667 Ways to F*ck Up My Life

by Lucy Woodhull

  Screw that.

  And fuck Carmichael.

  Ack! Don’t fuck Carmichael! The thought was too, too gross.

  Matt procured us coffee and ushered us toward Carmichael’s office. The entire staff, my former coworkers, stood as we walked by, all of them grinning from ear to ear. They flashed me thumbs-up and whispered praise for the blog. Several said they missed me—I definitely owed a few lunches.

  Funny—my most pathetic fuck-up had been filmed for posterity, and it had made me seem like some kind of romance heroine. I was the Meryl Streep of the book-nerd set.

  489. Except to Yash, of course

  Nope. I pushed his beautiful face from my mind, for we had arrived.

  Carmichael opened his door. Jazmine scurried out of the office, the smirk on her face wiped clean when she took a good gander at me.

  490. I know it’s petty

  491. And un-feminist

  492. But I was hotter than her now

  493. With a better job

  494. And I fucking knew it

  I ignored her. As did my compatriots.

  Carmichael wiped his hands on his pants and shifted a nervous glance from one to the other of us before finally landing on me. A. Nervous. Glance.

  Oh, yeah. This man would beg me for my favor.

  495. This was gonna be fuuuuuuun

  I smiled with my mouth, leaving my eyes out of it, and waited for him to speak. The first one to speak is always the weakest. And no matter what I’d been through, I would never be the weakest ever again.

  I faced him down. Well, up. He’s a lot taller than I am.

  I faced him up. Our eyes met. His slipped down to my tits. I sneered and shook my head, but stayed silent. Ha! Not even his leching would distract me from my up-facing!

  Finally, he turned and gestured into his office. “Come in, Dag, Melanie. Hello, Lillian, always a pleasure.”

  “It’s all yours, Carmichael,” she replied.

  Mel met my eye, as if to say, “We have chosen wisely.”

  Carmichael laughed, as if what she said had been a joke. Lillian laughed too, but a wicked gleam twinkled in her Mrs. Claus demeanor.

  He sat behind the Hemingway desk and said, “Well, who knew little Dagmar had it in her!”

  Little Dagmar said, “Who knew that little Carmichael would call me to beg for it?”

  A choking noise sounded from my right, followed by a quiet, “Damn, sug’,” from Mel.

  His full-of-shit bluster deflated for a moment, two even, before he puffed it back up again from his reserves. “You’d still have your job with me if you’d displayed this kind of ballsy attitude.”

  I pulled a face. “Thank goodness it came after.”

  Lillian sat up straighter. “So, Carmichael. Tell us why we’re here.”

  He sat back in his chair, his feet flying up to perch on the desk. His favorite ‘man grunt in control’ pose. He had about as much in common with Hemingway and real man grunts as Moaning Myrtle did. Finally, he gifted us with his wisdom. “I think the blog is a great example of how when girls decide to behave like men, they get ahead.”

  Mel stood with a, “Nope.”

  I had to hide my grin. I put my wounded hand on her shoulder to tap her back down again. I flicked my eyes to my other hand, in which sat my phone. The audio recorder was going. I wanted to be able to recount this stupid meeting in all its glory in the book. I would never name Carmichael.

  496. But everyone would know

  This appeased her, so she gritted her teeth. Carmichael had watched this while smiling. Oh, how cute we were, right?

  He continued taking a crap into the air. “The focus of the book needs to be about how women can start taking control of their lives, finally, and think like a man. Like how Dagmar tried to sleep with that guy from the coffee shop to get ahead.”

  I cleared my throat. “Wouldn’t that be acting like Jazmine? Is she a man, Carmichael?” I leaned in closer. “Is there something you want to tell us?”

  “Ha ha.” He did not laugh. “The idea clearly came from me, and I promise, Dag, I’m all man.”

  Mel bristled, and I shot her a sideways glance to keep her still.

  Wait a minute… Perhaps my take-down of Carmichael Burns should consist of killing with kindness. Everyone in the office understood the way to Carmichael’s heart—telling him exactly what he wanted to hear.

  I smiled my sweetest smile and said, in my most adorable tone, “Yeah, I think I see what you’re getting at. So, you took control of the situation like a man and told her that she’d get a promotion if she slept with you? That’s why you’re the boss.”

  He pointed at me. “Finally, you’re fucking figuring out life. I knew you had potential. It took me canning you to really bring out the best in you, but then again, I knew that.”

  “Canning me because I was too naive to sleep with you?”

  “I can see you’re learning. I think it’s fantastic the way you took that guy…Mahatma, for a ride. Although that blubbering thing was… Well, I guess you can’t take all the girl out of the girl. And who would want to?” He bestowed us with a wink. “Men are men, women are women. You can borrow some of our traits, but you still need to act like a lady.” His massive head nodded. “The book can talk about applying things learned from men for business, but keeping it womanly at home. No guy wants to sleep with a bitchy boss. There’s a place for everything.”

  By this point, Lillian’s mouth hung wide open.

  Carmichael scratched at his belly. “I don’t really like the whole ‘mistake’ concept, though. Women need to keep their shit together. If you’re anything less than ideal at work or at home, you’ll fall further behind than you already are. It’s a self-improvement book, after all. You’re trying to improve women.”

  I nodded. “You’re right. But what about men’s mistakes?”

  He laughed. “Dagmar, you’re cute. Women are so much more forgiving than men. You’re better than us!” There went that wink again, with a side of casual sexism.

  Lillian swallowed—no doubt around the bad taste in her mouth. “Uh, well, we’ll take what you’ve said here and…and think about it. I’ll email you the auction details.”

  “You’re the hot bitches in town right now,” he said, addressing me and Mel, “but don’t get caught up in it. You need a star to really make a breakout book. You need me. I can bring you the male readership you desperately need. I’m seeing you, Dag, on the cover. Bikini and neck tie. Six-Hundred-Sixty-Six Ways to Succeed Like a Man (While Being the Ultimate Woman). Like it?”

  Mel choked on her own spit.

  I stood. “Oh, I love it, Carmichael. I’ll start a diet today.”

  He stood. “Good! For every ten pounds, you’ll go up a slot on the NYT. Remember, my experience is worth at least quadruple the bid I make.”

  We made our way outside and stood on the sidewalk, gob-freaking-smacked.

  “So”—I turned to Lillian—“we’ll wait until he’s made an offer to tell the CEO and board that he admitted to trading a position for sex with an underling, right? And also that he fired me for not doing so? We can send them the recording.” I held up my phone. “After all, women are supposed to be helpful!”

  Lillian rubbed her hands together. “Why, yes! I think it’s only right to let them know why they won’t be getting this holiday’s nonfic bestselling title.”

  “Provided Dag drops two hundred pounds,” Mel joked.

  “I’ll stop eating immediately and for all of time,” I promised.

  As one, we threw our heads back and cackled. Dagmar, Melanie, Lillian—The Witch Bitch Coven of Publishing.

  Lillian wrapped her arms around our waists, me on one side, Mel on the other. “Ladies, I feel honored that you chose me to run around town and cause trouble with.”

  I squeezed her back. “You are a welcome addition to the coven.”

  Mel said, “Lillian, you don’t know the half of it.”

  Her eyebrows rose. “I bet. D
ag, I cannot believe you goaded him into saying all that.”

  I turned to face them both. “His ego is the size of Jupiter. You can’t imagine the stuff he says to his inner circle. Enough drugs and sexual harassment to choke a coke-head horse.”

  We parted ways then with a promise to have a call at the end of the day to begin parsing interested parties and go to auction. That way we would see all the bids, with the final choice being ours.

  I worked, worked, worked, didn’t eat—

  497. Because of emotions, not bikini cover

  498. Which would never happen

  Worked, and worked some more. Anything not to stew about you know who. Not to send my itchy fingers to my phone to text him. To email him. The struggle lasted through every minute—tick email him, tock think of another way to say sorry, tick I loved him, tock maybe today he’d unblocked me?

  Finally, I asked Latisha to take my phone away. I couldn’t be trusted.

  499. Obviously

  Sometimes I would sit there and edit, tears streaming down my face.

  500. My poor Latisha

  501. What a shitty surprise I turned out to be

  502. She’d probably request a transfer to a toilet stall

  503. It couldn’t possibly stink worse than I

  Chapter Twenty

  F*ck-Ups Five-Hundred-Four through Five-Thirty-Three

  February without Yash

  The money from Marlene wasn’t as great as some other offers, but she did cut us excellent merchandise and film takes, plus book percentages that made up for the smaller advance.

  And just like that, Mel and I were semi-wealthy young women. Everyone in town wanted to know us. Book parties, lunches, everyone wanted to see us and be seen with us.

  My heartbreak blogs seemed to be the most popular. Although the one about the bird shitting on my head was the best traffic we’d ever had. I got asked on dates every day of the week, but I turned them all down. Mel, however, was drowning in more dick than a male prison.

  Her words.

  In my heart of hearts, I hoped Yash read the blog. He had to, right? He had to.

  504. If the situation were reversed, I’d be hate-reading the shit out of me!

  One time, I made a post so that the first letters on the left side of the page spelled out a message. “Please forgive me, Yash.”

  505. It was so clever

  506. That commenters on the blog figured it out immediately

  507. Then they debated about whether or not it was pathetic

  508. Newsflash. It was.

  On the other hand, Mel loved it when I pathetic’d up the place. Our hits skyrocketed. On those days, she’d post a teaser for the book.

  It seemed to make people feel better, though, when I screwed up. Because let’s face it, we’re all piles of ego-driven lumpy animal cells just shitting and fucking and pissing our way through our pathetic lives until we die in some stupid, meaningless way and sink into a dark abyss from which there is no return.

  509. I might be depressed

  We sold the TV rights to my ongoing shit show to a premier paid cable network—the Holy Grail of deals. A movie comes and goes, but six seasons of syndicated goodness would perform as a girl’s 401K for a lifetime.

  One side-effect of the publicity:

  510. My father had been horrified by all the shitass language

  But my sister was the Official Designated Family Expresser of Dissatisfaction. One Saturday, as I sat in the long-cold bathtub at home while licking the inside of a Häagen-Dazs container, she called.

  511. I answered on speaker

  Me: Sigh.

  Vanessa: “Pardon if it’s noisy. I have kids!”

  Me: “What, you have what? Since when?”

  Vanessa: “Is that you being funny?”

  I examined my ice cream container, but it was empty.

  512. Like my bed

  Ugh, I didn’t feel like playing this tennis match with her today. She lobbed the balls straight at my head, and had trained her hell spawn to do the same. Not that I didn’t love my niece and nephew.

  513. But they were little assholes

  514. Then again, so was I

  Vanessa: “Dagmar! Are you still there? No. No, don’t do that. Renesmee, don’t do that! Renesmee, put it down. Put it down. Renesmee, put it down. Put it down. Renesmee. Renesmee. Renesmee. Put it down. Put it down. P—”

  I hung up. ‘Renesmee, put it down’ could go on for ten minutes. I’d clocked it once. Why Vanessa didn’t just go grab the thing to be put down, I’d never know. I asked once and was told I couldn’t understand unless I was a mom.

  Another thing I didn’t understand?

  515. Naming her daughter after a Twilight book character who ate her way out of her mother

  She’d chosen it while midway through peeing on the stick. Seemed like bad karma to me and, indeed, the epidural hadn’t worked. And, no shit, Renesmee had been born with two teeth.

  516. The horrifying name ‘Renesmee,’ of Twilight fame, wasn’t strictly my fuck-up

  517. But a fuck-up by and for humanity

  518. So on the list it went

  519. Ooooh! Maybe I’d blog about it

  520. Although imagine the angry rants

  The phone rang again, right as I was wiping bathwater off my butt. I put it on speaker and waited.

  Vanessa: “Why did you hang up?”

  Me: “You weren’t talking to me.”

  Vanessa: “You’ll understand when you have kids, Dagmar.”

  Me: “If.”

  Vanessa: “When.”

  She continued—

  521. “What kind of woman doesn’t want kids?”

  522. “Is that why that guy dumped you?”

  523. “The foreigner?”

  524. “Because you wouldn’t give him kids?”

  I ground my teeth as I threw on my brand new aqua chenille robe. It was the best thing in my life right now, and I needed it for protection.

  She just. Kept. Talking.

  Vanessa: “Dad would flip if he knew he was Middle Eastern, anyway.”

  525. I didn’t bother to correct her

  526. He’d dumped me, so it’s not as if I’d ever bring him to Thanksgiving dinner

  Vanessa: “Wait, what did I call about?”

  Me: “There was a reason for all these compliments?”

  Vanessa: “Ah, yes. That’s it—it’s the attitude, Dagmar. That blog thing is horrifying. Are you on drugs? Because it reads like you’re high on goof-offs. Dad practically cried when he read some of that. And now our family’s life is going to be some sort of slutty television show? Horrifying. If Renesmee ever embarrassed the family that way, I’d—”

  I hung up on her.

  What the hell was a ‘goof off’? That word had totally come from Dad. Sounded like slang from 1962.

  527. Where would I even get these ‘goof-offs’?

  528. No, really, it was totally the time in my depression-slash-success to start a lovely drug habit

  Of course I wouldn’t include any of my family in the book or TV show. Not even to mock Renesmee’s name. It wasn’t her fault. It was Vanessa’s.

  Slowly, I slumped into the kitchen for a new pint of ice cream.

  529. I was on a butterfat cleanse

  Ugh, I wasn’t such a monster that I didn’t understand why they were upset at some of the stuff on the blog. But really, to not feel pride in me at all? They hadn’t congratulated me. Neither of them. Not once.

  The fact that I wasn’t following the Kostopoulos woman life script was the biggest sin I’d ever commit. The worst part? Say I did get married and even pop out a little monster of my own. I would have done it for me, but they’d all nod and say ‘I knew she’d figure out her true purpose eventually.’

  Although… My kids would never be treated as well by their grandpa as Vanessa’s were. I knew that. Children of the scapegoat would forever be grandscapegoats.

  Marriage and kids didn’t bug
me—it was the idea that nothing else had meaning for a woman that made me want to run an all-female criminal commune on the beach where we’d do goof-offs and never shave again.

  530. New business idea—Goof-Off Island

  My phone rang. I ignored it. A while later, when I sat down to a lonely evening of Netflix with Myrtle, I finally listened to the message. Vanessa informed me, for four long minutes, that if I was going to make bank off her life story, I should at least give her all the money from it because she had children and needed money more than I. That if I spent the money I’d earned on me, a childless person, it was a waste.

  Wow.

  No matter that Vanessa’s husband brought home more money than they knew what to do with. Nope.

  531. Congrats on your pay day, but sign it over to someone more worthy, and also you’re a piece of crap

  I had already decided to help my niece and nephew with college, but I’d probably keep it a secret for a while. Couldn’t have Vanessa think that her demands worked.

  I made a bet with myself that the next message would be my dad demanding that I give Vanessa all my money while telling me the reason for my success was embarrassing.

  532. The call came fifteen minutes later

  533. New business idea—Add a psychic to Goof-Off Island

  Dad had totally gotten his wish, though. I fell onto the couch and sobbed about my worthlessness while the cat ate my hair.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  F*ck-Ups Five-Thirty-Four through Five-Forty-Eight

  March without Yash

  I spent a week in Palm Springs with Mel and Khandye Kardashian. We partied like rock stars by night, and by day invented new and interesting ways to put quinoa into Mason jars. I finally experienced an evening of naked hot-tubbing! I shucked knickers with the two ladies (bonding) and two male members of the Avengers (lusting) while surrounded by a bunch of gorgeous rich people who had no pursuits besides working out and snorting coke.