Wicked Jealous: A Love Story

by Palmer, Robin

  I shook my head. “I don’t know if I can shake my tuchus—”

  “Of course you can. Now go! Go!” she cried, shoving me toward the group of women. “You don’t want to miss one more calorie-burning moment!”

  I landed between Rona and a tiny woman with close-cropped dark hair and huge red-framed glasses that made her look like an owl, I tried to shake my tuchus but instead ended up shaking my right arm. So hard that my bracelets kept flying off, once even getting caught in a blonde woman’s bun.

  “Oy vey. Mami, what are you doing?” Jorge demanded after he pressed Pause on the CD player and took a giant swig of his Gatorade, even though there was no reason he should’ve been exhausted, seeing that he was just yelling at us rather than shaking his own tuchus.

  “Zumba-ing?” I replied meekly as I pulled my hair back from my face to swipe at the sweat. If I kept this up, I was going to have to invest in some ponytail holders. And some Stridex pads.

  “That is not Zumba-ing!” he bellowed. “That’s . . . I don’t know what that is, but it’s not Zumba!”

  I could feel myself turning red. You would have thought that Zumba teachers would be nicer than gym teachers, but apparently not.

  “Don’t mind him,” Rona whispered. “It’s the hot-blooded Latin thing. He doesn’t mean it. You’ll see—at the end of class he’ll kiss you on both cheeks and everything.”

  But by the end of the class, I had stopped shaking my arm and started shaking my tuchus, even if it wasn’t exactly in time with the music. Which not only made my T-shirt even more sweaty but also reminded me for the first time in a long time that my hips did more than just take up space in my pants—that they actually moved. And Rona was right—Jorge did kiss me on both cheeks. Right after he shook his head and sighed and told me that lucky for me, coordination-challenged white girls were his specialty.

  “So what’d you think?” Cookie asked excitedly as I limped behind my fellow Zumba-ers into the lobby, realizing that my rubbery legs were going to kill in the morning. “Was it totally red?”

  “Huh?”

  “You know—red. Awesome. Hard core.”

  “Do you mean . . . rad?” I asked.

  Cookie thought about it. “You might be right.” She reached into her studded orange leather handbag and dug out a little notebook whose pages were covered with writing. After looking at it, she nodded. “Yes, you’re right. I made this little cheat sheet to keep all the slang straight, but sometimes I can’t read my own writing. So was it?”

  A bunch of the women had stopped, waiting for my response.

  “It was . . . an experience.”

  “That’s the exact same reaction I had!” exclaimed the owl lady. “That it was a life-changing experience that opened a portal to a new era of my life!”

  The woman with the bun, whose heavy makeup made me think she was probably a rock-and-roll groupie at some point, gasped, “Cheryl, I can’t believe you just said that. That was my experience as well. How did we never talk about this before? I was actually thinking of writing something for Oprah’s magazine about it. You know, the whole ‘aha moment’ of it all.” She smiled at me. “I’m Marcia. You’re coming with us to Coffee Bean, right?”

  “After class, we go to Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf,” explained a preppy-looking Brentwood-mom type. The kind who didn’t say sorry as she wheeled her double stroller down San Vicente Boulevard and over your feet.

  “Oh. That’s really nice of you to invite me, but I can’t,” I said nervously. “I . . . have to get home and do homework.” Actually, what I had to do was get my butt to 7-Eleven and purchase a smorgasboard of snack cakes, because the stress of trying to get my butt to shake instead of my arm and being surrounded by a group of middle-aged women inviting me to be social over coffee when I was not really a social kinda girl was freaking me out.

  “You heard her, Beth—she’s got homework,” chastised Cheryl. “Well, we’ll see you in class on Thursday.”

  “Oh. Um. Well, see—” Sure, I had forked over (or, rather, my father had) a decent amount of money for ten classes—not to mention a very bright pair of yoga pants—but it’s not like I was planning on actually coming back. I didn’t know these women, and had spent only forty minutes sweating next to them, and yet, as I looked out at the sea of made-up faces smiling back at me, I did know one thing—that they were the kind of women who would badger and nag you to death until you said yes.

  “—that sounds just great,” I said weakly. “I’ll see you then.”

  You would think that after what I had just been through, the universe would cut me a break. Whoever ran it would just let me make my way peacefully to 7-Eleven, and when I arrived, not only would there be some Butterscotch Krimpets waiting patiently for me to claim them, but there’d be an ice-cold fuschia-colored Tab can smiling at me from the refrigerator section.

  Instead, I got my yoga pants leg stuck in my bike chain so that when I tried to get it out, the semi-cool oil-based design it had left got smeared and turned into one big blob. And when I got there, not only were there no Tabs, but due to an earlier power outage, all the sodas were warm. Warm soda made me nauseous, and so that left me having to drink plain old boring water. With my luck (or lack thereof) so far, I had given up on the hope of Butterscotch Krimpets, but when the gum-snapping Goth girl behind the counter looked up from her Fangoria magazine to tell me that because of a pit stop by a troop of runway models on their way downtown to a fashion show for L.A. Fashion Week, pretty much the only snacks left were salt and vinegar potato chips (“Salt is to models what garlic is to vampires,” she informed me), I was about to lose it. This was exactly why I didn’t like to leave the house—because when you did, you lost any kind of control over what happened to you. My life may have been on the small side because of it, but that just gave me that much more time to think about what it would look like when it was actually big in Paris or New York.

  “I love those,” a voice said as I gazed woefully at a box of Nilla Wafers, thinking about what a pathetic excuse for a cookie they were.

  I turned around to see Jason Frank. Of course it was him. I was sweaty, wearing orange yoga pants with an oil stain, and about to cry. The way my afternoon was going, who else would it have been?

  “Don’t you?” he asked.

  “Actually, I don’t. On the cookie scale I’d have to rate them . . . a negative seven,” I replied.

  His face fell. “How come?”

  I shrugged. “Lots of reasons. First there’s the whole consistency issue,” I replied. “They’re a little sandpaperlike.”

  He thought about it. “I guess they are.”

  “And then the taste thing,” I went on. “Meaning there isn’t any. They’re supposed to be vanilla, but they fail miserably. Which is probably why they call themselves ‘nilla.’ You know, so they don’t get sued for false advertising.”

  He shrugged. “Personally—”

  “But then again, vanilla is a synonym for bland, so maybe what that’s what they’re going for,” I added.

  He looked a little offended.

  “I’m not saying you’re bland or anything,” I quickly corrected. “It’s just that I can get passionate on the cookie front.”

  He nodded. “I see.”

  As my eyebrow went up, his face turned red. “I didn’t mean ‘I see’ like that,” he quickly said. “I meant it as in just from the tone of your voice, I can see. You see?”

  Wow. So popular kids babbled sometimes, too. Who knew?

  He motioned to my outfit. “So, uh, just finish a workout?”

  I looked down. Oh God. I had almost forgotten that I looked like something that had gone through the spin cycle using Crisco oil instead of water. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Yoga?” Jason asked.

  I totally could have lied right then and it wouldn’t
have been a big deal. I mean, it’s not like Jason Frank was going to take time out of his very busy life and trail me like some detective in one of the Law & Order shows to see if I was telling the truth. That being said, I was one of the people who, no matter how much time I took to make up a lie, and how foolproof it sounded when I practiced it in front of my mirror, somehow I always got busted. Which is why I decided to tell the truth.

  “Umm . . . something . . . kind of like yoga but . . . not exactly,” I replied. Okay, maybe not exactly the truth. Maybe something that resembled the truth. A little. If you closed one eye and turned the lights down really low.

  “Pilates?”

  “Nope.”

  “Ballet?”

  Ballet? Was he was taking me for someone with grace? “Uh-uh.”

  “Tae kwon do?” Jeez. Talk about nosy.

  “Oh! I know—is it that thing where—”

  “It was Zumba, okay?” I blurted out. Whoa. Did I really need to be that honest?

  “Zumba.”

  “Yeah, it’s this thing—”

  “I know what Zumba is. My mom does it.”

  Oh great. With my luck, she was probably one of the women in my class. “Well then, if your mom does it, you probably know that it’s an excellent form of exercise,” I said defensively. I was defending Zumba? How’d that happen?

  He nodded. “Yeah. She’s looking good. She even stopped wearing mom jeans.”

  I winced. Could he make it all sound any less cool?

  Suddenly, he started bobbing his head. “Oh man—I love this song!

  I listened, but didn’t recognize it. Probably because it was poppy and Top 40–ish, which was so not a world I lived in. I didn’t even like to go there for weekend getaways. “Who is it?” I asked.

  He laughed. “That’s a good one.”

  As the daughter of a sitcom writer, I knew how to joke around at times, but this wasn’t one of them. “You’re being serious.”

  I nodded.

  “It’s Bieber.”

  “As in . . . Justin?” I asked, confused.

  “Well, yeah,” he said. “What other Biebers are there?” I kept waiting for the “just kidding” part, but it didn’t come. I even looked over my shoulder to see if I was being Punk’d.

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted. Maybe one who sang songs that were more appropriate for a sixteen-year-old varsity-soccer-playing boy to listen to rather than a thirteen-year-old girl.

  “So if you don’t listen to the Biebs, what do you listen to?”

  I shrugged. “Lots of different stuff. Jazz . . .”

  “Jazz?” he said, surprised. “Like jazz jazz?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Miles Davis? John Coltrane?”

  He squinted. “I think my dad has some CDs by those guys.” Jason’s dad was this famous Academy Award– winning director named Stan Frank who made Films-with-a-capital-F versus movies-with-a-little-m. A lot of the parents at my school worked in the business, but the whole Academy Award thing was as close to royalty as it got in Hollywood, which therefore made Jason Frank sort of a prince. Although his dad’s movies weren’t my kind of thing (films set in the 1950s about the Mafia, Vietnam things, biographies about famous boxers), I had once read an article in the Los Angeles Times about how François Truffaut was his biggest inspiration, which therefore made him okay in my book. “But it’s not really my thing.”

  I nodded. It was understandable that he didn’t like jazz. As Nicola was always reminding me, not many teenagers listened to it. (“Maybe the kind who wear sunglasses indoors and then grow up to write angsty memoirs do, but not, you know, normal ones.”) But if that was the case, I wasn’t even going to bring up how I liked French music by Edith Piaf and Serge Gainsbourg, because if he barely knew who Miles Davis was, he probably wasn’t going to be familiar with two dead French people.

  We stood there, both staring at the Nilla Wafers as if they somehow contained the secrets of the universe.

  “Well, I guess I should get going,” he finally said.

  I nodded. “Yeah, me, too.”

  “I gotta get to SAT tutoring.”

  “And I have to . . .” He really didn’t need to know that I had to get home and jump in the shower so that the sweat that had now dried on my skin wouldn’t turn into some disgusting rash. “Anyways, nice talking to you.”

  He grabbed a box of Nilla Wafers. “All this talk about cookies made me hungry. See you around,” he said as he walked away.

  Hungry? He had no idea what I was planning on inhaling once I was back in the safety of my own room.

  three

  It made sense that after gorging on frozen yogurt from Red Mango, peanut-butter-covered pretzels from Whole Foods, and iced sugar cookies from Ralph’s, I’d feel nauseous. However, I was pretty sure the queasiness came from replaying the image of Jason bobbing his head to the Biebs.

  “So he doesn’t have great taste in music,” Nicola said the next afternoon as I helped Brad go through garbage bags full of stuff that he had gotten at a garage sale of some sitcom actress from the eighties. I got really excited when I saw a fake leopard A-line coat. Not only was it something you could totally have seen Jeanne Moreau wearing in a Truffaut film, but it was large enough to fit me. I was all set to buy it . . . until I saw the cigarette burns in the left sleeve. (“I think I remember reading something in People about how she had a little problem with the bottle and would pass out with lit cigarettes in her hand,” Brad said when I pointed it out.) “It’s not like it makes him a bad person,” Nicola added.

  I looked up from a colorful-looking caftan with long flowy sleeves (“I think that was from her Eat, Pray, Love stage,” Brad said, “when she took the money she made when the show went into syndication and went to India for a year to find herself.”)

  “Nicola. We’re talking the Biebs.”

  Brad stopped his Etsy surfing. (Because he and Luca were back on—at least for that week—he had turned off his OkCupid profile.) “This Testosterone Tweet guy listens to Justin Bieber?” he asked.

  “It’s Twit, not Tweet,” I corrected. “And, yes, not only does he listen to him, but he admits it,” I said. “Like without any irony whatsoever.”

  Brad wrinkled his nose. “Oh, that’s not good,” he said. “Even my people don’t admit to that. In fact, I don’t think my people even listen to him.” Brad’s “people” were gay men. I don’t know if any official studies had been done, but I was pretty sure that if they had been, research would have shown that they were the ones responsible for keeping all the CAPS (Cheesy Awesome Pop Stars) such as Cher and Britney neck-high in feathers and belly rings.

  I looked at Nicola, who was checking out a high-necked, long-sleeved blouse. (“I think I remember reading that when she was done in India, she became born again-Amish and moved to Pennsylvania,” Brad said.) “That, from a guy who has not one but two box sets of Barry Manilow’s greatest hits,” I said. I turned to Brad. “I hope you don’t take that the wrong way. I’m just making a point.”

  “No offense taken,” he replied. “And I still say that ‘Copacabana’ is the single greatest song ever written.”

  Nicola shook her head. “I can’t believe you of all people are judging someone based on something so superficial. So he’s got awful taste in music. That’s exactly what a girlfriend is for!” she cried.

  “I’ll say it again—the idea that you think Jason Frank is interested in me is insane.”

  “To teach guys right from wrong and mold them,” she continued. Her eyes narrowed. “So then, after you do that, they can break up with you and hook up with the Madison Stovers of the world, who then get to reap the benefits of all your hard work.”

  Brad and I looked at each other nervously. If Nicola got going on one of her rants about Nate Buckner, her one and only boyfriend wh
om she met last June because they both “liked” Apu from The Simpsons on Facebook, only to break up with her six months later after he met this skank Madison on the “I Hate Farmville” page, we’d be here for hours. “Don’t worry—I’m not going to go there,” she promised.

  “Thanks. And you know where else we’re not going to go? To any more conversation about Jason Frank,” I said as I marched over to the rack where the blue satin dress lived. Except it wasn’t there. “Brad. Where’s my dress?” I asked, panicked. “I mean, the dress. The blue one.”

  “I moved it over to the Dresses for Winter Even Though L.A. Doesn’t Really Have Seasons display,” Brad replied. Brad was always coming up with displays that he hoped would sell more stuff.

  I relaxed. Not like I was ever going to buy it, but I couldn’t imagine letting anyone else own it, either.

  “Look, Simone, I feel like I can say this because you’re my best friend,” Nicola said. “You’ve spent your life having people judge you and make cracks based on how you look, right?”

  I nodded.

  “But if they took the time to get to know you, like I did, they’d learn that you’re totally cool, right?” she asked.

  “We were seventh-grade lab partners,” I reminded her. “It was me or that weird kid who was into furry animal costumes, so you had to get to know me. And by the way—it’s not just the Bieber thing that’s weird. There’s also the fact that he likes Nilla Wafers.”

  “Nilla Wafers? Those are so . . . not exciting,” Brad said, disappointed.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Nicola shook her head. “I can’t believe I’m best friends with someone who is so judgmental. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  Maybe Nicola was right—maybe I wasn’t being fair. But it didn’t really matter what Jason Frank listened to or snacked on, because even though we may have lived in the same zip code literally, figuratively we lived on different planets.

  Although I had told the Zumba-ers I’d be back on Thursday, I wasn’t planning on actually showing up. Instead, I was going to come up with a totally viable excuse so that if the group hunted me down or saw me on the street or something, they wouldn’t burn me at the stake. But then I got home from school that afternoon to find that Hillary had hired these two women named Summer and Rain she had read about in some The-People-You-Must-Know-If-You-Want-to-Be-Thought-of-as-a-Hip-Angeleno list to go through each room of our house and clear it of all negative energy by burning sage and incense. I had to get out of there. Especially when they launched into some weird modern dance that was supposed to call in health, wealth, and prosperity (“And,” Summer said, glancing at her notes, “a four-carat diamond engagement ring”).