#TripleX

by Christine Zolendz

  Angelisa: Why’d you cross off the “and equally by?”

  Christine: Because it looks stupid. They know it’s by both of us.

  Angelisa: But you get top billing, so they think it’s MORE by you.

  Christine: Nobody thinks that.

  Angelisa: Everyone thinks that. You have more readers than I do, anyway.

  Christine: Oh, my God, not this again. Let’s just put our names on the same line, then.

  Angelisa: It won’t fit. Plus, whose name would go first on the line?

  Christine: Holy Hell, do you want to just leave my name off?

  Angelisa: Ummm…

  Christine: Angelisa!

  Angelisa: I mean, NO. Definitely not—I guess.

  #TripleX

  Copyright © 2015 by Christine Zolendz and Angelisa Stone

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Design by LP Hidalgo, Bookfabulous Designs

  Interior design by Angela McLaurin, Fictional Formats

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The authors acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owner.

  All rights reserved.

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Thank You

  Dear Christine

  Dear Carol-Angelisa-Deena

  This book is dedicated to all women who:

  **have looked in the mirror and gasped at whom they saw.

  **have looked at their husband and dreamed of punching him the face.

  **have looked at their kids and wondered how cute, little innocent creatures could viciously suck the life right out of them.

  **have devoured a bag of Skittles on the same day they started a diet.

  **have imagined beating their skinny friend with a Pepperoni & Cheese Loaf when she asked if her “butt looked big” in her size four yoga pants.

  **have tried every product that promises to defy the years and make them look younger.

  **have gone days without a shower while dried formula soured on their shirt.

  **have heard their knees and hips ominously crack when they stand up.

  **have struggled into a pair of Spanx to hide the “pooch” that baby #3 brought with him.

  Hell, this book is dedicated to ALL of you, women of the world, who deserve the recognition and praise you rarely get. You’re women! You can do it all—one handed. You’re the reason your families function; you’re the machine that keeps it going—the center of it all. Remember that carefree, fun girl in her twenties? Guess what? She’s still there; you just have to find her!… And no, she’s not hiding in the pantry behind the Teddy Grahams and Goldfish… or at the bottom of your bottle of Cabernet. She’s right there inside of you, begging to come out. Let her out—she deserves to come out!

  Twitter: That awkward moment when you wake up in jail and you wonder what you did to get there. Then smile. #TripleX

  A lone dimly lit light bulb sways gently from the jail cell’s ceiling. It hurts to open my eyes toward it, so I squint to try to ease the pain. A handful of loudly buzzing insects fly wildly around the dull yellow globe and just the sight causes me to scratch at my arms and neck madly. I loathe bugs. And it’s like Swarmageddon above my head right now.

  Pulling myself up into a sitting position, the throbbing behind my eyes turns sharp and shatters into millions of razor-tipped tiny pieces of glass. I moan as I grab my head in pounding pain. The room spins, and I fall back with a hard thud against the cold concrete wall.

  I hear footsteps, heavy and impending, walking along the rough cement of the hallway. I peek through my fingers, but all I can see is the knotted hair of my cellmate, my partner in crime.

  The footsteps become louder, closer. Keys are jangling. Someone is whistling, and the screech of the rusty cell door makes scorching bile burn the back of my throat. I swallow twice to keep it down.

  “Stone. Zolendz. Up-and-at-‘em. Going before the judge,” a deep voice bellows. I hate the man instantly.

  I believe I moan out some sort of unintelligible sound, but I’m not sure. Who can be sure?

  The dull bulb overhead flickers and makes a sizzling sound. Damn, I’m in a place where even the bugs are killing themselves. “Come on ladies, let’s go,” the voice yells. It’s closer now, and the body attached to it starts kicking the wooden bench I’m sitting on. I think my head is going to explode from the vibrations and violent crashes that echo through my head. “What’s the matter, not willing to offer up your goods this morning?”

  My head snaps up, “Excuse me?”

  The man standing over me is older, in his sixties with a long gray beard. His eyes dance with laughter. “Well, Ma’am. That’s what you tried to bribe us with last night when we put you in here. Your goooooooods.” He kind of shimmies a little and gives a few humps into the air. I vomit a little in my mouth.

  “Oh my God. Seriously? Just don’t… just don’t pay any attention to anything I said, okay?” I mumble my mortification.

  “You mean to tell me, you’ll be cancelling our hot date tonight?” he laughs, snidely, mocking me. “Come on, Darlin’. The judge is waiting on you both. No harm done last night, you both were quite intoxicated.”

  “Oh God, I think I’m going to be sick.” Slowly, I pull myself off the bench, every bone in my body screaming for a few more hours of silently sound sleep. And really, that stupid light bulb is annoying the Hell out of me; someone needs to shoot it.

  “Angelisa,” I whisper and shake her awake. “Come on. We have to go. A judge wants to see us.”

  “Blah… Ha. Ha. Very funny. Lemme sleep,” Angelisa groans and swats her hand at me. It falls to her side with a loud thwack against the metal rim of the bed.

  “I can’t. Clear your head and think about last night. Think back. Go ahead,” I urge. She doesn’t. She remains motionless and silent; all but a small, low snore can be heard. “You seriously need to open your eyes right now, because we’re in trouble,” I hiss ominously.

  Her head slowly turns toward me, eyes blinking open. They dart around the room and widen; a bubble of laughter escapes her lips. “We’re in jail, aren’t we?”

  I smile and join in with her laughter, “We are, indeed, waking up together in a jail cell.”

  “Damn it, I can’t go to prison. You know how horrible I look in stripes,” she whispers as she climbs up to her feet, grabbing onto my shoulder and using me for leverage.

  “Quick,” I look around the cell and laugh, “anybody got a cell phone? I wanna take a cellfie—post this to Twitter.”

  And we try, we really do try not to fall back down into a fit of giggles, but it’s way too hard. We follow the guard down the hallway.

  “Dude, I could so be a violent criminal.” Angelisa mumbl
es. “Shouldn’t you cuff me? Why doesn’t anyone ever want to handcuff me, Chris?” she whines.

  “Ummm, she’s not violent. We swear. She’s just… just… dumb.” I explain, nudging her.

  “Seriously though, how does he know I’m not packing an oozie in my girly stuff?”

  “Ya know that is true. It’s kind of sexist that you don’t think we could be hiding heat?”

  “Ladies, the only thing you two are trying to hide -- or hide from is good, old-fashioned middle age. And quite frankly, neither one of you is doing a bang-bang up job of it,” the son-of-a-slut says, pretending to shoot us.

  “Is that what you do now? Shoot blanks?” Angelisa quips, exploding in laughter that spirals out of control until we’re both laughing like lunatics.

  “Enough!” he shouts, trying to silence us before we enter the courtroom.

  The two of us are still giggling like two immature kids being brought in front of the principal. Matted hair, mascara-streaked cheeks, and barefoot. I’m pretty sure I even have an extra tattoo somewhere.

  We’re sworn in; big vocabulary is used. Case numbers are brought forth, and I almost fall asleep. I’m just about to face plant into the table with exhaustion when Judge Caroline Jacobson calls both of us up to the podium. “Ms. Zolendz. Ms. Stone. Approach the bench please.” She has dark, tired brown eyes, eyes that are weighed down with darker brown bags beneath them. Her light blonde hair is pulled back into a tight, painful looking bun. It’s streaked with gray. I want to pull out all those restraining pins. I want her to stop feeling so tight and tense behind her bench. I want her to feel free like me, like us. Well, like the freedom we felt before we were thrown in jail.

  Almost as if Angelisa’s reading my thoughts, she mumbles, “Man, she needs to get laid… and needs to get those roots done.” I can’t control the giggle that escapes me. The judge eyes us sternly, and you can nearly hear our mouths snap shut.

  “As I hear, you both were found in the fountains of the Bellagio last night. Swimming. Naked,” she chirps.

  “Yes, that’s true,” Angelisa giggles, proudly, next to me.

  I nod my head in agreement, “Yeah, that certainly sounds like us—well, the new us, anyway.”

  The judge pinches her lips into a tight pucker. Doesn’t she realize that’s exactly what makes those little wrinkles all around her mouth? She pulls out an envelope marked Prisoner Property/Currency and unfastens the clasp. I suck my lips between my teeth to stop myself from laughing, because this isn’t funny—at all. But if I remember correctly, the things in the envelope are.

  She slips one dainty little hand in.

  Angelisa and I lean forward to watch.

  Two books of matches, fifty-six dollars, a bent wedding ring, a fake moustache, a shoehorn, four glow sticks, two “Call for a good time” prostitute cards, a tube of Bengay, and an extra large rubbery dildo that flops on its side when she places it on her desk.

  “Do you want to explain to me why two fully grown women, respected in their fields, would be caught in this situation… with these items?”

  Angelisa and I look and back and forth from her to each other and back again. We both shrug.

  “Well, it all started with an apple pie,” I smile.

  Angelisa nods next to me, “Yes, definitely. That’s probably where it all started, the apple pie fiasco.”

  The judge leans back and draws in a long breath. She pulls her glasses off her fatigued eyes and rubs them softly with her hands. “An apple pie?”

  “Yes. A forgotten apple pie. I can tell you every detail except for three or four days where I have no recollection. Both of us can. It’s what we do, tell stories.”

  The corner of the judge’s lips curl up the tiniest bit, “Come into my chambers ladies, this I have to hear.”

  Twitter: McDonald’s apple pie and a bedazzled vagina: always a good way to start any adventure. #TripleX

  I lost it in McDonald’s. My dignity. My smile. My self-esteem.

  I was standing in line ordering, while my fingers texted my Facebook BFF, Angelisa Stone. Doesn’t it seem like nowadays all new relationships start and stop with social media? Anyway, she was trying to talk me out of a double cheeseburger. She knows my secrets; I was about one vanilla shake away from a heart attack, a small fry away from a Weight Watchers’ intervention, and an apple pie away from disrupting the Earth’s rotational axis. But her pleas didn’t stop me, nothing ever does. I’d lost all my willpower as soon as motherhood clamped its claws around my uterus and held on for dear life. I also found that I couldn’t quite distinguish the blurry line between hunger and boredom. And binge eating was my superpower.

  Three skinny twenty-somethings in tight leggings and pouty lips, drenched in perfume, and clutching their Coach bags walked in. I longingly looked at them and missed my youth, then quickly shook it off. I have an okay life; I don’t need to envy how smooth their skin is, or how thin and young they are. Grasping my bag of food a little too tightly in my hands, I walked toward the door. Opening my bag before I reached the exit, I noticed the McFotherMuckers forgot my apple pie. I huffed loudly and threw my head back, eyes to the ceiling like it was some sort of government conspiracy theory about censorship and the public withholding of apple pies and unnecessary caloric intake. That delicious apple-gooey-goodness was the only thing I actually came in for. Well, I did buy a meal to go with it and one of those yummy caramel fraps. I mean, I figured since I was there, why not just blow the whole diet?

  Anyway, I marched back to the counter in an inconvenienced huff. The three flawless girls were still ordering, so I waited until they were finished speaking. It’s only polite, right? I smiled warmly and pointed into my bag, “Sorry to bother you, but you forgot to put in the apple pie.”

  The tallest of the herd of bitches rolled her eyes at me and snapped, “It’s not like you really need that.” All the better to sit on you, my dear, Slutty-McTwiggy.

  No sooner were the words out of her thin-lined, pouty little lips, but I had my hand around her neck and my other hand in my bag. Taking out my cheeseburger, I shook the paper off of the sandwich and shoved it in her No-Carbed face, and yelled, “Yeah, that’s what bread tastes like. Maybe you should eat more of this and swallow less… forget it. You’re too dumb to even get it.” Yanking her by the hair, I plowed her into her little friends, and they went falling down like pretty little Barbie doll dominoes.

  Okay, so that’s not what I did, but I wanted to. I really wanted to. Still wish I would have. Instead, I smiled sweetly and said, “Wow. That’s really classy of you.” Didn’t she realize all I had to do was sit on her and she’d break?

  “Well really, someone should let you know how you look,” she sneered.

  Those imaginary hands were choking the Hell out of her again, this time shoving in some apple pie with that hamburger…

  Instead of my dreams of skinny-tart torture, I saved the pie for myself and winked at her. “Then thank you for checking me out, babe. But, I don’t swing that way.”

  Before the little twit could say anything else, I grabbed my apple pie, okay it was two, out of the cashier’s hand and walked out the door with my head held high. I climbed into my minivan, drove home, and opened the biggest bottle of wine I had. Filling a 48-ounce glass to the tippy top, I gulped it back. Grumpily, I played back my trip to Mickey D’s as I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, glass of wine in hand, and went over the most brilliant lines of sarcasm and comebacks I’d ever heard, all the things I wanted to say, but was too classy to articulate center-stage in a crowded fast food joint.

  I made my way into my eight-year-old’s room, and it took me a good ten minutes to clean off the four-foot pile of Legos and stuffed animals that blocked her mirror. I dragged in a stool, stood on the damn thing, and gawked at myself in the mirror. The stupid stool made menacingly cracking noises beneath me.

  My world spun.

  Who the hell was that?

  I had a half a glass full of wine and a half-eaten
burger in my hands. And I was huge. No, that thing in the mirror was huge.

  “What are you doing?” my four-year-old asked, scaring the Hell out of me and almost shaving twenty years off my life.

  “Mommy is looking at herself in the mirror.” I turned to look at my ass. Holy Good God it should have its own zip code! Who knows? Maybe it does. Why has no one told me that I looked this bad? An uncomfortable burn started to rise in my throat as my head ached.

  “You have a big butt,” the kid said, eyeing me.

  “Thank you, Captain Obvious. You couldn’t say that when you were like two, right? Couldn’t stop me from eating all those cookies back then, right?”

  “I was too busy playing when I was a baby,” she explained all serious.

  “You did this to me, you know. You and your sister got all up in my business and made me gain all this weight.” She gave me some crazy look, did a half lopsided cartwheel into the hallway, completely dismissing my accusations.

  I looked closer into the mirror, leaning over the dresser, and spotted a bunch of nasty crow’s feet that weren’t attached to any birds. No, they were attached to my once bright green eyes that now held more bags under them than the bottom of a cargo plane. Seriously, what the heck just happened to my life? I was just twenty-one with my entire life ahead of me. Now I’m fat and… and… and… elderly.

  Insert midlife crisis here.

  Because I am about to indulge in one of the adult extra large size tantrums that cause my four-year-old to run for my phone and dial 9-1-1.

  Immediately (okay not immediately it was a good ten-minute tantrum), I ran to do what everybody else in the known universe usually does in times of crisis. I signed into Facebook, so I could vent to a handful of strangers who most likely think of me as one of the cool, hot, strong characters of my novels.