Seven Books for Seven Lovers

by Molly Harper, Stephanie Haefner, Liora Blake, Gabra Zackman, Andrea Laurence, Colette Auclair

  Ignoring complaints from muscles I haven’t used since my Bob Smiley days, I grab my purse and make a dash for the exit. Officer Cheetah is in pursuit. I ditch the other heel to balance my gait as I weave between Bluetoothed business drones, overdressed Capitol Hill interns, and Georgetown students who scoff and curse as I push past.

  I wish they covered this at my college career center. Interview tip #947: When you’re too broke to pay your Metro fare, use your cleavage. Not your gymnastics “skills.”

  How is he gaining on me? I make for the overpass that rises above the Metro platform. Below us, trains rumble in, full of oblivious commuters. I plow down the overpass toward a metallic-painted mime who stands in the center of the walkway, voguing his arms into geometric shapes. As he sees me, he pauses mid-vogue, his arms framing his head. He raises a silvery eyebrow.

  The sharp green of his eyes pops against metallic eye sockets. I look into those eyes, transmitting a silent plea, and he raises the other eyebrow as I run past.

  A few seconds later, another blast of percussion makes me turn back. Officer Cheetah is splayed across the ground, a telling metallic stripe across his lower pant leg. The mime arranges his mouth into an O of mock shock. Mime-speak for Did I trip you, Officer? My bad.

  Interview tip #948: When you’ve run out of Metro fare, befriend a mime.

  Seeing Officer Cheetah still prostrate, I take a risk: I run back down the hallway, step onto the mime’s platform, and press my lips against his metallic cheek to express my eternal gratitude. I hop off the platform and sprint toward the exit. As I wipe his paint off my lips, I’m thinking I should have sucked it up and driven into the city. Then again, I probably would have ended up stuck in traffic on the Key Bridge as Lorena E. Anderson, assistant director of Orpheus Marketing Group, checked her watch and made a note in red pen on my résumé. Minus ten points for tardiness.

  I check my own watch: I have seven minutes to travel eight blocks in 90-degree heat to Lorena’s office. I sure hope this interview’s worth it.

  If not, I could always consider a career in mimery.

  Later that evening, Lin walks into my bedroom to find the tip of a kitchen knife poised above an expanse of soft pink flesh.

  He stops cold. “What the— Oh my God. Oh my freaking God! Piper Marie Brody. Let. Go. Of. Mr. Truffles!”

  I hold up my hands in surrender and release the knife, which lands on top of my latest student loan bill. A wisp of fuzzy innards clings to the blade’s tip. Lin rushes in and cradles the body, trying to pinch together the half-incised seam above Mr. Truffles’s curly tail. “Do I even want to know why you were about to dissect my innocent stuffed pig?”

  I scrunch up my nose, formulating a witty response—bad puns about pork-barrel spending come to mind—but I decide on the truth. Lin is my best friend, after all, so he’s going to find out one way or another. “I thought I hid some money in there. You remember the crazy klepto roommate I had freshman year? The one who hoarded tampons?”

  Lin nods and shudders involuntarily. It appears he hasn’t recovered from the time he opened our bathroom cupboard looking for dental floss and got caught in a pastel avalanche.

  “Well, I had to find somewhere to hide my valuables and lady sticks, didn’t I?” I gesture to Mr. Truffles. “I thought maybe there was still some money—left in—maybe it got wedged in—”

  “How could you violate Mr. Truffles like that? And—” He stops and sighs when he sees my penitent expression. “Honey.”

  “It’s not remotely the craziest thing I’ve done today.” I fill him in on my Metro incident. “And don’t even ask how the interview went.”

  What I don’t tell Lin is I managed to a) admit I have no relevant experience and b) hiccup and burp at the same time. To seal the deal, running eight blocks in the late May heatwave made my semi-coiffed hair all but explode. Needless to say, Lorena E. Anderson was less than impressed.

  We sit in silence until Lin says, “You should sell your body. But then you’d actually have to shave your legs.” We burst out laughing after a beat. I didn’t realize how badly I needed to laugh.

  I survey the wreck that has become my room with a mixture of ironic amusement and straight-up despair. I’d been searching for something, anything, I could sell on eBay. Sleeves and pants legs hang out of drawers like boneless inmates trying to escape their cherrywood prison. Necklaces, bracelets, and mood rings have made a break for the floor only to be buried by layers of clothes. Books like birds with their wings spread lie spine-up on top of the clothes. I’d been flipping through pages in case I slipped a fiver between chapters.

  I shake my head as if I could shake the crazy out. “How was your date with Steve?”

  Lin is distracted, eyeing my childhood companion Cheer Bear, who has a pair of pink lacy underwear draped over his face. “What happened to him?”

  “He was smiling at me like— like he could fix my financial crisis with a song about rainbows. It was pissing me the hell off. But don’t try and distract me. Out with the deets.”

  Lin gets up, takes the pink undies off Cheer Bear’s head, and holds them up. “These are cute.” He puts them on top of his own head. “Does this color compliment my eyes?”

  I swat at him. “Stop that. We can’t both lose our marbles.”

  He puts the undies back on Cheer Bear’s head. “Turns out Steve’s a chef—the gods are kind. Lord knows I’ve been looking for Chef Boyardee’s replacement for about ten years now.”

  “Nice! Is he a good kisser?”

  Lin rolls his eyes. “You know I don’t kiss and tell. At least not until after the third date, when I know I haven’t jinxed it. Besides, when are you going to stop living vicariously through my love life? How long has it been since—”

  I hold up a finger and look away. “Do not speak his name.”

  “Okay, how long has it been since You-Know-Who?”

  “Long enough. But I need to figure out my own life first.”

  Lin pinches my knee. “Smells like an excuse to me, Pipes.”

  “Ow! Easy for you to say. You have your life together, Mr. Senior Designer.”

  Lin flushes, still high from the recent promotion. “My offer to assassinate You-Know-Who still stands. You just say the word.”

  “He’s still not worth it.” We have a running joke that Lin’s going to kill him with one of our IKEA kitchen utensils. Death by GNARP.

  Though we refuse to say his name, it rises through my entire limbic system like neon bubbles in a lava lamp: Scott! Scott! Scott! The whole relationship made me seriously question my judgment. I thought it was the L-word. Turns out, the L was an Allen wrench designed to take me apart from the inside out.

  If there were a Greek chorus here right now, they’d sing my post-graduation mantra: How could I have been so wrong? About Scott, about my job, about my choice of college major. Turns out that an English degree will get you approximately one callback from the airport Book Nook out of a whopping 307 job applications. I thought: Selling books at the airport? That might be neat! Cue mantra.

  It’s not like Orpheus Marketing Group is my dream job, but it’s the only halfway decent callback I’ve gotten in two years. And “junior marketing assistant” would’ve been a significant improvement over “airport bookseller.”

  Lin scratches my back. “You know I’d help you if I could. But now that I’m an ‘adult,’ Mom’s making me pay my own way to see Pop-Pop over the holidays.”

  “How much does that cost?”

  “Last I checked, Kayak politely informed me that December flights to Hanoi are well into the quadruple digits, thankyouverymuch. I’d better find me a sugar daddy real quick.”

  “Can you find me one, too?” I gesture to my student loan statement lying on top of a pair of fuchsia toe socks. “The loan company called today to remind me I owe one bazillion dollars. And twenty-four cents. It was the twenty-four cents that got me. They’re not going to let it go until they’ve light-sabered my credit score and taken m
y firstborn child. My next payment’s due a week from today.”

  It’s Lin’s turn to scrunch up his nose. “I thought you didn’t want children.”

  “Right. Guess I better not adopt the teacup pig I’ve had my eye on.”

  Lin makes a tsk sound and clutches Mr. Truffles to his chest. A bit more cloud intestine puffs up from the wound. “Sorry, but you’re not fit for pig parenting. Le swine ees mine.” He leaves the room for a few minutes, returning with a cup of green tea and a good-night forehead kiss before disappearing into his room for the night.

  An hour later, I’m glaring at the cell phone bill and student loan statement. If I could vanquish just one of those final zeroes, my debt would be manageable. The other night, I watched that scene from The Matrix where they bend spoons with their minds. I’m pretty sure I can do this. I squint and focus on the numbers, their little black circles and angles seeming to somehow harden against my stare. No luck.

  I refuse to call my parents. For one, they still refer to me as “Sparkle Cheeks.” And they never fail to remind me that, had they known I would major in English and become an airport bookseller, they would have spent my college fund on an elaborate vacation in the South of France. Dad: “The cheese we could have eaten. Roquefort!” In his Southern accent, “Roquefort” sounds like “rock-a-fart.” Add that to the scrolling stock-ticker list of things I feel guilty about: depriving my hardworking middle-class parents of the finer things in life. Dad is actually lactose-intolerant, but it’s the principle of the thing.

  So it’s back to the eBay plan. I’m pulling open drawers and scattering books and papers, looking for anything remotely valuable. I survey my findings: old CDs, sociology textbooks, Norton anthologies of literature plastered with black and yellow “Used” stickers, photos from my cousin Lana’s wedding, rom-com DVDs (I set Dirty Dancing aside for later). It’s hopeless. Even Cheer Bear’s perpetual smile seems to have acquired a downturned cast. If Cheer Bear can’t maintain a positive attitude here, I know I’m screwed for sure.

  My hands are wrist-deep in my T-shirt drawer—can’t rule out the possibility of Andrew Jackson hiding between vintage tees—when I find a disposable razor lurking in one corner. I’m about to launch it at the trash bin when Lin’s words pop back into my mind: You should sell your body. But then you’d actually have to shave your legs. I run my hand down one calf and frown. “Ha. Sell my body. Hmph. Sell my body?”

  I retrieve my laptop, open up a new window, and type in “craigslist.org.”

  At first I type “Escort Services” into the search box, then hastily hit “delete.” Maybe I could start with something a bit more innocuous. I click on “Creative Services” then “Post Ad.” Staring at the blank form, I mentally mine my past experiences for hidden talents. Besides analyzing Milton’s poetry. Thanks, English degree.

  My eyes sweep the room for inspiration, finally landing on one particular photograph.

  After a moment of reflection, I begin typing.

  Two

  The next day, I’m hopping from foot to foot in the airport security line, which has shown no sign of speeding up in the past twenty minutes, when I realize I might as well accept my fate: My face is going to get hosed down by one of Sal’s Mountain Dew–breath tirades.

  The best part about covering the C shift today is that I only overlap with Sal for an hour. Sleeping until three o’clock in the afternoon isn’t a bad perk, either, though Lin left me a note on the kitchen counter this morning dubbing me “Queen Lazybones.” By the time I make it through security, he’ll probably be heading home to Fairfax, his taillights in tandem with the rush-hour crowd.

  “Hey, do you know what’s going on?” I ask two maintenance men ahead of me in line.

  One of them—Albert, according to his green security badge—turns back to me and shrugs. Dark circles shadow his eyes. “I think one of the X-ray machines is down.”

  “Cheese and rice! I’m already late.”

  Albert nods, Eeyore-like. “Tell me about it.”

  As it turns out, my brainwaves are as inept at speeding the security line along as they were at zapping my debt. The airport, like Dante’s limbo, is a land of the waiting. Full of long lines, long hallways, short tempers. Full of fluorescent lights and people with sad eyes. I think of an inscription I saw in Edinburgh when I was on foreign study: “Cities are hungry places.” I cast my eyes to the metal detector, adding my own imaginary inscription above it: “Airports are lonely places.”

  Twenty-three minutes later, I’m finally fast-forwarding through my security routine: I shed my shoes, belt, and purse into a worn gray tub. The TSA officer examines my employee badge with glazed eyes and waves me through the scanner. On the other side, I snatch the various pieces of my attire from the conveyor belt and sprint for the C Terminal tram, slipping through the closing doors as I finish refastening my belt.

  The tram starts moving before I have a chance to put my sneakers back on, displaying my mismatched socks for the tram population’s viewing pleasure. As I crook my elbow around a pole for balance, my gaze maneuvers between pieces of floral luggage to the front of the tram, where I’m hoping my favorite driver, Kalil, is at the wheel. When I see salt-and-pepper hair at the front in lieu of Kalil’s dark locks, I sigh and settle into a seat in the back. Kalil and I met a few weeks ago and have been sharing our post-grad woes ever since: He’s a philosophy major who whispers sweet nothings about Sartre as we slip between taxiing planes in the twilight. I only have his torso to judge from, but gazing at him is quite a nice ocular massage. Sexily tousled hair, wide brown eyes, broad shoulders, and surprising artist’s hands that look capable of far greater fine motor skills than those involved in tram driving.

  When I told him I have no idea what I’m doing with my life, he responded with: “The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.” I smiled up at him and said, “God, I hope so. I just wish these weren’t the days of our lives.” I gestured to his tram rearview mirror and the grumpy contingent of after-hours travelers reflected in it.

  I peer at today’s passengers through the round tram windows, thinking they’re lucky to be going somewhere, anywhere. Right now, my backpacking friends are likely being finger-fed escargot by Frenchmen with elegant mustaches, or perhaps relaxing at a hostel in the Italian countryside, drinking wine and swapping stories and spit. And I’m wedged between a handlebar-mustached man who is mumbling to himself and a three-year-old in a Spider-Man T-shirt who’s tugging on my pants leg.

  “Bad,” he says to me.

  “Eh?”

  He points to my shoeless feet. “Mommy says we can’t take off our shoes.”

  My eyes flick over his shoulder to the “Shirt and Shoes Required” sign. Conceding defeat, I bend down to slip my shoes back on.

  The tyke scrunches up his face, still not satisfied.

  “What now?”

  “Poopie,” he says. “I make poopie.”

  When we arrive at C Terminal, I squeeze past Monsieur Poopie Pants and dash to the Book Nook. A few people are browsing the New York Times bestseller wall, paperback novels tucked under their arms. Two more stand by the magazine section at the front.

  Sal’s talking with one of the five or six customers in line, but he will have noted the exact time of my arrival. The man has an internal clock that never stops ticking. He nods toward a book cart, a silent imperative to begin shelving in my least favorite section: biography. These hefty tomes are arranged by subject matter, not author name, so I have to focus on shelving instead of daydreaming about all the stories I want to write.

  The first of those stories is a romance about a dashing airline pilot who sweeps a bookstore clerk off her feet. She gets to thumb her nose at her evil bookstore boss as she sips cosmopolitans with her pilot at the Red Carpet Club. Before she leaves with him on an extended vacation to Fiji, of course.

  Back to reality: my book-cart chariot awaits. By now, I know no amount of optimistic brain
waves is going to turn Sal into a pumpkin. Or a naked mole rat (the current front-runner in my game of “If reincarnation is true, what sort of unfortunate creature will Sal be in his next life?”).

  I toss my purse under the counter, loop my Book Nook lanyard around my neck, and flip my badge around so my name is facing front—one of Sal’s golden rules of “making ourselves available to the customer”—before pushing the cart over to the biography section. I avoid glancing at the travel section, which never fails to remind me of all the places I’d rather be.

  Half an hour later, Sal saunters up behind me, watching me shelve. “Ah ah ah,” he interrupts as I’m about to squeeze a book on the end of the top shelf. If I had eyes in the back of my head, I’d see his long finger waggling back and forth.

  “Sorry.” I shift the book down to the next row and face Sal. His eyes drift southward, linger on my chest, and land on my left knee, where a conspicuous wrinkle lurks in my khakis. It’s no secret these babies haven’t been ironed since their last wash. He parts his lips, then seems to decide not to fight that battle today. He’s standing so close I can smell the mixture of sweat and cologne on his skin. And, only slightly less potent, the raging Mountain Dew breath.

  I look over Sal’s shoulder to lock eyes with Kelly, who started last month and is the sweetest person I’ve ever met. With the exception of Kalil, she’s been the only saving grace, the only bright spot of kindness, I’ve found at the airport, not to mention my buffer and comrade-in-arms against Sal. She goes cross-eyed and sticks her tongue out at me as I try not to burst out laughing.

  “You sure you’re okay being in charge tonight?” Sal reaches toward me. My back stiffens against the Hillary Clinton display. I bet she’d sock him a good one if she weren’t plastered onto a hardcover. Delicately, he takes his thumb and forefinger and turns my badge so my name is facing front again. “Now. I need you to go down to the stockroom and load the cart before I head out. Here’s the bestseller list. Make sure to get plenty of these and some pop fic to boot.”