Love Show

by Audrey Bell

  “Well, when's the last time you went on a date?” Nigel asked.

  I cocked my head, trying to think. “I don't know. Nobody's asked me out since high school.”

  “Well, to be fair, that would be hard to do,” David said. “The only things that might have gotten to know you well enough to ask you out are your textbooks and the newspaper, and, as you may have heard, they generally don't ask questions.”

  “Ray Chang,” I said, ignoring David. “He was the valedictorian of my high school and my ex-stepbrother was on the fencing team with him.”

  “We have a fencing team. And valedictorians,” Nigel pointed out.

  “We didn't exactly hit it off,” I admitted. “And it was a prom date, not a real date. We both needed someone to go with.”

  “Okay, who’s your celebrity crush?”

  “Edward Murrow.”

  “Is he in Twilight?” Nigel asked.

  “No, he's been dead for decades,” I said.

  They both looked at me blankly.

  “He ended Joe McCarthy's career?” I reminded them. “He did the report on the Army-McCarthy hearings?”

  Nothing.

  “George Clooney made a movie about him? Good Night and Good Luck. Come on, really?” I said, looking from Nigel to David.

  “Huh, missed that one,” Nigel said.

  David exhaled. “So you're saying you're a necrophiliac? Is that it?”

  “I'm saying I'm not interested in being set up with anyone,” I said. “I don't want a boyfriend.”

  “I'm not trying to find you a boyfriend. I'm trying to get you laid so you relax. And then I can relax.”

  “Who is the last person you hooked up with?” Nigel asked.

  I shrugged. The last person I'd hooked up with had been Andrew—a boy I still worked with on the newspaper—and it had been the night I found out I would be Editor-in-Chief.

  It had been the kind of night that only ever happens right after finals. The kind of night when you can’t tell exactly what it is that has gotten you so drunk: exhaustion or alcohol or relief.

  “Andrew,” I said. “But that barely counts.”

  “Andrew is not her type,” David said. “Which is unfortunate, because he would be very convenient and he’s in love with her.”

  “He’s not in love with me.”

  Nigel cocked his head. “So, basically, you don't know what you want."

  “She has no idea,” David said.

  “She needs to go to tailgate,” Nigel said.

  “Okay, I have things to do.” I picked up my plate of risotto, waved the printout of my speech in front of them, and walked to the sanctuary of my room.

  "You're coming to tailgate," David called after me.

  The speech went off without a hitch.

  I walked back to campus with David, sipping vodka and lemonade from a Gatorade bottle. Nigel had abandoned us to meet a student at the University of Chicago he had just started dating.

  “I'm tired,” I admitted, wincing as I swallowed a large gulp of David's concoction.

  My phone vibrated in my coat pocket and I stared at the unrecognizable number.

  “I bet that's the Times.”

  “Doubtful,” I said. “On a Friday night?”

  “Answer it!” he said urgently.

  "Hello, this is Hadley.”

  “Hadley, it's Suzanne Reiss from the New York Times.”

  “How are you?” I asked, nodding at David to let him know he’d guessed correctly. He fist-pumped exuberantly. I rolled my eyes.

  “Listen, I just wanted to give you a call and tell you how impressed we were with your candidacy.” She took a breath. “Unfortunately, we've decided to go in a different direction with someone with more experience.”

  I swallowed. What are you supposed to say to that? Thank you for being impressed?

  “But, I really want to emphasize that we all thought you did a great job and that you were a strong candidate for this position. And we will certainly keep your résumé on file for future openings.”

  I swallowed. “Ah, okay. Yeah. Thanks. That'd be good.”

  “I'm sorry this isn’t better news,” she continued. She sounded sympathetic. “We wish you every success, not that you'll need our wishes to achieve it.”

  I blinked. "Oh, um. Okay. Well, thanks for letting me know.”

  “Of course, Hadley. I really do wish it were better news. Have a good evening.”

  “Thanks,” I said again. “You, too.” I pushed the phone back into my bag, trying to pretend that didn't just happen. That I hadn't just been told “no” by The New York Times.

  I should have seen it coming.

  I blinked twice, surprised at the hot rush of anger and hurt I felt. It was childish, really, to cry over not getting a prestigious job that I was lucky to even be interviewing for, but here I was, disappointed, out of sorts, strangling the flash of emotion in my chest.

  I looked up at the starless night. I multiplied numbers in my head until the tears dissipated and then I took a long swig from the Gatorade bottle and flashed David a falsely bright smile.

  David slipped his hands into his pockets and watched me warily. “What did they say?” he asked after a second.

  “I didn't get the job.”

  “What?” he looked shocked. I took another sip from the Gatorade bottle, thinking of the hundreds of nights I stayed up too late and woke up too early and said no to too many friends.

  I had believed, foolishly, that because I gave up on fun, I was entitled to a job at the Times. I didn’t like that I had allowed myself to think that way.

  He reached for me. “I'm sorry.”

  “No, it's fine. Really,” I said. I stepped away, not particularly wanting to be comforted.

  It doesn't matter, I told myself. There are other newspapers.

  I swallowed thickly.

  "Hadley, slow down. Come on," David said. He jogged to keep up with me.

  There are so many other newspapers. So many other places to apply. She said they would keep you in mind, anyways. And it's fine. It doesn't matter. No big deal.

  It's funny how quickly you begin to talk yourself out of your own dreams. I took another long sip of the lemonade and vodka.

  David caught up to me. He grabbed my wrist. “Hey, talk to me.”

  “It's fine.”

  "It's not." He shook his head. "It's their loss, but it still sucks."

  "Right." I bit my lip, wondering if I'd picked the wrong pieces to showcase or if I had seemed too shy for the Eastern Africa bureau or something. “I'm sure they'll really suffer without me. It's a miracle they've kept afloat since 1851 without my services.”

  He wrapped an arm around my shoulders and I let him hug me briefly. He didn't say much else. There wasn't much else to say.

  When we got home, I took a shower. I washed the shampoo out of my hair and slapped my hand against the shower wall twice. "Fuck," I muttered. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."

  When I got out of the shower, I looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes showed most of the week's damage; red-rimmed and dark-circled, the left one was slightly larger than the right. That happened whenever I went too long without a normal amount of sleep. I toweled my hair into some kind of nasty Mohawk and got another good look at myself in the mirror.

  "You look like a troll doll," I told my reflection. "A fucking demented troll doll."

  I cleared my throat.

  "And you're talking to yourself. So, you've lost your mind." I exhaled and huffed. "Clearly. No wonder they didn’t hire you. You’re fucking crazy.” I closed my eyes, unwilling to look at myself for another second.

  "You've Got Mail is on!" David shouted.

  I toweled off my hair and put on a bathrobe.

  "Say something so I know you didn't drown yourself!"

  "Be right out!" I called back.

  I shuffled out of the bathroom and over to David. I sat down next to him on the couch just as Meg Ryan was being stood up by Tom Hanks at the café.


  "You've Got Mail could only be the name of a romantic comedy in the 90s," I said. "The only thing I like about my inbox is the delete button."

  David took a handful of popcorn. "You. Need. To. Get. Laid."

  "I need to get a job." I said. "And a haircut. And new eyes. Have you seen this? My eyes are different sizes."

  He looked at my eyes. "It's ‘cause you're tired. So, close them. And stop talking. And go to sleep."

  I yawned, thinking of something else to say about the inanity of romantic comedies, but as soon as my eyes were shut, I dropped off into slumber.

  Chapter Three

  David had been counting on doing a lot more wheedling to get me to go to tailgate.

  When I walked out of my room at 11 AM, he was already drinking with Nigel. He lifted a plastic cup in my direction and grinned wickedly. Nigel was squinting at a beer, jabbering on his cell phone to someone he was calling 'Snookums.'

  "So, I've been thinking that it's a requirement for you to attend tailgate,” David said.

  "Sure.”

  "Seriously?"

  I shrugged. "Why not? I don't have anything better to do."

  He opened his mouth and then closed it. "Wonderful. Put on something waterproof. They're calling for a monsoon."

  “Perfect,” I said dryly.

  Nobody should drink alcohol at eleven in the morning. It's a recipe for disaster. Nigel was slurring his words by noon and David was trying to cut my hair and I was singing Ke$ha at the top of my lungs.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” I demanded when he came at me with scissors.

  “You need a haircut.”

  “No.”

  “Trust me.”

  “No.”

  He pouted. “But, Hadley, I’m dying to cut somebody’s hair.”

  “Cut your own damn hair.”

  David checked his reflection in the mirror and tossed his head from side to side so his golden locks bounced. He pouted. “That would be criminal,” he said. “Your hair, however, is problematic. And Nigel has a limited quantity of hair."

  I looked at Nigel's buzz cut.

  "Go away," I said to David as he snipped in the air. "That is dangerous."

  "Please, Hadley, please, Hadley, please, please—”

  I looked in the mirror. “There is nothing wrong with my hair.”

  “You have so many split ends, it’s giving me a panic attack.”

  “Oh my God,” I said.

  He smiled maniacally. “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “Suit yourself,” he huffed, dropping the scissors on the counter. He sipped his lethally strong vodka lemonade from a hot pink Hello Kitty cup he had bought on one of our epic trips to Target.

  “You’re making out with a stranger today," David announced. He filled my glass with another generous portion of lethal lemonade.

  "I can't drink this."

  "You can. And you will. And then you will find a stranger, make out with him, and have the college experience."

  "That's it?"

  "No, that’s the beginning," David said. "Baby steps. Nigel!"

  Nigel opened his eyes. “What?”

  "Are you falling asleep?"

  "No," Nigel said.

  I slurped my drink through a straw. David turned the music up louder. By the time, I’d had my third vodka lemonade, I probably would have let David cut my hair and then perform open heart surgery if he wanted to.

  "We need to go," Nigel said to David.

  "Hadley, we're leaving," David said to me.

  “I love you so much. I think maybe we should get married,” I said to David.

  “I did not go through hell in high school so that I could marry someone with a vagina.” He gave me a withering look.

  “We would be a great couple though. And we wouldn’t ever have to have sex.”

  “Don’t be disgusting.”

  “I love you.”

  He dragged me by the wrist toward the refrigerator. “You need to drink more. You have the alcohol tolerance of a four year old.”

  “Well, maybe we could have sex once if we wanted to have kids.”

  “Please stop talking.” He handed me a Red Bull and I made a face. “Don’t even start. You are drinking that. I am not going to carry you home. I’m just not. If you pass out in the parking lot, then you can stay there. In the Monsoon. Where you will drown.”

  “That’s mean.”

  “That’s why I’m giving you a Red Bull,” he said.

  “You would totally carry me home.” He made a face. He would totally carry me home. He just wouldn’t be happy about it. So, I drank the Red Bull.

  We stumbled down the tree-lined block to the parking lot where the student tailgate was held. I wore jeans and boots with a heel, and a tight purple tank top to show a modicum of school spirit.

  “I should have worn a coat.”

  “You’re too drunk to be cold.”

  “You don’t know everything.”

  “I know most things,” David replied wearily.

  “What is the point of even going to this thing? They aren’t going to beat Nebraska,” I said.

  “Nobody cares about the game. It’s for the social scene,” he said. And, that was true. Most of the students would stumble back to their dorms and apartments long before halftime.

  “Hadley!” Andrew Brenner shouted as soon as we walked into the parking lot, which was jam-packed with people I knew and people I’d never seen. Everyone looked drunk.

  I hugged Andrew warmly. Mostly because, in spite of David’s insistence that I wouldn’t feel cold, I was freezing.

  “It’s supposed to rain,” Andrew warned me, with an eye to the sky. “There’s a low pressure system moving northeast out of Kansas.”

  “Oh, okay,” I looked up at the foreboding clouds and nodded. “Low pressure.”

  Andrew really liked the weather, which was endearing, but…you know, tedious. He knew all sorts of facts about dew points and densities and southerly breezes.

  So long as you didn’t let him get started on meteorology, he was the sweetest kid in the world. But he’d started in on the weather. And no matter how sweet he was, I couldn’t take much of it.

  Usually, David would have taken this opportunity to interrupt and drag me somewhere more interesting, but he gave me a thumbs up and an encouraging smile.

  “I’m just going to say hi to someone,” he said.

  "David," I hissed at his rapidly retreating back.

  "Hey, did you hear back from the Times yet?" Andrew asked.

  I cocked my head at him. "Nope. No, I didn't. Not a word. I did hear that there was a hurricane off the coast of West Africa, though. Sounds wild.”

  Andrew looked at me incredulously. "No way."

  "I'm pretty sure," I lied.

  "Where?" He pulled out his iPhone. "Do you know if the system has a name? That would be virtually unprecedented. It's almost December! And it’s the Southern hemisphere…”

  "I've got to run," I said. I lunged after David, but quickly found myself jumbled in a vaguely familiar sea of purple. The music was thumping. The pavement vibrated. I’d felt houses vibrate from aggressively loud speakers, but I’d never felt the actual ground move.

  And I thought I was drunk, but I definitely wasn’t. I mean, not compared to the people here. I wasn’t throwing up in a garbage can like the skinny girl in jean shorts a few yards to my right. And I hadn’t yet taken off my shirt, like the screaming, incoherent boy to my left.

  “This is trippy,” I muttered to myself. Appropriately, I took that moment to trip. Not badly. I caught myself. Still, I tripped.

  Someone wrapped a warm hand around my arm and helped me up.

  I brushed my hands off on my jeans, cringing.

  “You okay?”

  I looked up into a pair of thick-lashed brown eyes. They were soft. Bedroom eyes. Deep and big. Something you wanted to fall into.

  Okay, so I was definitely drunk.

  He was ha
ndsome, too, in a blue plaid shirt, with a playful smile—halfway between teasing and happy to see you—and tall, at least six two. We were standing close enough that I had to lift my chin to look into his eyes.

  He waved a hand in front of my eyes. "Hey.” He laughed gently. “Are you okay? Did you hit your head?"

  “Oh. Sorry. No,” I said awkwardly. “I’m-I’m good…I’m fine.” I smiled. “I’m great. Just clumsy.”

  Someone shouted in our direction and the handsome stranger turned his head. “One second, okay?” He took a few steps towards a pickup truck parked at the edge of the lot.

  “There you are,” David said, grabbing my wrist and yanking me forward. “Where the hell did you go?” he asked.

  “Where did I go?”

  “You were supposed to make out with Andrew.”

  “What?” I turned my head. I was just drunk enough to want to make out with the handsome guy in plaid. I tried to locate the back of his head in the crowd, but David kept pulling my wrist.

  “I am not making out with Andrew.”

  “Andrew likes you.”

  “Says who?”

  “Everybody who has eyes.”

  “That’s ridiculous. And I've made out with Andrew. It was not memorable."

  "Right, you were drunk."

  "Not that drunk."

  “Mm…” he took a deep breath. “You need to make out with someone. Break the totally depressing vow of celibacy you’ve taken—”

  “I haven’t taken a vow.”

  “Nobody goes through three years of college without so much as drunkenly hooking up with a stranger without taking vows. Or being, you know, Mormon, or something,” he indicated vaguely with one hand. He looked at me suspiciously. "And I know you're not a Mormon. One, you’re drunk and two, you’re a caffeine fiend."

  I took in a deep breath of the cold air and ran my hand through my hair. Something about being cold and drunk and wobbly from having tripped made me want to do something moderately crazy. “Well, there was someone over there,” I said vaguely.

  “Excuse me?”

  “There was someone…you know, cute. Over there.” I indicated over to where the stranger in plaid had been.

  “You think someone’s cute?” he repeated slowly. "I've literally never heard you say that before. Where?"

  “Over there," I gestured. "But, I don't think—”