“Pull yourself together, Pia.” I try to sound as stern as I can. “Stop being such a fucking loser.”
Good pep talk.
I exit the bathroom and walk back through the restaurant toward the garden.
Then, as I turn to walk down the stairs, there he is. Eddie. Standing right in front of me.
I try to speak, but nothing comes out. My voice is gone.
Eddie’s mouth falls open in shock. “Pia!”
I lean against the rail for support, attempting to fake the cool serenity I don’t feel, and arrange my face into a happy, surprised smile. But my heart just skipped about four beats, my hands are trembling so badly I have to hide them behind my back, and I feel like I’m suffocating. Oh, God, it’s going to happen, a panic attack—
“What are you doing here?” he says. “You, in Brooklyn, of all places?”
“I’m … dinner—” I manage to say, the sound of the sea roaring in my ears. “You?”
“Uh, dinner with Josephina, my … and her parents.”
“G-g-g-great,” I say. I can feel a tiny muscle pulling in my cheek as I smile, making my lip flicker. I see his face suddenly change, dropping the all-American-boy bravado.
“God, Keller…” he says, coming up the steps toward me and reaching his hand out to touch my arm.
I instinctively flinch, pulling away before we can make contact, and push past him down the steps.
Just as I reach the bottom, I turn around and look back up. Eddie is paralyzed, staring at me, but I can’t read his face. He looks—upset? Confused?
“Good to see … running into you,” I mumble, nodding frantically in an attempt to get the words out.
Before he can say anything back, I turn and hurry back to Aidan.
I pick up my wineglass before I’ve even sat down and start gulping frantically. Fucking hell, that was a nightmare.
Aidan is looking at me with a mixture of amusement and concern.
“You wanna tell me what’s going on?”
“No,” I say. “Let’s get really drunk.”
“Let’s not,” says Aidan. “Let’s just go back to having a good time.”
The conversation limps along. I drink as fast as I can and can’t think of anything to say. This is too hard, I realize, looking at Aidan’s face. I can’t do it. I don’t want to try. I don’t want to take any more risks.
“Pia, what’s wrong?” says Aidan, a few minutes later. “I thought we were having a good time—”
“Yeah? Well, so did I, but I’m always wrong, about everything,” I say, waving my glass wildly. “You seem like a nice guy, but you’re probably not. You’re here because you’re bored, or because you think I’m someone I’m not, because you want an easy fuck and I look like I might provide it.”
“That’s a ridiculous thing to say,” snaps Aidan, his face darkening.
“Is it?” I say. “It’s the truth. That’s what people do. That’s life.”
“That’s life? I think—”
“I don’t care what you think. We’re done here,” I snap.
“Fine,” he retorts.
Aidan calls for the check and we wait for it in silence while I drink the rest of the wine. When it finally arrives, he won’t let me pay, so I just throw half the bill down in cash and storm out of the restaurant, ignoring Eddie’s table, ignoring everything.
I reach the street and take a deep breath of fresh air. I didn’t melt down. I am still in control.
“So that’s it?” shouts a voice. I turn, and Aidan’s behind me. “I see you on Court Street and think about you for days.” He remembers seeing me that day? I didn’t think he’d remember that.… “Then fate throws us together in the back of a cab—twice!—we have half of a perfect dinner, and then you decide it’s not worth your fucking time to see what happens next? Nice one, Pia.”
“Don’t you dare shout at me!”
“Why not? You’re shouting at me!”
“You don’t know me! You can’t talk to me like that!”
“I do know you,” he says, his face creased in anger. “You feel out of place everywhere, but make friends easily. You love travel but never feel at home. You love feeling part of something, but want to be independent.”
“Stop analyzing me!” I scream.
“I know you because you’re just like me, you idiot!” he shouts back.
Fortuitously, a cab is going past the moment we hit the sidewalk, so I immediately yell “Taxi!” and it screeches to a halt. I get in and slam the door before Aidan can stop me.
“Where to?” asks the cabby.
“Manhattan,” I say, not looking around to see Aidan, who I can sense is just standing still, staring at me from the sidewalk.
“Anywhere in particular?”
“I’ll tell you on the way. Just get me the hell away from Brooklyn.”
I text Angie frantically. HelphelphelpEDDIE
She calls immediately.
“What the fuck?”
“He was at the restaurant, I freaked,” I say.
“Where’s the British dude?”
“I ran away.”
“Come and meet us,” she says. “I’ll have a vodka the size of Maine waiting for you.”
“Address?”
“We’re in the West Village. Go to Grove and Bleecker and then call me.”
“Done.”
We’re not even on the Brooklyn Bridge yet. I close my eyes, willing the cab to hurry up. I want champagne, vodka, tequila, a cigarette, a smoke, in fact for the first time since being kicked out of boarding school I want a line.… Anything to make these feelings go away.
I’m tired of working. I’m tired of worrying. I’m tired of taking risks. Nothing will ever work out for me. I don’t even want to be me anymore, and obliteration is the only answer.
CHAPTER 22
Next thing I know, it’s three in the morning.
“Pia! We’re leaving!” shouts Angie above the music.
“You’re boring!” I shout back.
The guy next to me—Stef? Stan? Something like that, anyway—throws his head back and cackles, and then high-fives me. He’s hot, in that long-haired, over-privileged, trust fund way, and I have a feeling I’ll be hooking up with him later. I kissed some other guy at the bar an hour or so ago. I wonder what happened to him. Whatever. Right now I just want to have fun!
“Don’t you have a truck to drive in like, three hours?” Angie says. She and Mani have been canoodling all night, she’s hardly partied at all. “Come on, I’ll take you home.”
“Fuck the truck!” I say, with all the brazen, heady confidence of half a gram of coke and a bucketload of champagne. “Fuck it!”
“Pia, seriously.” Angie gives me the listen-to-me face.
“Angie, seriously,” I mimic. I do not want to listen to anyone. I feel great!
“What about SkinnyWheels tomorrow?”
“Fuck tomorrow!”
Soon after that, she and Mani leave. I don’t know where they’re going, or where we are. We’ve been barhopping since eleven. Now we’re in some place with no closing time and loud music. There are just four of us left: me, Stan/Stef, and a couple who’ve been wrapped around each other like vines for the past two hours, Veronique and Charles.
“Where to, Stef?” says Charles. Ah, good. At least I know Stef’s name now.
“Party at my place,” says Stef.
Charles looks at me, then winks at Stef. Does he think I’m blind or stupid? “Let’s do it. Ready to roll, ladies?”
“You’re with me,” says Stef, linking his fingers through mine. His cool fingers feel wrong linked around mine. But I erase that thought by necking another glass of champagne. “It’s an impressive talent, drinking champagne that fast.”
“I have no gag reflex,” I say, swiveling my eyes up at him.
“Whoa!” he says, laughing in shock. “Babe, you are awesome!”
Next thing I know, we’re at Stef’s place, a spacious all-white apartment on
Columbus Circle with only a flat-screen TV that takes up an entire wall and freezing-cold, white leather sofas.
“When did you move in?” I say, turning to him. We’re on one sofa; Charles and Veronique are on another.
“Two years ago,” says Stef.
“You can’t afford a decorator?” I say. “Wow, times are tough.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“You work?”
“Hell no, baby, I just have a good time.” Stef leans over and kisses me, pushes me back on the sofa, and my brain gets lost in the kissing. The next thing I know, we’re alone.
“Let’s have another line and get naked,” suggests Stef, kissing the spot behind my earlobe that makes me shiver all over.
“Um…” The lights in the room have been switched off, and I can hardly see Stef’s face in the dim light from the hallway. Suddenly I can’t remember what he looks like. But he kisses me some more, then rolls over on the sofa so I’m underneath him, grinding into me.
“Ow,” I say. “Belt.”
“I’ll take it off,” he says.
A little voice in my head whispers, you shouldn’t be here.
I close my eyes and ignore it. Just keep kissing him, ignore thoughts of Eddie, Aidan, SkinnyWheels, and everything else …
“You’re making me so hard,” whispers Stef, and grabs my hand to show me.
No.
I snatch my hand away and sit up. “I don’t want this.”
“Sure you do,” says Stef.
He holds my arms down and shifts quickly down the sofa, kissing and licking the inside of my thighs, edging the hem of my shorts up with his tongue. Coco helped me pick out these shorts. Was that just a few hours ago? It feels like years. What the hell am I doing in an empty apartment with some strange guy licking my thighs? God knows where his tongue has been.
“No,” I say, pushing him off me, and pulling my legs up to make a barrier between us. “I don’t … I don’t want to be here.”
Stef sits back and quickly arranges his hair. Always the cool guy, clearly. “No problem. Where do you wanna go, babe? I’m heading to the Bahamas on Friday, why don’t you come with me?”
“No,” I say, climbing unsteadily off the sofa. Where are my boots? “I want to go home.”
“Fine,” he says, flicking a switch that takes him from caressing to cold. Spoiled brat guys do that, I’ve noticed, when you tell them you’re not going to sleep with them. They think it’ll make you feel bad and immediately yearn for approval and kindness again by dropping your panties. Sadly for him, I’ve played that game too many times. He gets off the sofa. “I’ll take a leak, and we’ll talk about it.”
The moment Stef is in the bathroom, I leave the apartment. It’s past 5:00 A.M. I was awake and working this time yesterday. God, that feels so wrong. I should be at work now. I should be picking Toto up from the commissary, making her salads, driving to Manhattan.
I’ve really fucked up.
The Manhattan streets are gray, windy, and freezing, and by the time I find a cab and get back to Rookhaven, the sun is up. Oh, God, I meant to work today. I need to work every minute I can to earn enough to pay Cosmo back. How can I have not even have thought about that once all night?
Shivering, I tiptoe into Rookhaven.
Shit. Voices in the kitchen. Madeleine and Julia, I’d guess. I try to sneak up the stairs without being heard, but then—
“Pia? Wow, looks like it was a good date!”
I turn around. Madeleine and Julia, both in jogging gear, ready to hit the streets in their perfect and capable way, and then go to their jobs that they’re perfect and capable at and come home to their perfect and capable lives.
“No,” I say. “It wasn’t. I fucked the date up, and he’ll never talk to me again, then I went drinking, things got crazy, I did drugs and went home with some random dude, and now I’m missing a day of SkinnyWheels, so Cosmo will probably just slice off my toes one by one or something. Hey, if you’re going to ruin your life, do it properly, right?” They are both staring at me, open-mouthed with shock. I can just imagine what they’re thinking. “Yes. I’m a fucking loser, okay?”
Before they can reply, I turn around and march upstairs to my room. Somehow I get the energy to shower and wash the stickiness of the night away and then—finally—I climb into bed.
The confident coke buzz is long gone, leaving me exhausted, but my brain is still racing in that jittery, anxious, cokey way, not settling on any one thought for long, just spiraling ever-downward. Aidan, Eddie, Toto, Mike, Jonah, Bianca, Julia, Angie, Madeleine, Coco, Cosmo, Nicky, my parents … I can’t find a single thought to comfort me. Everything is too complicated, too hard.
My mind continues to jump unhappily from thought to thought until, sometime around 7:00 A.M., I edge into a dreamless sleep.
CHAPTER 23
It’s early evening, and I haven’t gotten out of bed yet. I’ve been awake for an hour. Maybe two or three. I can’t tell. All I know is that the light was coming in the window when I woke, and now it’s not. I can’t bring myself to move.
There’s a knock at my door.
“Pia?” It’s Julia. “Emergency house meeting. Kitchen. Now.”
I open my mouth to talk, but nothing comes out.
“Pia? Are you awake?”
“Yes!” I finally get the words out. “Just getting dressed.”
That confirms it. A house meeting in my honor. I fucked up.
Again.
I haven’t exactly been a stranger to feeling bad over the past few weeks. Just about all of it self-inflicted and avoidable. But nothing compares to this. It’s a mixture of self-pity, regret, self-flagellation, and good old-fashioned misery, with a dash of hangover for added spice.
Without thinking, I pick up The Best of Everything from my nightstand and open it.
“Whenever you’re miserable,” Sidney said, “it seems as though you’ve always been unhappy and you remember all the bad and disappointing things that have happened to you. And whenever things are going wonderfully well it suddenly seems as though life has never been so bad.”
Goddamnit. This book keeps reading my damn mind.
I get up and pull on jeans and a frayed men’s Prada shirt that I think Angie stole from an ex-boyfriend. Oh God, last night. Oh God, today. Oh God, my past and my future are a mess.
I’m on the edge of an abyss, staring down, about to fall in, and I’ll never find my way back, ever, ever again.
Jules probably wants to kick me out. I bet that’s what the house meeting is about. I wouldn’t blame her.
Sighing, I head downstairs. Everyone is sitting soberly around the kitchen table, staring at me.
“Pia…” starts Julia.
“Is this an intervention? I swear I don’t need one,” I say. No one laughs.
“We just wanted … we wanted to talk to you,” says Julia gently.
“I’m sorry I was rude this morning. I wasn’t, um, myself.”
“We’re worried about you. We feel like you’re having…” Jules bites her lip.
“A breakdown,” says Madeleine.
I close my eyes and sigh. “It’s not a breakdown. It’s just … I fucked up. Again.”
Coco hands me a chocolate chip cookie still warm from the oven. Sweetness means love, I think, and smile at her. She smiles back.
“Thank you. I thought I was a new, improved Pia, but I’m not. Everything I touch turns to merde.” I sigh. “I’m just gonna call my parents. I can’t do it. I can’t make the money back.”
“Why do you think that now? You were so positive all week!” says Coco.
“I don’t know.” I stare into space, thinking. “I guess seeing Eddie reminded me of how I felt when he rejected me.…”
“Who the hell is Eddie?” asks Julia.
“Just a guy. A guy I went out with a long time ago. A mistake. Just like going on a date with Aidan was a mistake, and the loan was a mistake, and SkinnyWheels was a big giant fucking mistake,” I s
ay. “You wanna hear something funny? Eddie dumped me on August 26, which is why I always get as drunk as I can on the anniversary. That was the night of the housewarming, which was why I was dancing on a table while deep-throating a bottle of Captain Morgan, which got me fired, which got me the job at Bartolo’s, which got me to the Brooklyn Flea, which was why I ended up buying Toto and getting into debt with a loan shark. It’s like a chain reaction from hell. Mourning Eddie on August 26 is why I’m in this whole entire mess.”
“I think you’re wrong,” says Angie quietly.
“What?”
“You’re wrong. I don’t think you mourn August 26. You celebrate it. You just don’t realize it, because it suits you, in some fucked-up way, to pretend Eddie was the perfect guy who looked into your soul, or whatever the hell you think he did, and saw that you were undeserving of love. But it’s not true.” She pauses. “He was an uptight control freak, Pia.”
“What? No he wasn’t!”
“He made you a study timetable and updated it every night.”
“He was helping me be a better student!”
“He kept you away from me that entire ski holiday.”
“He didn’t like drinking!”
“He chose what you wore, he made you check every decision with him first, he tried to control everything you did! If you ask me, the only reason he broke up with you was because he knew it would be too hard to monitor everything you did when he was at Berkeley and you were at Brown. He was a fucking pain in the ass, Pia. And he didn’t know you. Because anyone who really knows you can’t help loving you just the way you are.”
Silence. And suddenly, I don’t know what to say. Because she’s right. He did do all those things. And yet …
“I was a mess.” I sound as uncertain as I feel. “I was a total mess, and he fixed me, I was a fuck-up, I was—”
“You were a normal kid, Pia. A teenager doing her best to survive her reality, that’s all.” Angie’s voice is shaking with intensity. I’ve never seen her like this. “You know what I think makes you act like this? Your secret belief that you’re not worthy of happiness. You’ve gotta forgive yourself for the coke and the cheating and all that shit, Pia. You bury it so deep that I bet you never even really let yourself think about it, and yet that guilt influences everything you do. No one cares what you did when you were fourteen.”
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