Exes and Ohs

by Shallon Lester

  “Hey.” He grinned softly, but that simple word, those three wee letters, spoke volumes to my heart.

  H. Here comes the bride. Honey, start the car, the baby’s coming!

  E. Eternity. Ever after.

  Y. Yell it from the rooftops. You complete me.

  “Hi,” I murmured back as he pulled me close for a lingering kiss on the cheek. He smelled clean and fresh, like an afternoon nap on newly laundered sheets. I buried my nose in his neck as Pfeiffer bit back a giggle.

  “I thought you were going to take a bite out of him!” she said later, laughing.

  I would’ve swallowed him whole if I could have, like a snake, and walked around proudly with a Penn-shaped bulge in my gut. Instead we just smiled at each other goofily.

  “Did you guys have fun?” His voice was barely above a whisper, but it didn’t matter. Our eyes were talking enough for the both of us, drinking each other in—the silent, unerring language of eye contact.

  A few minutes of small talk passed in a dreamlike blur until his coach came out and hollered for him to get on the bus. He drew me close for a farewell hug and whispered in my ear, “Come to my hotel tonight—the Affinia Dumont, eleven o’clock. I have a surprise …”

  And with that he was gone, my heart lurching and my mind swimming at the idea of seeing him again … at night … alone.

  “Well, I guess that’s that!” said Marcia brightly on the car ride home. “I have this gorgeous trader that I want to set you up with. He’s from Westchester and—”

  “Wait, what? What do you mean, ‘that’s that’?”

  She and Pfeiffer exchanged exasperated glances.

  “I mean,” she said slowly, “that now you’ve met him and the spell is broken; you got what you wanted, right?”

  I considered my answer carefully. In no way was that five-minute encounter enough to slake my thirst for him. But I wasn’t willing to admit that to my friends. After all, what kind of addict goes around telling her friends when she’s about to score her next fix? Penn was the most private and valuable thing I’d ever had. We existed inside the narrow windows of our cell phones, flourishing in each other’s humid imaginations. No one else would understand.

  So I lied and told Marcia that yes, I had sweated out the Penn fever and was back to my old self, and to prove it, I was going to meet Declan that very night for drinks.

  Unfortunately, I’m a terrible liar and Pfeiffer and Marcia confronted me in my doorway as I left.

  “This,” Pfeiffer said sternly, “has got to stop.”

  I tried to evade them, but they weren’t having any of it. “I don’t know what you’re—”

  “We know where you’re going and, Shallon, you gotta let this thing go. You don’t know him—you know a version of him, an idea. Is this really all you want out of a relationship? Clandestine meetings at his hotel and text overage charges?”

  I winced; she was right. I knew that this lovesick mania had to end sooner or later. It was consuming me, preventing me from meeting an actual, real guy. That night would be my last drink of him, then I’d go cold turkey.

  But he’s the kind of boy you deserve, whispered my weak, romance-addled brain. He’s tall and handsome and successful! True, but this wasn’t the kind of relationship I deserved.

  In the cab to his hotel, I steeled my will against his charms and tried to summon the Ick.

  “Hey,” he said with the same boyish, sleepy smile from the afternoon, looking gorgeous in pajama pants and a tatty T-shirt. He grabbed my wrist and pulled me in for the most perfect kiss in the history of kisses. I’m pretty sure my knees buckled, and I felt any will to hate him turn to dust and blow away. Still woozy from the kiss, I let Penn lead me to the couch, where I was surprised to see a contraption that looked like a cross between a water cooler and a douche. I shot him a puzzled look.

  “It’s a Cryo Cuff!” he said proudly.

  “A what?”

  “I figured it’ll make your elbow feel a lot better so I had my trainer bring it up.”

  He swung the contraption around to face me, and with the flick of a switch, it came whirring to life. Penn strapped a blood-pressure-type cuff around my elbow. Icy cold water flowed through the tube into the cuff and within seconds it was like a cool, firm hand pressed around my broken joint, squeezing the inflamed tendons into submission.

  It had been years since a boy had been so thoughtful to me. I kicked myself, trying again to hate him. I focused in on how pigeon toed he was and the fact that he used odd, after-school-special-type phrases like “squash the beef.” That night, as he slept, I studied his face, desperately searching for a grotesque flaw. But there were none anywhere, on the inside or outside.

  After that night, he and I still talked, but not as frequently; I forced myself to pull back and we weaned ourselves gradually. Within a few weeks I met Lord Voldemort, whom I came to love more broadly than Penn, but somehow much less. Voldy understood me, but Penn had inspired me. He was everything I wanted to be: humble, driven, focused, and sweet. But I knew in my heart that despite it all, he hadn’t been the one for me.

  Sometimes I still instinctively reach for my phone to text him, like the alcoholic who forgets, just for a moment, that she’s recovered and absentmindedly grabs her dinner companion’s drink.

  But I put it down and try in vain to get that same dizzying thrill from more rational things like low-cal Frappuccinos and boys from Massachusetts named Charles. A life of sanity and dignity, I know, takes time.

  A Pain in the Duff

  I don’t have a very unique look. I realize this. I’m fair and blond and green eyed, average height and average weight. Physically, I don’t stand out very much, unless of course you’re Hitler, in which case I’m what you see when you daydream. When I was four years old, I stood in front of the mirror and took stock of my face.

  Well, Shallon, I thought, you’re rather plain. Pleasing, but plain. If you want to get noticed it’s going to be on personality, not looks. Now, where are your animal crackers?

  I was on the right track with this whole personality thing. Thanks to my inherent weirdness and endless string of dating debacles, I eventually landed myself an MTV reality TV show, Downtown Girls. That’s when I decided that not all attention is good attention. My reality TV peers don’t always agree with this. They’ll release sex tapes willy-nilly or tweet that they have a UTI. But we Downtown Girls tried to keep it classy; we peed with the door shut and always wore underwear on blustery days.

  But as filming got under way, I learned the hard way that no matter how well-behaved you are, not every stranger on the street is happy that you are making a reality show and won’t hesitate to tell you. But things started to turn around once it dawned on me to capitalize on my un-unique physical appearance. If I wanted people to stop freaking out every time an MTV cameraman happened to catch them in a shot, I had to do only one thing: convince them I was Hilary Duff.

  For years people had been telling me I looked like the Disney star and I always rolled my eyes. This was out of sheer jealousy, of course. She was younger, more famous than me, and married to a Canadian hockey player, which is basically all I want out of life. Secretly, I love her music and I watch Raise Your Voice at least once a month, but I’m too bitter to ever admit it openly. She’s living out my dreams and I simply won’t publicly condone that sort of identity theft. So imagine my delight when I got the chance to hijack her life.

  It was the third week of filming and for the people in our Tribeca neighborhood, the novelty of seeing a reality show in the making had officially worn off.

  “Hey, sluts!” someone shouted from the sidewalk. “Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you, ya blond Barbie cunt. You’re a fuckin’ nobody; get the hell off our street!”

  “This is my street too, ugly!” I spat back. “I live a block away!”

  “Get the fuck out of here!” screamed one disgruntled (and clearly not yet caffeinated) patron of our local coffee shop simply because our fifteen-person crew st
ormed the café to film a scene.

  I could’ve pulled out a PowerPoint presentation on why I deserved to be getting my iced tea in that particular coffeehouse, but it wouldn’t have mattered. All people needed to see were a boom mic and a camera and they hated me automatically. If I had been an actual celebrity, this would not have been the case. If it were Julia Roberts or … hmm, who are the kids talking about these days … Maury Povich filming a show, gasps of awed delight would have echoed through the corridors of Tribeca. But once our good neighbors figured out that my friends and I had never won an Oscar or tested some deadbeat’s paternity, we were about as welcome as a case of bedbugs. Soon it started to feel normal for a woman to ram me with her stroller and another guy to let his dog urinate all over our microphone pack.

  “Whatever, they’re just jealous,” Klo sniffed. “That’s a good thing. It means we’re winning at life.”

  I like to be envied as much as the next girl, but I’m more of the opinion that a little jealousy goes a long way. Too much smells like dog pee, and I wasn’t about to stand for it.

  That night we headed out to Cake Shop, a dive bakery on the Lower East Side that doubles as an indie music joint at night.

  “What should we wear?” asked Nikki, our resident fashionista. “This place sounds grungy.”

  The last time I went to Cake Shop I was drunk out of my mind and ended up going home with the heroin-addicted lead singer of an emo band. But I politely chose to withhold the fact that this was the general vibe of the Cake Shop crowd and told the girls to dress pretty.

  Literally anything would’ve been better than the pink sequined dress I chose to wear—a turban, an SS uniform, a skort—anything. The second we walked in, people started booing.

  “Look!” sneered one grungy girl in a tatty Black Flag tee, “it’s hipster Barbie! Where’s your Ken doll, you stupid bitch?”

  The mangy crowd roared and toasted her with their PBRs. I turned crimson and her snaggle-toothed friend, smelling weakness, decided to get in a few potshots too.

  “Yeah, fucking Paris Hilton bitch! Go make a sex tape, ho!”

  “She’s Hilary Duff, not Paris Hilton!” Klo hollered back as a joke, but suddenly, the hipsters went silent. The punks and rockabillies craned their tattooed necks to get a better look as Hilary’s name rippled through the crowd.

  “Oh my God, I think they believed me,” Klo murmured as we inched cautiously toward the bar and ordered drinks.

  “So … I,” said the guy waiting for his Maker’s Mark, raising his pierced eyebrow at me, “you’re Hilary Duff, huh?”

  I pursed my lips in a Duffian way and giggled coyly. “You tell me …”

  “I’m not gonna lie,” he said, “my little sister loves you. And your ex in that band—what’s his name?”

  “Joel Madden,” I cooed, letting my hair fall in front of my face as camouflage. “He’s actually on his way here, but don’t make a fuss.”

  “Omigod,” the guy said, not even bothering to conceal his excitement. “Here? He’s coming here?! Wow! Wait, I thought you guys broke up?”

  “We did … but what Mike doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

  I winked and slid away. Lying to drunk boys is my specialty; it helps to keep my mind sharp, kind of like Sudoku does for regular people. But lying about a celebrity’s life is a slippery slope; it’s a lot easier to get caught pretending to be Hilary Duff than the heir to, say, the Ziploc fortune. But if it kept people from throwing rocks at us, it was a risk I was willing to take.

  “You’re much prettier in person,” a girl said randomly to me in line for the bathroom. It occurred to me that when people talk to celebrities, they seem to start in the middle of the conversation, with an out of nowhere non sequitur sentence. “And you’re taller too!”

  “Oh, yeah.” I blushed. This was starting to get awkward. I love awkward. “It’s not that I’m short, it’s that everyone in Hollywood is really tall.”

  “They are?” she said, baffled. “I thought Tom Cruise was practically a midget.”

  “No,” I said, “he’s over six feet, swear to snaps!”

  “Really!”

  “Yep, same with Ryan Seacrest. They’re both gigantic.”

  Mercifully, our producer yanked us out of there before I could embarrass myself/Hilary any further.

  I was forced to emulate the Duffster a few more times during filming, but only in emergencies, like the time at the Jersey shore when a girl shoved me against a pinball machine and threatened to cut my hair.

  “Hey!” Nikki yelled. “Nobody messes with Hilary Duff’s hair—nobody!”

  “Oh. Oh, um, gosh I’m sorry, we just … we didn’t recognize her. Sorry.”

  Once filming wrapped I decided to retire my Hilary impersonation for good; I could hardly become a legitimate celebrity if I was constantly pretending to be a different one.

  But the road to Duff-level recognition is a long one. Since I’m a celebrity in my own mind, I assumed that the rest of the free world would jump on board after my show aired. Six episodes were more than enough to make me an international superstar, right? No, as it turns out, not at all.

  After Downtown Girls hit the airwaves, I did get recognized every so often, but not nearly as much or by as many studly hockey players as I’d hoped. And if I did, it would always be at the least-opportune times. Once, a naked lady tapped me on the shoulder in the gym locker room; another time, a guy started squealing with excitement while I was in Home Depot buying nails—wearing overalls. But at legitimate celebrity events and parties, no one said a word.

  “People are definitely looking at you,” my friend Dorit whispered at a U.S. Open party that summer. “But this is New York; no one just goes up to celebrities and starts gushing.”

  She was right; I’ve seen loads of A-listers roaming around Manhattan but I’d rather drunk dial my grandma than run up to them and coo about how awesome they are.

  “Honestly though, I don’t know why you care,” she said. “Being famous and having people come up to you sounds awful. Anonymity is so much better!”

  “The hell it is,” I snorted into my drink.

  I’ve been anonymous my whole life and it’s only really useful when you’re shoplifting or doing the walk of shame.

  She and I were sitting in the VIP section of the party, right next to a bored-looking blond girl and her normal looking boyfriend. I was too busy scanning the crowd for hot guys to pay much attention to the small cluster of fans gathered at the velvet ropes.

  “Hey, can we take a picture with you?”

  A small, stocky gay guy was waving me over to the velvet ropes as his twin brother and a group of giggling girls held up cameras.

  “See!” Dorit laughed. “People do know who you are! Yay!”

  I smoothed my dress and strutted over. One of the girls mouthed, “I love your show,” as the boys sidled next to me for a photo.

  “I’m really sorry you fell,” the gay one said.

  Fell? In one episode I tripped a little bit, but that was hardly a standout moment in the series. What an odd thing to lead with. But still, people are weird, and it was my job, you know, as a very famous celebrity, to be gracious.

  “Thank you,” I said earnestly.

  “I know, it was awful,” said his non-gay brother. “But we’re still such fans of yours. Go USA!”

  “Um … yes,” I said. Whichever celebrity they thought I was, it wasn’t Shallon Lester. But we were already in photo position and I didn’t have the heart to embarrass them—or myself. “Go USA,” I cheered.

  They gushed their thanks and I scooted back to my seat.

  “I think they thought I was Lindsey Vonn,” I told Dorit with a heavy sigh.

  I sulked into my vodka soda until ten minutes later, when the group of fans returned.

  “You’re not Lindsey Vonn, are you?” said the gay guy fearfully. “Omigosh I am so sorry!”

  He and his brother flooded me with apologies but the girls scratched their he
ads.

  “Wait, you thought she was Lindsey Vonn?” a brunette asked.

  “Yes!” hissed the gay in embarrassment. “Who did you think she was, smarty pants?”

  “She’s Shallon Lester, duh!”

  I puffed with pride. At least one person on earth had seen the show and wasn’t afraid to admit it.

  “Yeah,” said another girl, chiming in. “I mean, who the hell is Lindsey Vonn?”

  “Excuse me,” said a voice from behind me. It was the blond girl, who was now standing—towering, actually—over me. “But I’m Lindsey Vonn.”

  Psych

  I could have easily titled this essay “The Worst $20 I’ve Ever Spent,” because that perfectly sums up my experience with a psychic.

  A week prior, my friend had seen a clairvoyant who had accurately deduced that she had once had a miscarriage, which we thought was a pretty risky and random assumption to throw out there. If she could deduce that, I felt certain that she could help me find the boyfriend I’d recently misplaced.

  Luc was a professional poker player I had been dating for a few months, and we had just begun to fall in love. At least, that was my view of the situation. I had finally decided to really open my heart to him and dive in when he just … vanished. I hadn’t heard from him since our last date, two weeks previously. I should have known better than to trust a man who deceives people for a living.

  Our evening hadn’t been anything out of the ordinary—no fights or spinach in the teeth or discoveries of giant condom stockpiles. Yet when I didn’t hear from him the next day, something in the pit of my stomach told me it was over. My friends said I was being paranoid and ridiculous, that he was just busy. But the heart knows. Maybe he’s dead! I thought hopefully, but Google told me he was very much alive, competing in a tournament up in Toronto.