by Suzie Carr
Hope said as if talking about the banality of frost on car windows, “I’ve got three hundred and five followers as of this morning.”
Adam’s eyes blinked several times. “Wow, after just a week?”
“Yeah I picked up most of them from Twitter. They all want to be involved. I’ve got a dozen or so emails with really funny stories about first dates, bad dates, and weird dates. People are sending me some good stuff.”
“How did you get them to react?”
“I just asked them.”
He clicked his tongue and I could tell his mind went into overdrive, speeding away from the scene like a bank robber anxious to get to a quiet place and count every penny.
Then, Hope did the unthinkable. She asked him, “How is yours?”
“Fine,” he said, fidgeting.
“It’s an excellent way to get more readers,” Hope said.
“Absolutely.”
And this was his queue to vacate and get writing.
Two weeks later, Hope’s blog roll climbed to four hundred fifty. Each blog entry, hysterical and based on reader contributions, landed twenty or more comments.
“This is so much fun,” she said one night. She propped up on the couch with her laptop clear across her legs. I sat beside her and looked at her most recent entry – The Power of the Flirt. “This reader sent me her take on how to flirt, and then ended with asking me out on a date.” She shook her head. “Too funny. Good stuff.”
“Did you say yes?”
“She lives in Takoma.”
“Hmm, too bad.”
“Too bad?” Hope asked, pointing her eyes down to my lips.
We encroached on that awkward moment we had both wanted to avoid since our kiss on the deck. “Hope...” I stared at her.
“I know. I get it.” She scooted a bit away.
“I’m sorry. I just can’t… I want to…”
“I get it,” she said again, staring off now at the fireplace. “What was that all about for us that night?”
I couldn’t go down this road, realistically. My life was set and simple. I’d resisted drugs and cigarettes all my life, I could certainly resist Hope Steele. “It was just a friendly kiss.”
She pulled in her lower lip. “If that’s what you think, Lucy.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm. “But I’m glad we’re finally talking about it, anyway. I’ve felt really awkward dancing around it.”
“Me, too.”
She looked back at me. “I’ve got to get myself out there.”
“When you’re ready. Take your time.” Take a very long time just in case, I wanted to say.
“Well, there is this girl who lives in D.C. who hinted about getting together.” She waited for me to say something.
“Is that what you really want to do?”
She flung her hands up. “I don’t know. Why not, right? It’s not like I have any options here.” Her voice rose to a frustrated plane.
“Yeah, totally. Why not? Isn’t that the whole point to starting this blog in the first place? To meet hot chicks?” I wanted her to say no, I really just want you.
“True. Who knows? Maybe she’ll end up being really cool.”
This answer angered me. “Wouldn’t that be wonderful?” I asked this like I was the most confident girl in the world, like her kisses didn’t mean a fucking thing to me.
We stared at her salmon checkered screen and watched another follower appear.
Seemed everyone naturally gravitated towards Hope.
~
Once again, I couldn’t help myself. I needed to get into her head.
I opened up her journal and read.
November 22
Dear Journal, it’s Hope and I am a whore.
I pulled away stung by her interpretation of our kiss. A whore. Lovely. I was making her feel like a whore.
Now I understand what love is. I thought I loved Ryan. But now I know I never did. Ryan never took my breath away, never smelled like a garden oasis, never softened in my arms, never made me feel like I could take up flight and dare the impossible. I always wanted to be alone when I was with him. I wanted to escape him and his manly ways. I crave nothing of the same with her. I find myself unable to function without her. I hate when she goes to work, I hate when she goes to bed. I hate when she takes a morning off from running. I hate that I can’t just stop her mid stride and kiss her. What I wouldn’t give to make love to that girl and show her how awesome we could be.
I absolutely adore the way she steps up to protector role. At first, I thought she was just afraid to face reality and conflict, but now I see that she just loves to protect everyone before herself. I certainly don’t want to be the one that fucks this up for her by turning her into someone like me who will never forgive herself for overstepping boundaries and hurting those she loves by giving in to her own selfish antics.
Ironic how I end up falling in love with the one girl who will forever keep me shackled to my label of cheater. This is why I am doomed to a life in front of my webcam with a sleazy whore from Nebraska fucking herself. This is why I have to lie and make up girls who want to date me from D.C. I have unraveled into a life where I play silly, stupid games now.
I don’t know what I’m doing with my life. Being a whore isn’t fun. I just want to be in love. It hurts that she’s not free to love me back, and it hurts even more so that for her to love me back would mean she has to turn into someone like me, a cheater. She’d never leave Adam. She could never hurt him that way. What a freaking dichotomy, huh?
Fuck my life.
Hope
I would never be a cheater, and I never wanted Hope or anyone else to ever see me that way. I could never be happy living my life with such a mark over my head. I could never do that to Adam. So, what was I doing, kissing her and fondling all these naughty thoughts of her?
No more. Next time I saw her I would act like a friend acts. Friends don’t go around kissing and provocatively dancing with each other. They ran, they talked, they cooked, and they talked about their lovers. Never did they talk about each other as lovers.
How could I have been so selfish giving her signals that trapped her to infidelity? Hope was not mine to toy with.
Chapter Eleven
I was in the middle of dressing up for school when my sister called me.
“Do you think Ralph can teach Angelina a few self-defense moves?”
I pushed my left arm through the sweater sleeve. “He’s kind of a busy guy. And, I know he charges about a hundred bucks an hour. You might just want to go to the Y and take some classes.”
“You know money isn’t an issue.”
“I can ask him.” I pulled my head through the neck of my sweater and my hair blew up in a charge of static. “Why the sudden interest?”
“Your darling niece got beat up yesterday and now she refuses to go to school this morning. I’ve tried everything, bribing her with new makeup and a new jacket, and she just rolled over and buried herself under her blankets. She needs to get her butt off to school and learn. And, if that means kicking someone’s ass, then so be it.”
“She could be expelled.”
“Well, then, at least she’d have an admirable reason to be home.”
I climbed into my pants, holding the phone with my shoulder. “I can check with him.”
“You know she’s flunking out of every class?”
“It sounds like she needs some serious tutoring before worrying about teaching her how to beat someone up.”
“She needs some confidence. Can you just ask Ralph? See if he can help us out? Fast.”
“Only if you let me tutor her, too.”
“Fine, whatever, tutor her. She won’t listen. She’s ridiculously closed up right now. These bullies are going to kill me if she can’t pull it together and defend herself.”
Always about Julie. “Just bring her by Saturday. Let her stay the weekend. I’ll make sure Ralph gets in a lesson between Saturday and Sunday.”
“She
’ll never want to stay the whole weekend with you.”
It would probably kill my sister if she did want to. “Just try.”
She sighed. “Fine. I’ll bring her by around nine.”
HOPE
I needed some fun topics for my blog. That European vacation I dreamed about for so many years would be perfect for this type of research. I could travel the cafes and museums digging up all sorts of great prompts. Until then, I had to pluck ideas from magazine sidebars. Like my latest idea of posing a question about how to go about deciding if a woman was worthy of a second date. One of my blog followers responded. She punctuated her list with must-haves: must be taller than five-feet, five-inches; must be fit; must not smoke or do drugs, occasional drink is ok; must be able to carry on a conversation about current affairs, and this does not include current prime time television comedies or dramas; must be educated and in an upward climb to her career; must be a go getter; must believe in God; and absolutely must be a dog lover. If she strayed too far from any of these, the second date would never be an option.
I wanted to tell her she’d have better luck pre-ordering a custom-built house from a catalog than finding someone to match her standards. Instead, I thanked her and told her she had some great ideals.
Seemed she took this to mean that I might actually be someone who read The New York Times and stayed up to speed on the current state of affairs, and that I earned an advanced degree from a prestigious university that would allow for such upward mobility in my career. She sent me an email and asked me to meet up this one weekend when she would be traveling through Maryland to get to New York for a Katie Herzig concert.
I peeked at her profile image. She was cute with highlighted shoulder-length hair that flipped and was parted slightly off center. Why not? I asked her what date she was coming. I’d show up and disappoint her with my five-foot, four-inch frame and my love for cats over dogs. I couldn’t do any worse than I was doing at the moment, unless of course she turned out to be a serial stalker, at which point, I’d just kick her ass. If that didn’t work, I’d bring Ralph along with me and the two of us would kick her ass.
Either way, I really needed to date. Lucy made that point clear the other night.
Within two minutes, this chick sent me the date, and I accepted her invite. We decided to meet in Annapolis for a seafood feast at Buddy’s Crab House for an early dinner. My stomach already started to roll in angst. I really didn’t want to date. I hated the process. I just wanted to fall in love naturally and not have to deal with the nervous jitters and the whole putting-on-a-good-first-impression bullshit.
A few minutes later, just as I signed my latest blog entry about the art of conversation during a dinner date, Adam walked in the front door, flung his shoes off, and zoomed by me on route to the kitchen. “Hey,” he said, stopping to toss his laptop on the couch. “I’m starved.”
I continued publishing my blog, and when I previewed it, the font got all screwed up like usual. User-friendly program my ass. Every time I saved the freaking blog, the font changed to a different color, different size, random bold and italics, and the images got all distorted. “Adam, do you know anything about formatting a blog?”
He shoved a handful of nuts in his mouth and walked towards me. “Is it screwing with you?”
“Yes.” I tapped the page up key, impatient it wasn’t scrolling up to the top fast enough. “Why does it keep making my fonts gigantic like this?” I pointed to the first two sentences which were triple the size of the rest of the sentences.
“Scoot over,” he said, sitting down and taking my laptop. “This happens to me, too. I learned a trick.” He scanned my blog. “Four hundred eighty-five followers?”
“I think it’s just the subject matter.”
“I have ten followers and two of them are me and Lucy.”
I hammered in a mental note to follow this poor man’s blog. “Show me your trick,” I said, refocusing him back to something he could control.
He clicked on the HTML code option and showed me how to manipulate the font type and size, paragraph breaks, colors, and image properties. And when he clicked back on preview, everything fell right in balance. “Wow, that’s amazing. Thank you.”
“It was an easy fix. Now you know.” He smiled, and I saw his straight white teeth for the first time.
I felt sorry for him. He wanted this writing career so badly he forced everything he had into it, including Lucy. “You know,” I said, raising my voice to a more cheerful level. “I never did get a copy of your book. I’m going to download it tonight.”
He brightened again just like he did the other times I mentioned his books. “That’d be great. It would mean a lot to me. You know, no one else who knows me, besides Lucy of course, has read my stuff. It kind of sucks, you know, living with people and them seeing the hard work and intensity, and the sacrifices I make to create these books, and they don’t ever offer to sample it.”
“It could be that they’re afraid to hurt your feelings if they don’t like it.”
“I’ve grown thick skin over the years,” he said. He pinched his forearm. “Pinch me, right here,” he urged. “Go ahead, feel how thick it is.”
I did as he asked. I pinched his skin so hard I brought tears to his dewy eyes. He didn’t flinch though. He took it like a tough guy.
“See, thick skin. So, if you hate it, it’s okay.”
This guy needed a fan. “I promise, I will read it, and I will be honest with you.”
“Can I be honest with you?” He paused as if waiting for me to grant him permission.
Did he know I kissed his girlfriend not once, but twice? I wasn’t prepped for this attack. He would be well within his rights. I sat feeling very much like the cheating whore I was and faced him head on. “Go ahead. Tell me what’s on your mind.”
“I read your blog.”
My face heated up like someone stoked a bonfire under my chin. “You did?” I braced for my first solid critique.
“I can see why like they like you so much. You’re witty and unpredictable.” He handed my laptop back to me and then picked up his from the couch. “I’m just glad you’re not a sci-fi writer.” He winked and walked out of the room leaving me with an entirely new cool perspective of him and a major appreciation that I hadn’t been caught with my lips where they had no business being.
~
Later that night, I downloaded his book and committed to reading the first five chapters regardless of how terrible they might’ve been. Two hours later, I woke up and attempted to reread chapter one again. Perhaps I was just tired when reading it the first time through. Maybe I’d get it now that I had a few hours of sleep.
~
Julie arrived with Angie at nine on Saturday morning. Julie wore a black leather jacket with fur wrapped around her neck. Her lips were painted bright crimson and her hair was tucked back into a lose knot at her nape. Angie wore an Old Navy hooded sweatshirt and jeans that dragged on the floor. Her bangs hung down to her cheeks, covering her left eye.
Lucy was whipping up some pancakes and I was making a third pot of coffee when Adam chauffeured them into the kitchen. Lucy immediately walked over and hugged Angie. Her sister shifted her Coach bag to the next shoulder and fidgeted with her keys.
“Hi Julie,” I said to her, rising to shake her hand. “I’m Hope. The newest roommate.”
She scanned my bright orange running shirt and traced down to my striped socks before accepting my shake. She clung to her Coach bag like I’d steal it if she placed it down on the counter. “Lucy mentioned something about a new roommate.”
Lucy ventured back over to the stove. “I’m making blueberry pancakes, Angie. Want some?”
“Sure.” She shrugged and plopped down on a stool, tossing her weary face into her hands.
“Okay, well, you two have fun. I’m off and running,” Julie said. “Bye, sweetheart.” She leaned down to kiss her daughter’s head, but Angie backed away. So, she settled on patting her
back instead. “I’ll be back for you tomorrow.”
Angie swung her back to her mother and asked Lucy, “Can you make me some strawberry pancakes?”
Instead of answering immediately, she turned to Julie. “See you tomorrow, sis.” Then, she turned to Angie. “Strawberry pancakes coming up.”
Julie waved and followed Adam back out to the foyer.
With her mother gone less than ten seconds, Angie perked up and turned into a happy-go-lucky teenager. She jumped off the stool and stole the spoon from Lucy’s hand and began mixing the fresh batter. Before long, they were giggling while mashing strawberries.
“Do we have bananas?” I asked.
“Nope. Adam ate the last one.”
“Well, one of these days, I will make you my world famous banana pancakes.”
“I love bananas, so I’m going to hold you to it.”
Adam came back into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee, offering me my third cup. I welcomed it. “She’s a piece of work, isn’t she?” he asked me in a whisper. “Waltzing in here with her fancy clothes acting like she’s doing Lucy a favor instead of the other way around.”
“Seems to be a lot of hidden resentment there.” I poured some creamer into my coffee.
“You have no idea.” He sipped. “She hates me, I think.”
“I’m sure that’s not true.”
“She’s so damned jealous of Lucy, and she sees that we’re happy, so this annoys her.”
I wondered how much she’d hate me.
We moved to the breakfast bar and sat beside the baker girls.
I stole a blueberry pancake and plopped it on a plate for Adam and another one for me.
“So,” Adam asked. “Did you read my book at all?”
“Uh, yes. I did.” I smeared some butter on my pancake, trying to issue a delicate opinion. “It was different. I’m not a big science fiction fan, so I’m not sure I’m the right target for this type of book. I like your characters so far.”