Exes and Ohs

by Shallon Lester

  “Jesus, you look awful,” said our new intern, Steve, while the HR lady left packets of Emergen-C on my desk every afternoon.

  Looking sickly and tubercular was a small bit of success, but I wanted to be positively vampirish. I wanted to look like something Stephenie Meyer dreamed up—minus all that gay sparkling, of course. I knew it was time for something drastic yet strangely fitting: a chemical peel.

  My dermatologist back home had suggested it once before, and it sounded ugly and painful—three days of blistering, peeling skin—but since ugly and painful was my new autumn look, I was all for it.

  Luckily, I had a trip to Irvine coming up, so I booked an appointment. “Kinda ironic, isn’t it?” my doctor said with a wry smile as he painted my face with the caustic goo. “You come to Southern California to get pale. Seems like Wisconsin would’ve been the logical choice!”

  “Just gimme the juice, doc!” I said through gritted teeth like a heroin addict or a death row inmate strapped to the chair. And in a way, I told myself morosely, this procedure is like a death. After, I shall be reborn as a true emo kid, pale, like a ghost drifting around New York, haunting it with my lameness.

  What I was reborn as was in fact a cross between a molting pigeon and a boiled hot dog. My skin peeled off in penny-sized pieces, littering the front of my shirt with flakes. But of course it didn’t all shed at the same time or in any sort of pattern. So while one part of my face looked like it was snowing, another quadrant was still bright red and too tight to move. I looked like Jonah Hex, and Mama was horrified.

  “Shallon, please, please stay in the car,” she begged, pulling up to the supermarket.

  “Nur!” I gurgled through the corner of my mouth, which was still too tight to open. “I’ng going wiffoo.”

  She relented, pulling the hood on my grim reaper sweatshirt up and drawing the strings so tight it looked like I was being born. For good measure, she fished an ancient “Hanu Reddy Realty” cap out of the glove compartment and added it to the mix. All you could see were my nose and mouth, but that was more than enough to terrify.

  “Just get enough waffle mix and syrup for the next few days so you won’t have to leave the house,” she told me, and once inside the market she took off like a greyhound. I couldn’t blame her for not wanting to be seen with me, a blond Frankenstein lurching around the produce section.

  “Affulshs?” I asked a teenage stockboy. “I eed affulshs. Un sirp.”

  He recoiled in horror and thrust an Entenmann’s Danish at me the way one might toss a rotisserie chicken to a zombie hell-bent on eating one’s brain.

  “Affulshs, sirp,” I grunted, and lumbered back to the safety of our Honda, chuckling at the irony.

  Here I was, burning off my own skin to quell my emo itch, to feed my bizarre hunger to wear my depression on the outside. No one seemed to understand why, and if I had to put my finger on it, I couldn’t either. This emo revolution was a biological need so strong I couldn’t ignore it. I was sure that there was some greater purpose; I just didn’t know what yet.

  Four days later, I emerged from blistering hideousness as a porcelain-skinned butterfly. Delighted, I put dark red streaks in my hair to look even paler, splurged on some black Chanel nail polish, and stocked up on leather leggings. I flew home to New York like Caesar riding back across the Rubicon into Rome. I was going to conquer this new social scene come hell or high-waisted pants.

  And triumph I did. With my shored-up wardrobe and cadaverous complexion, I had the confidence to drag Klo to Black and White, an East Village bar overflowing with indie rockers and emos.

  And it was there that I would meet … him. There, like Gaius Julius Caesar, I would draw someone close to me who would eventually be my undoing: Lord Voldemort.

  Quod me nutrit, me destruit.

  Dignity on Sale, Aisle Five!

  What’s worse than running into your ex while serving Awesome Blossoms to tourists? Worse than running into not just any ex, but the ex of all exes—the grand high wizard of heartbreak and evil, Lord Voldemort?

  Running into him when you’re bargain shopping. In sweatpants!

  It was a sweltering August afternoon and I was creeping around Loehmann’s, as I tended to do that summer. A few weeks prior we had finished filming Downtown Girls, and I had nothing to do during the days—no office job, no kids to mind, no felony conviction to serve community service for.

  Fortunately, neither did my best friend, Klo, who was just as bored and cheap as I was. So we spent the humid days lurking around town, making our daily rounds to T.J. Maxx, Loehmann’s, and, if we were feeling adventurous, the Target in Brooklyn. If we scored a particularly awesome deal, we’d celebrate by drinking a bottle of whiskey at Angels and Kings, the bar her fiancé owned.

  The only real structure I had to my day was seeing my trainer. Reggie Chambers was a hulking black man who looked like he would love nothing more than to see you do bicep curls until you vomited, but instead he was quick to smile and had a lot of tolerance for my complaining and lack of natural athleticism. He was tasked with whipping me into camera-ready shape, and sometimes I didn’t know who I felt sorrier for—him for taking on such a difficult assignment, or me for having to endure it.

  Every morning I’d emerge from High Performance Fitness ratty and covered in sweat. My producers would beg me not to trot around town looking so terrifying, but pffft, who was I going to see? Anyone who mattered was at work, right?

  Klo happened to be busy that day, so I rode my bike, Amelia, down to Loehmann’s alone and prowled around for … something. Nothing. I didn’t need anything, mostly because I didn’t do anything. Everyone thought my life post-filming was soooo glamorous, but mostly I skulked around the city, watched endless episodes of Degrassi: The Next Generation, and waited to hear news of when Downtown Girls would air. I didn’t need clothes for work or dates because I was involved in neither. What was I even doing at Loehmann’s?

  Just as I was about to head home, a sparkly pair of Steve Madden heels caught my eye; someone had abandoned them right there in the plus-sized section I had wandered into, and as I stooped down to grab them—my size too!—I felt a ripple of good luck. The feeling would not last long.

  As I crouched down, I looked up and saw the boy who had destroyed my heart two years prior, Lord Voldemort. So many thoughts filled my head at once, I felt like I was having a stroke. Where did he come from?! What is he doing in the fatty section of Loehmann’s?! Did he see me?! Our eye contact lasted but a millisecond, but it was too late; a dam had burst in my mind, and the memories of our doomed love came flooding back.

  Voldy and I had met one brisk spring evening at an indie rock bar that I’d begun frequenting on account of my emo revolution. Within a few weeks I was head over heels.

  He was funny and clever and loved all the same dorky things that I did. For weeks we e-mailed back and forth, pages and pages at a time. In the first blush of our courtship, I presented him with the same all-important question I posed to every guy I dated: Which X-Man would you be?

  I had long ago settled on Magneto, who could control metal, because metal is everywhere. I would stop car accidents and yank metal fillings out of my enemies’ mouths!

  I could tell a lot about a man based on what X-Man he chose. The ones who picked Wolverine were invariably macho man-children with a lot more ego than brains. But really good in bed.

  Some said Gambit because he had a cool N’Awlins accent and was good at poker. That was acceptable, I suppose, but those boys seemed less like well-endowed superheros and more like shifty Tulane frat boys.

  And then there was one dude who picked Storm—who is a woman.

  “You’d be the girl?” I said, my voice dripping with revulsion. “The girl who makes it rain?”

  He balked. “What? That’d be really useful!”

  “Yeah if you were a goddamn park ranger.” I snorted. “How does that make you a hero?”

  Clearly it didn’t, neither in the world of Marvel com
ics nor in my bedroom.

  But Voldemort’s answer trumped them all.

  “Oh! I’ve totally thought of this before!” he wrote. “I’d be a new one called Element. He could control earth, wind, water, and fire.”

  “Isn’t that Captain Planet?”

  “Eh, I feel like he’s more about recycling than doing cool stuff.”

  Voldy and I went back and forth debating the virtues of Element versus Magneto. I argued that Element would be little more than a fancied-up Storm, but when he countered that the ubiquity of plastic would soon make me useless, my heart melted.

  We even made up stories about what life would be like in the Element/Magneto household—our household, the superhero one that we had started to build in our minds.

  We even had a fictitious dog, Waffles, and spent pages detailing how we would dupe each other into picking up his poop. Element’s plan was to feed him an iron-rich diet so the scat, now mostly metal, would fall into my domain.

  I saved each and every one of those e-mails. I printed them out to give to him, all pretty and bound into a book, on some quiet wedding anniversary.

  My friends just rolled their eyes and figured that Voldy wasn’t much different than any other guy I’d dated. But they were wrong.

  My love for Voldemort was quiet yet magnificent. It wasn’t the manic, sugar-rushy adoration I had felt for other boys; it was like a great comforting yawn. It was happy and peaceful and true and shone like justice in the morning light.

  Usually at the beginning of a relationship, I kept my fingers crossed and did rain dances hoping that things would work out. Not with Voldy. It seemed unnecessary. When I was with him, I felt a resolute nod from the universe that yep, this is the man you’ve been waiting for. He was why God had planned my emo revolution, the reason I’d endured caustic chemical peels and had all my pants tapered. All those things were the broken road that led to him, my northern star.

  Or … not.

  The pain I felt when I lost him was just as awesome, but in no way as silent.

  A few months into the relationship, while on a trip to Miami, he had met and slept with a go-go dancer named Crystal. She was twenty-one, with a six-year-old kid and a drug conviction. The cruel irony was that everything that protruded on her body was made of plastic—nails, boobs, ass, lips. And he fell in love with her.

  The day he called and told me, I literally collapsed. My legs just said, “Fuck this noise,” and gave out, like I had polio. My roommate Holly found me like that an hour later, shaking and sobbing and writhing. She tried talking me down but I remember barely being able to hear her. The pain was deafening. It was needles between my eyes, liquefying every muscle in my body. He was part of me, not just some dude I was dating. No heartbreak in my entire life would compare to this. I was sure of it.

  I stayed in more or less that crumpled state for seven months. Twenty-eight weeks of daily sobbing, 210 ten days of misery so acute it made me nauseous. I’m pretty sure this is how boys feel when someone kicks them in the balls.

  In the morning, I would wake up with salty cheeks from the evaporated tears I’d shed in my sleep without knowing it. My body was so accustomed to the sound of my weeping that it barely even registered.

  “It’s just a fling,” worried friends said of the crack whore, “he’ll be back—they always come back.”

  But he didn’t. Instead, he moved her to New York and they bought a dog—our dog. Suddenly Element was playing house with Spandexia, a supervillain whose power was to shatter dreams with a single blow job.

  And Magneto was out in the cold, trying in vain to pull her slutty, evil replacement out of his arms, but alas, the replacement was made of plastic. His prediction had been right—I had become useless.

  Now all these years later here I was in the basement of Loehmann’s, pretty much the same way he’d left me: on my knees and terrified.

  This made the Giant Douche run-in look like an episode of Touched by an Angel.

  I wasn’t sure that he’d seen me but I had to get the hell out of that store—fast.

  I dropped the shoes and slithered between the racks of clothes, backing toward the escalator. The other shoppers cocked their heads curiously at me. I looked like I was being chased by an alligator. I managed to weave through them and dart out of the store to Amelia, who was chained up across the street. I realized then and there that I should probably avoid a career in bank robbery and/or bomb defusing—maintaining steady hands under pressure is clearly not my forte.

  After fumbling with the lock and cussing for several minutes, I hopped on and pedaled wildly into traffic. In my haste, one of my flip-flops fell off.

  And I left it, like a wounded comrade too cumbersome to rescue. I cut my losses and glanced back at it lying pathetically in the road as I sped toward home.

  A few minutes later, I was safe, back on my shady street, and I coasted to a stop in front of our local bar …

  … where I bumped into Chace Crawford and Ed Westwick. Of course. Of course.

  Chace’s publicist was a friend of mine and had introduced me to him at a Super Bowl party. I had met loads of celebrities, but he literally took my breath away. He was flawless, charming, and gracious. At the party, the three of us had chit-chatted before he said he was calling it a night.

  “That’s a shame,” I’d said, “you’re going to miss out on some Irish Car Bombs!”

  His eyes lit up. “Car Bombs?” he chirped. “Yes. Awesome. I’m in, let’s go!”

  We headed back inside and sidled up to some liquor. These twenty glorious and unexpected minutes of bar-side chatter immediately sparked countless fantasies in my mind that usually involved Chase shirtless, whipped cream, and a very large tarp.

  Ed Westwick also ranked high on my Future Ex-Husbands dream list but seemed to be the polar opposite of boy-next-door Chace. Ed was swarthy and British and sexed up, the kind of guy for whom chest hair was a weapon of seduction. I had met him a few different times at various parties and had even trudged down to the East Village to see him sing with his dreadful band, the Filthy Youth.

  These two heartthrobs were the reason my wardrobe was full of headbands and kicky plaid skirts, not to mention why I once blew an entire week’s paycheck on lunch at the Plaza. Every girl in Manhattan, maybe the country, wanted to live like they did on Gossip Girl, the show that made it cool to be ruthless and wear tights! Who needs an X-Man when you can have an Archibald?

  Any other day of the year, I would have given a kidney to run into these two. But right then, sweaty, half barefoot, and panicky over my encounter, I would’ve given a kidney to have a meteorite strike me dead.

  But oh, Shallon, no way would these two dreamboats recognize you, right?

  Fail.

  “Oi, I know you …,” Ed drawled in his smoky English accent. “You’re that bird from the newspaper …”

  “N-nope, no I’m not,” I stammered, still looking around in terror, worried Voldemort had followed me. “I’m not Sha—I’m not anyone. At all.”

  “Yeah, you know my publicist!” Chase said, chiming in. “I met you at the Super Bowl; we did Irish Car Bombs!”

  I winced at the memory of a happier, cleaner, less grubby me.

  “Wait,” he said, suddenly looking down, “where’s your shoe?”

  At that exact moment, Cheryl, a homeless woman whom I had befriended, walked by and hollered my name. And pointed.

  “Hey, Shallon! Shallon, over here! Hi!”

  So there I was. Dirty, jumpy, shoeless, and apparently little miss popular among the homeless. Chace and Ed exchanged puzzled looks, trying to figure out what in the hell was going on.

  I bit my lip miserably and instantly invented a thousand different low-rent superheroes I’d rather have been in that moment other than myself: Minestronia, able to shoot scalding hot soup or goulash from her fingertips! Or Tin Lizzie, whose can-opener claws will slice and dice her foes! Even Walruse, a mild-mannered Sea World employee by day, vengeful tusked pinniped by
night!

  But alas, I was just plain old Shallon, with the power to create humiliating situations with nothing more than a bike, an ex, and a dirty flip-flop.

  Everyone but the Turtle

  Usually, I make friends easily. I’m blond and feisty and can be quite charming when I want to be. But apparently, I’m a lot less enchanting dressed as an anthropomorphic amphibian.

  Let me explain.

  I never really got the memo that you were supposed to dress slutty for Halloween. Even as a child, when this wasn’t yet expected, my costumes were weirder than everyone else’s. This was quite an accomplishment considering the flock of geeks who went to Vista Verde (“Vista Nerdy”), my year-round K-8 school. On the cutting edge of liberal education, we were like a normal school on opposite day—the jocks were the least popular, the smart kids were never bullied, and Principal Terry always ran the jog-a-thon in a hula skirt. Vista Verde was the whole reason my mom moved us from San Francisco, the bohemian paradise she so loved, and her sacrifice paid off—the school was a total dork factory. The nine years I spent at VV were the best of my life, an idyllic, dweeby paradise that let my inherent oddness flourish like an orchid in a hothouse.

  And flourish it did.

  My last normal Halloween was in third grade. I went as a can-can girl—that is, I wore my dance recital costume and put on rouge. The next year, however, my mom spent weeks working on an elaborate court jester outfit that won our school’s annual costume contest. I was thrilled … until someone put two and two together and came up with the nickname “Lester the Jester.” I couldn’t get too angry about it; the moniker made a lot of sense. Picture ten-year-old Shallon, just as sarcastic and awkward, but add in a fanatical love for Zoobooks, unicorn stickers, and Reading Rainbow and you got yourself one big doofus. And, just like any weirdo, Halloween was my time to shine. If there had been Comic-Con back then, I would’ve pwned that shit too.

  Mama wasn’t helping the situation, either. Most parents help steer their children toward sanity, but my mom (who didn’t exactly fit the suburban mold herself) thought I was super-awesome in all my PBS quirkiness. She became my Halloween enabler.