone out. I watched all of season one while eating a full tube of chocolate chip cookie dough and then cleaned the entire house from top to bottom. I used Lysol and Clorox bleach to scrub down all the surfaces and tried to imagine that advertised 99.99 percent of bacteria burning up on contact. I spent the day like that. I microwaved a burrito and then forgot to eat it. I deleted 433 photos from my phone that were taking up unnecessary space. I brushed Princess Leia’s hair. I read an article in Nylon magazine called “Twenty Other Girls Under Twenty.” I ordered a unicorn-shaped phone cover online using my mom’s credit card she left for me to use in emergencies. I watched the sunset from my bedroom window with Princess Leia and tried to listen for the crickets that hid out in the wires and woodwork. Princess Leia heard them and tried fruitlessly to hunt them down.
I was so tired from trying not to think all day, and with the sun down and a sugar crash coming on and the cricket lullaby, it was becoming less and less appealing to keep my eyes open. But according to the clock it was barely eight thirty and so I couldn’t go to sleep just yet, it would have been too sad. So I got my MacBook and started looking through I Know What You Did Last Night. It was a newly posted set called “Hot Mess Time Machine” that took place at an upscale karaoke bar with red leather couches and gold-framed record covers from the eighties on the walls. There was an Emma Stone look-alike in black leather pants posing with a bright magenta-colored drink, and then an Emily Ratajkowski look-alike in a Rolling Stones T-shirt (or maybe it actually was Emily Ratajkowski, the real one) singing into a microphone while the lyrics to “Hold Me Now” by the Thompson Twins appeared on a bright blue screen to her right. The next photo was of Eva-Kate, by this point a familiar face, but I felt like I was looking at her for the first time, actually seeing her now. She wore a hat with a wide brim that hid her eyes so that her pale glitter-glossed lips, the black velvet choker around a slender blue-white neck, were the focal point of the shot. She wore a black fur coat over a leotard with skeleton ribs painted on. She was juvenile, vulnerable but 100 percent carefree among a sea of veteran socialites with practiced poses and cooperative fabric patterns. She herself had all the experience necessary to photograph like holier-than-thou Hollywood royalty, but she chose not to. She went about the party acting like each camera flash had caught her off guard, and as a result in pictures she looked clumsy and unprepared, like a newborn deer. And just like a newborn deer, her aesthetic came off as adorable and charming. She knew what she was doing.
* * *
Just then an eruption of music bounded over the waterway. I went to the window and saw a trail of neon and suede filtering into the front gate of Eva-Kate Kelly’s mansion just across the canal. I glanced compulsively at my phone (a quick and easy comfort in the face of insecurity) and was surprised to see that it was ten o’clock. Two hours had passed since I first wanted to go to bed. How long had I been staring into the computer screen? Where had that time gone? And where was Princess Leia?
“Princess!” I called out, seeing that she wasn’t in my bedroom with me anymore. “Princess Leia!” I walked out into the living room and found her stuck hanging halfway out the window. She had to have hopped up onto the coffee table to reach, but then couldn’t fit all the way through the opening in the glass where night air was now slithering in ribbons.
“Yo. Girlfriend. Are you serious?” I laughed, scooped her up by the belly, and set her back down on the hardwood floor. She looked up at me with her mouth open and tongue hanging out, tail wagging slowly back and forth. It wasn’t an excited tail wag, it was a hopeful tail wag, one that said “I hope you’re not mad at me for trying to sneak out again.” Like a teenager who had waited for Mom and Dad to fall asleep before she snuck out in search of that big world outside. Like I should be doing. How was it that I ended up the one kid who didn’t have any parents to try to sneak away from and no legitimate reason for staying in?
“Come on, we’re getting ready for bed,” I said to her, and she followed obediently to my room, then curled up on the red-ringed rug and sighed deeply. I left my curtains open while I changed into baby-blue pajamas, not because I’m some sort of twisted exhibitionist but because the thought of closing them—the thought of hiding my body from the world—just hadn’t ever crossed my mind. For a sixteen-year-old girl, I dwelled very little on my appearance. I watched my friends vying for male attention and felt bored. I couldn’t figure out why they scrutinized themselves, dutifully altered themselves on a daily basis, just so that some boy might or might not lust after them. As if somehow male attraction increased our value! As if their gazes could validate us! I mean, had girls seen the guys at our school? Surely these gangly mini-men with bad skin and body odor and generic-as-hell fashion sense were not qualified to glance in our direction, let alone determine how we felt about ourselves.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I was Queen Confidence when it came to body image, I just didn’t spend much time thinking about it one way or the other. My whole life people had called me pretty, and I’d agreed with them. I figured if as a girl my job was to look pretty, then my work there was done. And, when it came to boys, the very last thing I wanted was extra credit.
“Man I can understand how it might be kinda hard to love a girl like me.” Rihanna’s voice recorded over synth organ reached me from across the canal, the opening lyrics to Kanye West’s “Famous.” The beat dropped and Kanye started in.
I used to be a Kanye West fan. The College Dropout, Late Registration, Graduation … I was all about these albums. When he called himself an artist and a genius, I agreed with him. I still agree with him, actually, but this lyric from “Famous” and the reignited feud that followed kinda broke my heart. For those of you who don’t remember: In 2009, Taylor Swift’s “You Belong with Me” won Best Music Video at the VMAs, and when she went to accept her award, Kanye drunkenly took the mic from her and said, “Imma let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best music videos of all time.” Nineteen-year-old Taylor went backstage and cried, but soon after, he apologized, and in her then-magnanimous heart, she forgave him. Seven years later, as the story goes, Kanye called her up and asked if he could use her name in a song. She gave him her blessing.
But when the song came out on his 2016 album, The Life of Pablo, she was horrified. Yes, she’d given him her permission to use her name, but never did she approve of him claiming that he “made that bitch famous.” The internet lashed out at Taylor, calling her a liar and a hypocrite for giving her blessing and then acting like she hadn’t. This attack on Taylor was majorly unfair. It is one thing to use her name in a song and another thing entirely to degrade her as a woman and attempt to undermine her success as one of the most essential pop stars of our time. And, my personal opinion: How dare he pretend that interrupting her award speech was the cause of her fame. Where was he in 2008 when she was nominated for Female Vocalist of the Year at the Country Music Awards, or when she won Country Female Artist that same year at the American Music Awards? What about 2010 when Fearless won Album of the Year at the Grammys? And besides, if he made her famous by stealing the spotlight that night, then how’d she get up on stage—beating out Beyoncé for Best Music Video—in the first place? Oh right, because she was already famous.
And don’t get me started on the phone call that dug up all this buried drama. If Kanye had called Taylor up for an innocent chat, a courtesy call between friends, then why did he have his wife record it? If you guessed because he intended to set Taylor up from the beginning, then you’re correct. He knew she’d approve on the spot and he knew that when he released the altered version she would react negatively on a public level and then he’d be able to swoop in with his little recording and make her look like a sneaky bitch trying to use him to elevate her public image as an innocent—albeit tenacious and unbreakable—victim. By releasing the video of her condoning the lyric “me and Taylor might still have sex,” Kanye and the ever-loathsome Kim Kardashian made it look like Taylor had secretly given him her blessing, only to publicly shame him for it later on. So, if you can follow: They plotted to make her look bad by setting her up to look like she had plotted to make him look bad. And they call her the snake? No, no. Make no mistake, true snakes in this story wear Yeezys.