Party Girl

by Anna David

  “You do, too,” I say, and mean it. I’d never really noticed how pretty she was before.

  We start walking in sync, and I notice that our legs are literally taking strides that are the exact same size. It reminds me of how women who spend a lot of time together get on the same menstrual cycle—supposedly, foul as it is, because their bodies subconsciously smell each other, and then adjust—and it seems surprising that after so much time apart and so many changes, Stephanie and I should be in the same groove in any way at all.

  “Stephanie, I want to apologize to you for being an asshole,” I suddenly say.

  “Please, Amelia. I’m the one who wrote you that foul note. Why don’t we just forget everything that happened and move on?”

  I stop walking. “In a second. But first let me just say that I’m sorry for always making everything about me—what I want to do, where I want to go, who I want to talk to when we’re there. Kissing Gus that night was the ultimate selfish act, and I’m so sorry.”

  Stephanie looks pleasantly surprised. “I miss you,” she says, starting to head up the path again, with me just a step behind. “It was hard not to call you. And then, when I heard about what happened at work, and you going to rehab and everything, I literally couldn’t stop myself from calling.”

  “I miss you, too, Steph,” I say. We stop walking and I throw my arms around her. “I’m really sorry for the way I’ve acted,” I say, feeling tears sting my eyes.

  She surrenders into my hug. “Me, too. Can we be friends again?” I nod, and I know she can feel my nod because my head is cradled against her neck. After a few seconds, we disentangle and I ask her about Jane and Molly.

  “Molly’s good but Jane is thoroughly immersed in the whole coke scene,” Stephanie says, shaking her head. “We’ve completely lost touch.”

  “That’s sad,” I say and mean it, genuinely hoping Jane finds a place like Pledges and knowing that if she’s like every other addict I’ve met, my calling and telling her about it would probably only piss her off.

  Stephanie and I continue up Runyon and even though I did this walk once before, I was seriously hungover at the time and didn’t notice that you can see almost all of Los Angeles from the top.

  “God, this is stunning,” I say.

  Stephanie nods, but looks distracted. Then she blurts out, “By the way, I’ve cut back a lot on drinking myself.”

  I nod—I’d kind of expected her to say something about her own drinking habits, assuming I’d be judging them now. “The way I look at it, I’m the one who lost the privilege to do that stuff—not anyone else,” I say. “So please don’t think I’m going to be some antidrinking Nazi.”

  I’ve thought a lot about this because when I first got to rehab, I couldn’t stop declaring every person I thought about a complete and utter alcoholic. But I’ve come to learn that alcoholism and addiction is a self-diagnosed disease and that it doesn’t have much to do with how much someone drinks. An alcoholic personality is one where the person is massively self-involved and always wants to be the center of attention but still has low self-esteem—“the piece of shit in the center of the universe.” An alcoholic is someone whose life is unmanageable as a result of drinking and using. And for however much Stephanie and I used to party together, I’m the one with that personality, not her. I learned at Pledges that there’s a big difference between alcoholics and heavy drinkers.

  We continue to walk and then Stephanie stops suddenly. “Oh, I almost forgot to tell you—I got promoted to managing editor.”

  “Oh my God, that’s amazing.” I’m so accustomed to taking other people’s success as a personal affront, like they’ve received something I should have had—no matter whether I was qualified for it or even wanted it myself—that it feels foreign to be genuinely happy for her. “Congratulations.”

  “It’s crazy—the less I care, the more they reward me. I’m the very definition of failing up.”

  It occurs to me then that Stephanie maybe isn’t as unambitious as she pretends to be, and that perhaps she acts self-deprecating around me because she knows I compare myself to everyone and will thus feel bad. “That’s ridiculous,” I say. “You’re about twenty times smarter than anyone you come into contact with, so you don’t even have to try to succeed. That’s why you’re always getting promoted.”

  Stephanie smiles but looks at me somewhat quizzically. “Okay, who are you and what have you done with Amelia?” she asks and we both laugh.

  “Hey, congratulations,” I hear as I walk back to my folding chair. It’s a few hours after my walk with Stephanie and I’ve just taken a sixty days sober chip at Pledges. “That’s quite an accomplishment.” As other people take their chips, I glance at the person talking and realize I’m staring into the face of Damian McHugh, the boy-next-door sitcom star with a drinking problem that’s gotten more ink than his career. He’d been going through his very public battle with the bottle—throwing up in bars and licking the faces of reporters—while I’d been an inpatient at Pledges and though we’d all jokingly talked about “saving a seat” for him there, I hadn’t expected him to simply show up one day to shake my hand for getting a chip.

  “I’m Damian,” he says, holding out his hand.

  I’m about to say “I know” before remembering how uncool that is. “I’m Amelia.” I smile and shake but he doesn’t let go of my hand. “Nice to meet you,” I add, taking my hand away.

  Just then, the meeting starts breaking up and people begin their rush outside in order to get as much nicotine as possible into their systems as soon as humanly possible.

  “Want to go smoke?” he asks. I nod and follow him outside as I marvel at how surreal my life has become—writing about celebrities going to rehab one month and smoking with them the next. Damian walks past the clusters of people smoking right outside the meeting doors and toward the basketball hoop, lighting a cigarette and holding the lighter out for me.

  “You know how when some people get sober, they start glowing and shit?” he says suddenly. “You really seem to have that.”

  “Thanks,” I respond, taken aback. Is this a special sober pick-up line? I wonder, deciding that if it’s not, it should be. It seems like the polite thing would be to tell him that he’s glowing, too, but it would be an outright lie and outright lies aren’t escaping from my lips with ease anymore. “So did you just finish up the thirty-day program?” I ask.

  He nods. “Yeah, at the Malibu Pledges. But I like the meetings better here.” He stares at his cigarette as if it, and not me, asked him the question.

  “And?” I ask. “How did you like it?”

  He blows smoke rings. “About as much as I figure I’d like open-heart surgery,” he says.

  I can’t help but laugh. It’s actually an appropriate analogy if you thought about it, but I got the feeling Damian hadn’t. “Really? That much?” I ask.

  “If I needed the open-heart surgery in order to survive,” he adds, grimacing.

  “I see,” I conclude. “Miserable but necessary.”

  “Something like that,” he says, eyeing me as he tosses his cigarette butt on the ground and smashes it out with his Nike Airmax–encased foot. “You?”

  “Actually,” I say, “I loved it. I feel like I’ve been given a whole new life.” I know I sound like a walking cliché when I say things like this but I don’t know how else to explain how different everything has become.

  “Really?” Damian asks, looking at me skeptically. He gestures his head toward the meeting room. “Don’t you feel a little like all of this is…I don’t know…sort of cultlike? Like they’re trying to brainwash us or something?”

  I shrug. Of course, I’d heard people say this kind of thing before—to the point where I pretty much had a standard response. “I guess,” I say, “but my brain really needed some washing.” I smile to try to alleviate how annoying my response must sound to him but at the same time realize that talking to this guy who’s paid, like, $10,000 for every second he’s
on camera is about as stimulating as examining an ant farm—and having the ants crawl up your arm.

  He smiles and takes a step closer to me. “Say the word and we could be naked and in my pool in ten minutes,” he says.

  Stunned, I feel positive I must have misheard him. “What?” I ask.

  “Say the word and we could be in my pool in a heartbeat,” he repeats, editing out the nude part, and I realize that Damian has, indeed, asked me—a girl he met under five minutes ago whose name I feel certain he hasn’t retained—to leave an alumni meeting on a sunny afternoon and go home with him, assuming that his celebrity—and, I guess, the fact that he has a pool—would be enough of a selling point.

  “Thanks,” I say, “but I’m going to have to pass.”

  “No one has to know,” he says. “I mean, don’t you want to just get out of here and away from all these people?” He lights another cigarette.

  I look up and see Tommy walking over with Vera trailing behind. Then I glance back at Damian. “You know, I really don’t.” I gesture toward one of the all-female smoking groups. “But I’m sure you could find someone who would.”

  Damian nods. “Cool,” he says, not looking even the slightest bit perturbed by my denial. I smile and start to walk away. “Hey, congratulations on your sixty days,” he adds as he waves. Is this really how things work? I wonder as I watch him walk up to the girls smoking. When I glance back and see a blonde girl with a scarf on her head nodding at him and smiling, I have to conclude that it is. Even in Culver City, we’re still in Hollywood.

  18

  I’m sitting at the Starbucks smack in the middle of the gayest part of West Hollywood staring at a blank screen and sipping the remains of my grande latte when Adam walks by. He doesn’t see me, just marches right by and goes to wait in line, and my first instinct is to duck and hide. I can’t really believe I’ve joined the ranks of people who sit in coffee shops with laptops—easily as established a Hollywood cliché as the casting couch—but when I had sat down to write my first column at home this morning, I panicked. I had spent so many nights in the same, cat hair–filled, stuffy apartment completely high on coke, and the four walls seemed like they were going to descend upon me as I stared at my computer screen. And then a thought came to me, as clear as if I were a cartoon character and it was printed in a thought bubble printed over my head:

  I could call Alex.

  Even though I’d deleted his number from my BlackBerry, I still knew it by heart. Would I ever forget it? And that’s when I started to panic. We’d talked a lot in rehab about how the obsession to use gets removed at a certain point and after a few days in Pledges that had basically happened to me. But there in my apartment, with a new lease on life and a fantastic dream job to do, the thought of doing cocaine popped into my head like it was the most natural thing in the world.

  And that’s when I realized I had to get out. Grabbing my laptop and cigarettes, I drove over here, and even though I know it’s good that I’m out of my place, I can’t help but feel like one of those i Book to ting poseurs I always judged so harshly.

  But then I remind myself of what Rachel always tells me, which is that what other people think of me is “none of my business” and that what they’re really thinking probably isn’t as bad as whatever it is I imagine they’re thinking, anyway. So when Adam walks by again and I know I could blend right into the marked-down coffee mugs if I don’t say anything, I call his name.

  He turns around and looks surprised. “Amelia,” he says. He says it softly.

  I haven’t seen him since he left my apartment the night we made out, and for a split second, I feel myself about to surrender to a shame spiral. But there’s a thought I’m having about Adam that is thoroughly distracting me from how ashamed I feel.

  Roughly translated, the thought is that he’s adorable.

  How come I never really noticed his olive skin and square jaw before? And why did I fail to note that he has the exact body type I’ve always been drawn to—tall, boyishly lean, and not overly muscular? I don’t have much time to ask myself these questions before words just start tumbling out of my mouth.

  “Look, I’d really like to apologize for the last time we saw each other—the night of Steve’s party,” I start to stammer. “I was a mess and—”

  Adam smiles and holds up a hand as a gesture for me to stop. “Don’t worry. Come on, we all have nights like that.” He suddenly gestures toward the empty seat in front of him. “Can I join you? Would I be interrupting?”

  “Not at all,” I say, sliding the seat over to him. “I’d love it.”

  Adam looks at me as he sits and our eyes stay on each other long past when they should. “My God, you look amazing,” he says. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look so good.” His green eyes peer into mine, and then he takes a breath. “What bothered me about the night we hooked up wasn’t the fact that you were high,” he says. “Or, I should say, what bothered me more than the fact that you were high was hearing after the fact that you’d also hooked up with Gus.” His eyes stay on me the entire time he talks.

  “I know, but that didn’t mean anything,” I say.

  His eyes flicker over me and he looks the slightest bit cruel. “You and Gus or you and me? After a while, isn’t it hard to tell the difference between which ones mean something and which ones don’t?”

  “No, it’s not,” I say. I hadn’t planned to tell him about being sober, and feel wholly unprepared for some kind of “this is me now” speech but I can’t seem to stop myself. “I have to tell you something.”

  “No, hear me out,” he says. “I really liked you, and that hurt me.”

  “But I get it—”

  “It’s just that…I don’t know, Amelia. You’re such a cool girl, but I don’t know…. You’re wild. And while I love that—it’s part of what attracted me to you from the beginning—being around you that night made me realize, I guess, that I’m not.”

  There’s a pause, and I realize he’s done. “Can I talk now?” I ask.

  He nods. “Yeah. Sorry about that rant.”

  “It’s okay,” I say, subconsciously putting my hand on top of his before realizing what I’m doing and snatching it back. “It’s just that I’m now a reformed wild woman. I’m sober.” I glance down and then force myself to look him in the eye. “And, well, I’m not at the part of my recovery where I start apologizing to everyone yet, but can I just say that I’m sorry for the hurtful and silly things I did?”

  He nods, looking extremely surprised.

  “The fact is, I had a great time with you that night, and it wasn’t about the coke,” I continue. “The coke was actually the only thing wrong with that entire experience.” He’s about to say something but I keep talking. “And maybe it’s because I’m sober now or maybe I would have seen it anyway but what happened with you did mean something to me.” I find myself unable to look him in the eye when I say that.

  He smiles. “So you’re sober?” He’s looking either stunned or confused, and since at least half of L.A. is sober, he surely couldn’t be confused. “You mean, you don’t drink or anything?”

  I nod and then shake my head. “Yes—I mean, no I don’t.”

  “You don’t even smoke pot?”

  I smile. I’ve pretty much always hated pot. It would just make me more paranoid than usual that nobody could understand anything I was saying. Right when I was first getting into buying coke, it occurred to me that regularly buying pot would be far less expensive than getting coke so, in an effort to get myself hooked on a more economical drug, I bought an ounce and smoked it for three days straight. And that’s when I proved to myself once and for all that I hated it.

  “No, not even pot,” is all I say.

  “My God, that’s amazing,” he says. “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “It feels great.”

  Adam still seems to be in shock. “But I mean you…” He shakes his head, as if trying to clear up space in his brain
for this information. “You were the ultimate party girl.”

  Smiling, I opt not to tell him about my new column. I’m enjoying this interaction far too much to allow it to turn into a conversation about work. “Well, now I’m the ultimate ex–party girl,” I say.

  He smiles as he looks at me with mock seriousness. “Do you think the bar at Jones will survive without your business?”

  After we both laugh, I ask, “So what about you? How’s Norm’s?”

  He grins. “Still standing, I assume. But not really my concern anymore.”

  “You quit?”

  He nods. “I got a series.”

  “Are you serious? Which one?” It never really crossed my mind that Adam would become a really successful actor; most of the aspiring actors I know seem to get, if anything, a small role in an indie that no one sees outside of Sundance, or like a one-line part on Without a Trace.

  “The Agency.”

  My mouth goes slightly agape: The Agency is Darren Star’s new dramedy about the lives of four young male real estate agents. “Are you serious?”

  He nods. “It’s crazy, I know. I’m the only unknown.”

  “Congratulations,” I say, leaning over to hug him. “That’s incredible.”

  “Incredibly convenient, too,” he says as we disentangle, “seeing as I was getting so sick of Norm’s that I was on the verge of pouring soup on the next person who ordered it.”

  I laugh but in my head I’m thinking, It figures. Just as soon as I’m sane enough to realize how adorable Adam is, he gets on a series and will now have women fighting over him like he’s the last pair of Hudson jeans at a sample sale.

  Adam’s cell phone rings and he doesn’t answer it but glances at the time and seems to realize he has to be somewhere. “Damn, I have to go,” he says, looking like he doesn’t want to, “but it’s really fantastic to see you.”

  I feel myself panicking. I could have had the moment we were having go on, like, forever, and yet it’s ending. I want to do something but I’m not sure what. He said he “really liked” me, I think as I sit there trying to look casual. Why did he use the past tense? When exactly do you stop “really liking” someone?