I ball up my sandwich wrapper and stand up. “I’ll see you Monday.”
“Katie, I’m only trying to help.”
“Well, you’re not, OK? I know I fucked up. I made a stupid mistake. But you’re talking like I can’t have a beer with my friends . . . like I should be in . . . rehab or something . . .”
“Isn’t that what that woman at The Line suggested?”
“She doesn’t even know me.”
Her mouth forms into a line. “Right . . . all she knows is that you came to an interview at nine in the morning still hammered from the night before. Silly her to think you might need some professional help.”
My blood is boiling. “Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Come on, Ror. What do you weigh now? Ninety pounds? When’s the last time you ate even half a meal?”
She stares at me so intensely I think she might hit me. Then she picks up the remainder of her sandwich and shoves the entire thing into her mouth, chewing aggressively.
“That make you happy?” she says through a mouthful of food.
We stare at one another, equally furious.
I’m not sure which of us cracks first, but, suddenly, we’re both laughing uncontrollably.
Rory covers her mouth with her hand to keep from spitting out bits of her sandwich. “You know, I think that was our first fight.”
“Had to happen sometime.”
“Truce?”
“Truce.”
Despite, and maybe because of, the fight with Rory, I arrange to meet Greer at the pub. When I get there, she’s sitting at her usual stool being plied with free drinks by Steve.
Steve smirks as he hands me a beer. “Hey, birthday girl.”
“What was that all about?” I ask Greer when he leaves.
“You don’t remember?”
I get a flash of standing on a bar stool yelling, “Who’s the birthday girl? That’s me! I’m the birthday girl!”
“No . . . wait . . . don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
“It’s a good story, lass.”
“Again with the stereotypical Scottish terms.”
“What’s wrong with being a stereotype?”
Steve brings me a shot and a beer back, waving me off when I try to pay him.
“You don’t have to buy me drinks anymore, Steve. I’ve got a real job now.”
“He’s not buying you drinks—he’s trying to get in my pants.”
Steve colors and pretends he needs to wipe the counter further down the bar.
“You’re totally taking advantage of him.”
Greer tosses her hair over her shoulder and gives Steve a lascivious look. “Do you really think I could?”
“Please.”
“Interesting.”
I spin my stool toward Greer. “So, what’s new? I feel like I haven’t seen you in ages.”
“It was your own self-imposed exile, remember?”
“I prefer to think of it as taking a moment. A knee if you will.”
“A knee ?”
“Yeah, you know, in football, when the coach wants to tell the team something, he says, ‘Take a knee.’ It means, literally, get down on one knee, but also, ‘Listen up, I need your attention.’ ”
She frowns. “Why would you go down on one knee to listen to someone?”
“I guess it is kind of strange.”
“And football players do this?”
“Yes, and I mean American football, not soccer.”
“Yes, yes.”
“Anyway, I was taking a time out to process the state of my life.”
“And?”
“And, it turns out my life was extremely shitty.”
“Was?”
I bring the shot to my nose, breathing in the sweet, hard fumes. “It’s on the mend.”
She raises her glass. “I’ll drink to that.”
“Let’s.”
I pour the shot down my throat and chase it with half my beer. As the alcohol spreads through my bloodstream I feel lighter than I have since my disastrous day at The Line.
It’s good to be back.
What with one drink and another, I stumble out of bed the next day sometime after noon. I follow a trail of delicious smells to the kitchen, where Joanne is standing at the stove in her weekend uniform of roomy flannel pajamas, making a sauce.
“What is that? It smells great.” I pick up a spoon and try to help myself.
She swats my hand away. “It’s not for people who don’t answer their phones or return messages.”
“What’s up your butt?”
“I’m not your answering service.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Some girl named Elizabeth called for you a million times yesterday.”
My heart thuds to a stop. “Elizabeth from The Line ?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“You must be joking.”
But Joanne doesn’t joke.
She stirs the sauce vigorously a few times and puts the lid on. “What’s wrong with you? Elizabeth called. She wants you to call her back. Urgently.”
I still don’t completely believe her.
“What does Elizabeth sound like?”
Joanne rolls her eyes. “She sounds like this? Like she’s asking questions? All the fucking time?”
Oh. My. God! It is Elizabeth! She called. She wants me to call her back. Yes, yes, yes!
I’m so overcome with joy I actually hug Joanne. She stands there like a board while I jump her up and down, but I don’t care. Elizabeth from The Line called, and all is right in the world.
I spend the rest of the day in a nervous tizzy. Even though it’s Saturday, I keep checking my voice mail every fifteen minutes to see if Elizabeth’s returned my call. When the sun sets and she still hasn’t called, I help myself to several large glasses of Joanne’s never-to-be-touched-by-her wine in a futile attempt to sleep. When that doesn’t work, I flip on the E! network and watch the latest TGND coverage unfold.
TGND’s been busy since I stopped watching TV all day. She broke up with Connor Parks again and went on a woe-is-me bender. Then a video of her sucking on a crack pipe surfaced. A few days ago, her parents took her to a rugged, lockdown rehab facility up north, where she has to stay for a minimum of thirty days. The footage of her entering a succession of clubs, holding a flame to a pipe, and being dropped off at rehab is played and repeated until even the anchors look bored.
I finally drift off around four in the morning, only to be awakened at eight by Joanne looking pissed and holding the phone out to me with a straight arm.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” I say groggily.
“It’s Elizabeth? From The Line ?”
I grab the phone. “Hello?”
“Is that Kate?”
“Yes, this is Kate.”
“This is Elizabeth from The Line? We met a few weeks ago?”
“Yes, hi. I remember you.”
“We were wondering if you could come in for a meeting about a position that’s come up? Maybe this morning at ten? I know it’s Sunday?”
“Of course I can come in for a meeting! Ten is great.”
“Perfect. Come to the same place as last time?”
We say goodbye, and I spring toward the bathroom to start getting ready. The sudden movement makes my stomach turn over, but I shake it off and leap into the shower singing, for some reason, “I am, I am Superman!” over and over at the top of my lungs as I lather my hair.
Whoever said there are no second chances in life was a moron.
I arrive at The Line’s offices twenty minutes early with my hair brushed, my makeup done, and my clothes pressed. (I pick the suit this time, hoping some of its respectability will rub off on me.) My stomach still feels jumpy, but I chalk that up to nerves. At least I know I don’t smell like alcohol, having loofahed every square inch of myself just in case.
At ten o
n the dot, Elizabeth appears in the Sunday-quiet lobby wearing an extremely short gray skirt and a tight blue sweater.
“Hi, Kate. How are you?”
“I’m great. Thank you so much for giving me another chance.”
“Sure. So, you’ll be meeting Bob? You remember him from a few weeks ago?”
I think back to the sea of faces sitting around the boardroom table. Try as I might, I can’t remember Bob.
“Right, of course. Looking forward to it.”
“Good. His office is two floors down?”
I take the elevator to a floor where the decor hasn’t been updated in at least twenty years. It’s Miami Vice chic, and there’s something kind of seedy about the atmosphere.
Seeing no one, I push the doorbell that’s recessed into the wall next to a solid wood door. A few seconds later, the door buzzes open, revealing a squat, blond man who resembles Philip Seymour Hoffman, which is ironic when you think about it because PSH played a music magazine guy in Almost Famous and . . . Focus, Katie, focus!
“Hi, Bob. Thank you so much for asking me back after . . . well, you know. Anyway, I’m really excited to be here.”
He gives me a tight smile. “Yes, well, when this assignment came up we thought of you . . . for obvious reasons. Why don’t we go to my office?”
OK, so it’s an assignment, not a full-time gig, but everyone has to start somewhere, right?
I follow him along a dark hall to another nondescript brown door. He swipes a key card. The room behind the door has a long row of unoccupied fabric-divided cubicles full of abandoned coffee cups.
“Is this some kind of call center?”
“You might say that. This way.”
He cuts to the right along a narrow passage through the cubicles. As I turn to follow him, I notice a paper banner hanging on the far wall. It reads: GOSSIP CENTRAL: IF YOU CAN’T FIND ANYTHING MEAN TO SAY, YOU CAN FIND THE DOOR.
What the hell?
I realize Bob’s striding away from me, and I hurry to catch up with him. At the end of the passage is another brown door. Bob swipes his key card once again and pushes it open.
“Sorry about all the security. But given the nature of the information we deal with, we have to take every precaution.”
Since when did album reviews become top-secret information?
“Of course.”
Bob points to the chair in front of his cheap-looking desk. “Have a seat.”
I sit down gingerly. When is this guy going to put me out of my misery and tell me what my assignment is?
“So . . . I assume Elizabeth filled you in?”
“Actually, not really.”
“Well, you’ll have to leave immediately because there’s no telling how long she’s going to be in there. Everything’s all arranged, and the staff’s expecting you. It’ll be a minimum thirty-day assignment if all goes well, but I’m warning you, it might be longer. We’ll be covering your expenses and paying the usual per-word rate. We’d like five thousand words, but we’ll discuss the final length once we know what you’ve got.”
He picks up a bulky envelope from his desk and hands it to me. “Here’s the background information we’ve been able to put together. It’s pretty extensive and will hopefully give you a place to start. Of course, you can’t drink or do anything else that’ll jeopardize your stay. If you get thrown out, the contract will be forfeit. Do you have any questions?”
What the fuck is this guy talking about?
“I’m sorry, but I really don’t understand. What’s the assignment? Where am I going?”
Bob gives me another tight smile, but this time there’s an undercurrent of glee in it.
“You’re going to rehab.”
Chapter 3
Houston, We Have a Problem
So, here I am a day after my meeting with Bob, the Philip Seymour Hoffman look-alike, sitting on the smallest airplane I’ve ever been on. Cocktail service begins in five, and our flying time will be a total of forty-two minutes. We’ll be flying at an altitude of twenty-two thousand feet, and yes, the flight will be this bumpy the entire time. Now remember, folks, if the mask falls from the ceiling because of a loss of cabin pressure, place it firmly over your mouth and breathe normally. In case you weren’t aware, there’s no smoking on this flight.
Now, let’s see. Is there anything I’ve forgotten?
Oh yeah . . . I’m on my way to rehab.
Turns out that besides being one of the editors of The Line, Bob is also the editor-in-chief of Gossip Central, an up-and-coming gossip magazine in a world of up-and-coming gossip magazines. Its niche is obtaining extremely inside scoop on celebrities. It made a name for itself when one of its reporters posed as a nanny for a movie star who has a penchant for adopting children from Third World countries. Apparently, a lot of people want to know what brand of underwear she wears. By supplying such details, Gossip Central’s market share grew quickly, and its circulation now surpasses the population of New Zealand. Or, at least, that’s what its website says.
Apparently, Bob had been trying to get something on The Girl Next Door for years. The problem is that she doesn’t hang out with anyone who isn’t quasi-famous, and that includes her hairdresser, makeup artist, and publicist. After several fruitless attempts, the idea was shelved, and Gossip Central moved on to other, more accessible, targets.
And then, TGND went to rehab.
No one was quite sure where the idea came from. Someone (Bob told me there were several people taking credit) shouted it out during the weekly editorial meeting, and the idea immediately caught fire. “We should follow her into rehab.” “That’s perfect!” “Whoever came up with that deserves a promotion!” “It was my idea.” “No, it was my idea!”
Once Bob calmed everyone down, they spent a lot of time discussing the thorny issue of who to send. It had to be someone who could convincingly appear to need to be in rehab and also write a kick-ass article. It couldn’t be anyone obviously connected with Gossip Central, but it had to be someone they trusted. They racked their brains before putting the idea on the back burner when TGND escaped from rehab.
You know the rest of the story. I showed up half-drunk and disheveled for my interview. They loved my work before they met me, but then they met me. TGND’s crack video surfaced, and she returned to rehab. Bob had a moment of clarity: what if the writer actually needed to be in rehab herself? Then she’d fit right in, and might even have a chance of striking up a friendship with TGND. Now who did they know who fit that bill?
So that’s why they called. Gossip Central wanted to hire me to go to rehab to spy on/befriend TGND and write about it. They’d pay the cost of my stay ($1,000 a day) and $2 a word. And if I did a good job (and dried out, he implied), they’d reconsider me for the position at The Line, which still hadn’t been filled.
When I picked my jaw up off the floor, I agreed to do it.
Embarrassingly quickly.
I wish I could say the decision was a difficult one, that the thought of going to rehab undercover to dig up dirt on a young woman in the middle of self-destructing gave me pause. I wish I could say I was indignant that Bob thought I’d agree to do it, or that I could convince anyone I needed to be in rehab. But that wouldn’t be true, and the first step to recovery is admitting that I have a problem, right?
So, OK, I do.
I want to work at The Line so badly I’m willing to do whatever it takes to get into Bob’s good books. And if spying on TGND in a sober environment for a minimum of thirty days is going to get me there, well . . . so be it.
Forty-two minutes and four mini bottles of Jameson and Coke later (hey, I can’t drink at all for the next thirty days, and I’ve never been a good flier), the plane lands, and I disembark a little unsteadily onto the sunny tarmac.
I grew up about forty minutes from here in a town nestled at the base of a ski hill that’s so small it doesn’t even have a real supermarket (just the Little Supermarket, where everything is twice as expensive and
has twice the calories). There’s no McDonald’s, no main street, no town hall, and no courthouse. It does have a liquor store and a Santa’s Village, but that’s about it. Unemployment’s through the roof, the high school’s twenty miles away, and most of the residents don’t ski, despite the highest elevation in the east sitting at their back door.
My parents are an exception: educated and middle class, they fell in love with the outdoor life and moved to the town in a fit of hippieness in the late seventies to set up a commune with some like-minded friends. Six months, four broken friendships, and two divorces later, only my parents remained in the half-finished house nestled on a back road in a back-road town. The house was finished just before I came along. By the time my sister arrived a few years later, we even had indoor plumbing. Mom teaches English at the high school, and Dad is assistant manager at the ski hill.
I left town the day after high school graduation and never looked back. Fame and fortune hadn’t followed, but I was surviving. I was eking out a living in a city that spat out wide-eyed, small-town girls like cherry pits.
I haven’t been home in four years.
When I stumble out of the terminal, a pretty woman about my own age is waiting for me. She has caramel-colored hair that falls to her shoulders and round brown eyes. She’s wearing khaki pants and a dark blue polo shirt with a white Cloudspin Oasis logo on it.
“Hello, Katie, I’m Carol, the intake administrator for the Oasis.” She speaks in the local, drawn-out accent I’ve worked hard to get rid of.
“Hi, Carol. Thanks for picking me up.”
That might’ve come out, “Sanks for sticking me up,” though I’m not exactly sure.
“Have you been drinking, Katie?”
Hello! Of course I’ve been drinking. I’m supposed to be an alcoholic.
“I had a few drinks on the plane to steady my nerves.”
Schdeady me nervsss.
“Well, we’ve got about a half-hour drive to the lodge.”
“I know. I grew up around here.”
She smiles. “Then you’ll feel right at home.”
Absofuckinglutely.
We climb into the van, and Carol maneuvers it onto the highway. I fiddle with the radio dial, searching for the station I listened to growing up. It comes in faintly through the crappy radio. The Plain White-T’s are singing “Hey There Delilah.”
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