Love Street
Page 8
I needed to text him. I needed to reach out. I remembered the first eight digits of his number but not the last two. And there wasn’t any time.
With complete disregard for my father and my dignity, I lifted the hammer and smashed the mystery box to pieces. What used to be beautiful marbled wood was now emotional shards of desperation.
But there, in the middle of a pile of splinters, in what remained of my father’s box . . . was Ryan’s phone number.
I coolly and calmly grabbed my phone and texted him: “Hey u . . .”
The next morning, I woke up in what looked like a crack den. The stale, sticky nachos, the hammer, the torn-apart desk, the smashed-apart box . . .
I was embarrassed and disgusted. But it was all going to be worth it. Right?
I grabbed my phone and flipped it over, covering my eyes. Ready for the best day of my life or the worst day ever.
I had ONE NEW MESSAGE.
It was from my father. “Hope you enjoyed the mystery box :-)”
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How to stop worrying about everything: Fall in love.
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How to stop binge eating: Fall in love.
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How to stop wondering what you were put on earth to do: Fall in love.
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How to stop worrying about work too much, because nothing else matters more: Fall in love.
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How to find something riveting to write about: Fall in love.
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How to gain five pounds and feel more beautiful than ever: Fall in love.
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How to stop overobsessing about your sometimes flaky friend who you love but who isn’t there for you enough: Fall in love.
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How to finally forgive your mother for all that shit she said last winter: Fall in love.
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How to sing a great song even if your voice is terrible: Fall in love.
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How to let go of grudges: Fall in love.
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How to stop thinking that there can’t be anything better than doing ecstasy alone on a Thursday night: Fall in love.
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How to stop listening to podcasts and start listening to music: Fall in love.
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How to wake up on the right side of the bed: Fall in love.
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How to stop smoking: Fall in love.
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How to start smoking: Fall in love.
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How to finally understand why Thomas J. went headfirst into that beehive: Fall in love.
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How to suddenly succeed at your career, because even though you’re trying ten times less, your work is ten times better: Fall in love.
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How to stop thinking, That stuff only happens in books: Fall in love.
* * *
How to fall in love: . . . ?
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Projector image sourced from Pixabay; other images sourced from Unsplash
This story is a tragic one. Mad, rambling, and vagabond. All the good ones are, don’t you agree?
The room was pitch-black, if I’m remembering correctly, until the string of a small light was pulled, illuminating the space in a clinical fluorescent haze. I squirmed underneath the white sheets, my stomach grumbling, my demeanor vacant, haunted, sick. Unable to sleep, I put on my furry pink slippers, buttoned my nightgown, and walked to the door of my assigned room, careful not to wake my roommate.
Quietly, carefully, I tiptoed along the dark hallway toward the common area and grabbed a piece of fruit. A harsh light turned on. I froze.
“What are you doing?” the warden snapped.
“I can’t get to sleep. I don’t think I had enough to eat at dinner.”
“Just go back to bed,” the warden ordered. “You’ll forget you were even hungry in the first place.”
Oh dear, I thought. If only it were that easy.
Early the next morning I rubbed my tired eyes and sat in a chair across from a nurse. The nurse checked my blood pressure, applying the arm wrap tightly. Pump, pump, pump, as my mind did its thing and drifted elsewhere.
Months ago, when I arrived, I was labeled suicidal and unstable. Addicted to and unable to handle love in a healthy manner. Severely susceptible to the fever. I didn’t understand what measurements they could possibly be using when computing the chemical imbalance of unrequited love. They said I had the demeanor of a kicked dog. That I was as fragile as melting ice. They asked me if he ever hit me. He didn’t. But anyone who’s ever been in the thick of the fever knows that crimes of the heart can feel more violent than physical abuse, anyway. During my time here the staff of professionals has diligently tended to my emotional indigestion with a vast array of experimental therapies. As if you could stitch together a broken heart. I was fed healthy, nourishing foods to satisfy my insatiable appetite. Taught coping mechanisms to express my feelings in a controlled manner. Given two yellow pills a day to help me forget him. Why, my little friends were guaranteed to numb it all.
Hours later, after my blood pressure proved shockingly stable (I had chugged beet juice the week previous and counted sheep during the test), I folded my clothes in my room, with one barred window and two twin beds. Frances, my roommate, sat on the other bed, holding two manila envelopes close to her chest. Frances used to shoot love up her arm five times a day. I liked Frances. She knew what it was like to want more, more, more.
Anywho, it was an important day, because both Frances and I were finally being discharged. And Frances stole our files.
Eagerly, I opened mine and stared down at the report. I knew what it would say. That I liked the crazies. The daft ones. Scientists. Professors. Drug addicts. Painters, poets, criminals, saviors. But this report had it all wrong; it said they weren’t the crazy ones—it said I was.
Apparently, I didn’t attract the psychos. Apparently, I was the psycho.
Whatever.
Later that night, my taxi pulled up outside a large decrepit trailer in the armpit of the Midwest. The Ohio River Valley. I had been sent to live with a distant cousin of my mother’s in a trailer park outside a town called Yorkville. As far away from my shadow as I could get, I suppose. Hate it as I tried, I couldn’t help but feel like maybe the whole hospitalization thing was for the best. I felt strong and in control. Far from love and all its disastrous detours. Better than I had in years . . .
After paying for the cab, I stepped into the overgrown mobile-home community full of single-wide trailers. The color of the vegetation was undersaturated, the gardens overgrown. After a few tentative moments, I walked up a stone pathway toward the trailer-park office and passed a gorgeous brown-haired farm boy. He had the same husky voice and nicotine-stained skin as my father. I briefly thought about kissing him. After all, I had always had a little thing for my father. Most girls do.
As I continued staring unabashedly at the farm boy, my cheeks flushed with color, my hips began to slightly swell, a familiar euphoria pumping through my veins. Something horrible was happening. Something wonderful was happening!
I felt the slight beginnings of a peculiar fever. And it spread like the goddamn plague.
* * *
ARIES (MAR 21–APR 19) Has a loved one been giving you the cold shoulder lately? Been in one of their “moods” for far too long? Have you felt as if you’re in a one-sided relationship? Have you been feeling alone? Is it because he broke up with you a few months ago? Are you in a delusional state of thinking he’ll come running back to you once he “figures himself out”? WAKE UP AND SNORT THE ROSES, SILLY GIRL. Go get your hair cut. Short and shocking. Figure out a battle plan, because today JUST MIGHT be the day that you are able to break out of the delusion factory in which you’re trapped. Your emotional hangover will slowly subside only if you begin to let it. The choice is yours.
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TAURUS (APR 20�
��MAY 20) Reach out to your ex today! Cosmic conditions will serve your delusions well! He won’t text you right back, but fear not! You can call him to tell him that you texted. Didn’t pick up? Call him again! Go to his house with a bottle of wine! The world is yours! Don’t cry because it’s over! Cry because “it’s over” never means it’s over!
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GEMINI (MAY 21–JUN 20) Mercury lurks in your 12th House of Privacy, while curious Saturn sanctions your urge to snoop. (You were right. He did fuck that girl.)
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CANCER (JUN 21–JUL 22) If the one you’re dating has suddenly gone cold, you may feel quite frustrated by the whole situation today, especially with the histrionic Leo moon throwing a tantrum in your 7th House of Companions. Purge your urge to go apeshit and end the relationship by creating a reflective interpretive dance instead. Later, when your beau is home from work and relaxing with a glass of wine, turn the volume up loud, turn the lights down low, and put on your one-woman show. If he is still cold after your performance from the heart, you may then go apeshit and end the relationship.
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Because every relationship is a long-distance relationship . . .
Between heaven and hell.
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LEO (JUL 23–AUG 22) Lucky you! The lively Leo moon will guide you to meet your soul mate today. And they won’t text you the fuck back.
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VIRGO (AUG 23–SEP 22) Have you been feeling introspective as of late? Coming to realizations about your magnetic vagina being a tractor beam for lost souls? Suddenly looking back and discovering that lunatics with good hair seem to be drawn to you more than others? This emotional autopsy report makes total sense, since the 8th House of Honesty is circling the Jupiter moon. Listen closely and you may receive an aha moment from above that sounds something like this: “Maybe you don’t attract the psychos. Maybe you are the psycho.”
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LIBRA (SEP 23–OCT 22) Steadfast Saturn creates a harmonious sexual connection to Mercury in your 6th House of Habits. What does this mean, you ask? It means today is a good day to throw your troubles in the compost pile and take life by the titties. Eat that burger, fuck that boy, get that massage. Then turn this “me day” into a “me year.”
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SCORPIO (OCT 23–NOV 21) Your 8th moon is pulling you to revive a flamed-out relationship from the past. Enjoy, but be careful. It’s all fun and games until you’re a single mother with a baby named after the restaurant where you and your ex re-met. (OMG, Applebee is soooooo cute!)
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SAGITTARIUS (NOV 22–DEC 21) Have your sensitivities been at an all-time high this lunar cycle? Have little things like trips to the grocery store ended in you having an existential crisis in the employees-only bathroom? Have you been thinking about God and the afterlife and soul mates and spiders? Has your current lover threatened to leave you over your increased capacity to expel extraneous emotion? Have you tried to talk about the laundry-dryer-ful of feelings in your brain but he turns on football instead? Listen to your friends and run far, far away from him, dear vibrating child. And relax! I mean, sure, you might have an anxiety disorder, but he’s a closed-off, beer-guzzling man-child with three roommates, and they don’t make pills for fuckboys.
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CAPRICORN (DEC 22–JAN 19) The emotional landscape of your love life may be rocky terrain to travel today, causing you to nose-dive into the glory days of your youth, when liking a boy meant you threw rocks at his window and flaking was hard because texting didn’t exist. You long for the days of *69 and physically talking on the phone, but you also know your ass hasn’t picked up an incoming call since 2015. Nostalgia can be a bitch, and everything looks better in the rearview, especially when manipulative Mars is circling your frontal orb. But today is the day you must decide to fuck the past. And fuck it hard.
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AQUARIUS (JAN 20–FEB 18) Have you found yourself trying to fill your love-starved heart with a myriad of poisons and alternate stimulation as of late? Are you nose-diving into a sea of drugs, work, food, creation, or crime to distract yourself from the most legal and venomous addiction of all? Are you afraid you’re addicted to love? Fear not, beautiful soul! This past year has been extra hard on you. You tasted that high for the first time, and nobody expects a crackhead to stop hitting the pipe while in the thick of it. Never get sober, little lover. Just get smarter.
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Image sourced from Unsplash
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PISCES (FEB 19–MAR 20) Run. Run from this new lover now. Do you hear me? GET OUT. This new “thing” is nothing but yet another relationship that will inevitably leave you chain-smoking Camel Lights just to remember what it felt like the last time he kissed you. Next month will be better.
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Paper Dolls
Crossword Puzzle Answer Key
Acknowledgments
Thank you to all the weirdo friends who creatively supported me, modeled for me, and/or helped make this book happen in a various plethora of strange and glorious ways: Afton Reid, Mia Luisa Saltis, Dave Mullen, Kate Danson, Eli Russell Linnetz, Victoria McGrath, Kellie Pokrifka, Kansas Bowling, Parker Love Bowling, Sky Ferreira, Jessica Whitaker, Travis Jackson, Nesta Cooper, Pete Van Aucker, Amy FitzHenry, Christine Daley, @overheardla, Elizabeth Gesas, Doug Wick, Lucy Wick, Charlie Morrison, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, Jenn Yale, Bart Breve, Tiffany Anders, Joe Vogelsang, Annette Lamothe-Ramos, Paige Ferrari, Sarah Zelman, Aidan Pilgrim, Elizabeth Burch-Hudson, Lauryn Kahn. And an extra huge thanks to Meredeth Kast who told me this should be a book and I was like oh hell naw, and she was right.
To my dad, Brian, my brothers Jaron and Joe, and a special hell yeah to my Mummy, Susan, for convincing me that I could take this project on, and for helping me tirelessly and embracing such a strange child.
To my amazing team at William Morrow: Liate Stehlik, Cassie Jones, Jen Hart, Jeanie Lee, Andrea Molitor, William Ruoto, Mumtaz Mustafa, Yeon Kim, Susan Kosko, Andrew DiCecco, Lauren Lauzon, and Camille Collins.
Special thanks to Olivia de Recat for her amazing paper doll artwork.
To my editor Emma Brodie, who has made a dream I didn’t even know I had become a reality, and who never spanked me (that hard) even though I was late on Every. Single. Deadline.
And to my agent Meg Thompson, thanks for believing in me before I believed in myself. I never thought I could make a book, and I still don’t even really remember writing it—so thanks for making the process feel magical like that.
About the Author
LEAH RACHEL lives in Laurel Canyon, California. She spends her days writing, fantasizing, and fucking up her relationships. She’s written movies and television shows for Universal, Lionsgate, Amazon, and HBO. She is currently showrunning the Netflix series Chambers, starring Uma Thurman, which she created and wrote. In addition to all that name-dropping Hollywood fuckery, Leah’s alter ego, @TheYellowHairedGirl, has become one of her most honest and fulfilling artistic expressions.
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Copyright
LOVE STREET. Copyright © 2019 by Leah Rachel. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover photography by Leah Rachel
Beach party by Billion Photos / Shutterstock
Color abstract blurred backgrounds by goku4501 / Shutterstock
Old newspaper background by HERE / Shutterstock
Seamless animal print by Patel BK / Shutterstock
Venice beach pier at sunset by KalpanaBS / Shutterstock
Paper dolls courtesy of Olivia de Recat
Digital Edition JUNE 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-295592-0
Version 05132019
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-283807-0
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