“Fucking awesome,” Dean bellowed at the opposing team.
Peyton cast those blue eyes on me, approval warming me from the inside out. “That was pretty sweet, Tif.”
“Thanks.” My smile reached my ears. Dean handed me a beer, and I took a pull, relished the sourness fizzing in my empty stomach. I wasn’t in the habit of skipping meals yet, but that night I was so giddy, so hot to the touch with excitement, that it didn’t take any effort to forgo dinner.
I felt two hands on my shoulders, squeezing the muscles just a beat too long. Liam smiled and wrapped his arm around my shoulder. I was barefoot, and I fit perfectly into his armpit, which thank God smelled nothing like Dean’s. “Look at what a midget you are,” he said.
“I am not!” I protested giddily.
Liam took a sip of his beer and fixated on a spot above my head, contemplating something. He looked back down at me. “There’s a table on the porch that would be perfect for beer pong.”
“I’m really good at beer pong,” I said, putting more of my weight on him. The side of his body was hard with lean teenage boy muscle.
Liam took another sip, a long one this time that emptied out the contents of his beer. He made an ahhh sound when he brought the can away from his lips. “No girl is good at beer pong,” he declared. He walked me to the sliding glass door. The deck was damp and slimy beneath my naked feet, but I didn’t want to go back in the house and find a pair of shoes, risk Liam asking someone else to be his partner in my momentary absence.
Dean and a few others trailed us outside. Teams and rules were set. Liam and me against Dean and Peyton. Hoes could blow and a bounce knocked out two cups. Five minutes in, Liam and I were winning.
It didn’t take long for Dean and Peyton to catch up to us. I lost a little bit more of my touch every time it was my turn to raise the red Solo cup to my lips. When Peyton and Dean beat us, I thought that was it and we could just walk away from the table, but Liam said that where he came from, it was good sportsmanship to drink the last cup. It was my turn and I obediently swallowed the remaining contents in small, sickening waves.
“Holy shit!” Dean clapped his hands. The stern October air caught a few words before releasing them into the night—“Never seen a girl take it down like that”—their effect as good as an A in English class, as the pride I felt years later when I landed a desk in that glossy honeycomb tower. Who are the pussy girls they’re hanging out with? I smiled smugly, knowing it was Hilary and Olivia. I accepted the cocoon of Liam’s odorless armpit again, leaning into him so heavily he stumbled.
“Easy there,” he said, but he laughed.
Then we were inside, sitting cross-legged around the living room table, playing quarters again. Only this time whiskey scorched my throat when it was my turn to drink. Dean said something so funny I fell over from laughing. Liam—no, wait—Peyton was next to me and he propped me back up, telling me maybe I should sit this next round out. I looked past him, searching for Liam. I wanted Liam.
“She’s fine.” Dean tipped the bottle over the glasses again.
Someone called Peyton a pussy, and he said, “Look at her. I’m not taking advantage of her like that.”
That must have been when I fell asleep. Because the next thing I knew, I was lying on the floor of the guest bedroom, my gym bag by my side. I groaned and lifted my head and so did the boy between my legs. Peyton. He stroked my thigh and went back to doing whatever he was doing that he thought was making me feel good. I couldn’t feel a thing.
There was activity by the door, someone poking his head in and urging Peyton to do something, go somewhere. I was too tired to cover myself.
“I’m coming,” Peyton snapped. A laugh and then the door closed.
“I have to go.” I looked at his beautiful face in the valley of my legs, meticulously shaved on the off chance something like this would have happened with Liam. “Let’s hang out for real, okay?”
I fell asleep.
“Ow, ow,” I was moaning this before I opened my eyes, before I could locate the source of the pain. Liam. There he was. And there was his face above mine, also twisted in pain, his torso immobile but his hips pressed close to mine, pressing closer still in an agonizing rhythm.
I was hunched over the toilet in the guest bathroom, the tiles cool beneath my knees. Was I throwing up blood? Why was there blood in the toilet?
A few months after this, when I stopped lying to myself long enough to admit that I’d become the cautionary tale mothers told their daughters, I pretended like I was asleep when the train lurched to a stop at the Bryn Mawr train station. I rode the R5 the rest of the way into Philadelphia and called the school when I arrived. “Oh my God! I fell asleep on the train and ended up in the city.”
“Oh dear,” croaked Mrs. Dern, Headmaster Mah’s longtime assistant and an exceedingly committed smoker. “Are you all right?”
“I am, but I’ll probably miss first two periods,” I said.
Mrs. Dern made the mistake of sounding concerned rather than suspicious, so instead of boarding the first R5 winding back through the Main Line, I wandered around Thirtieth Street Station. I found a Chinese food buffet, and even though it was not even ten in the morning, the undisturbed rows of glistening meat and vegetables were too beautiful to resist. I made a plate, and with the first plastic forkful I shoved into my mouth, I bit into some mysterious pocket that exploded, a burst of salty, gritty chemicals that made me gag.
That’s what I tasted in my third and final round that night. A foul, bitter blob on my tongue deposited in tandem with a boy’s euphoric groan.
When I woke up it was morning and I was in a bed and in a room I didn’t recognize, the sun unraveling like flight lines, welcoming and warm, as initially oblivious to the night’s tragedy as I was.
There was movement behind me and before I turned over to see who it was, I accepted that I wanted it to be Liam so badly that it couldn’t be. But of all people, it had to be Dean. He was shirtless, his lean torso exposed, and, for a moment, I thought I would throw up on it.
He groaned and rubbed his face. “How you feeling, Finny?” He propped himself up on his elbows and looked down at me, curiously. “Because I feel like shit.”
I realized I was still wearing my Victoria’s Secret tank top, but only that. I sat up, clutching the duvet cover to my chest, looking around the room. “Um, do you know where my pants are?”
Dean laughed, like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “No one does! You were walking around without them for half the night.”
The way Dean told it, this was just another innocent anecdote from our wild party, the same way some senior announced he was going home and everyone found him passed out in his car in the driveway the next morning, never even having fit the key into the ignition. Or the way another guy from the soccer team had forgotten to put any turkey on the sandwiches all the guys made late night, so he ended up eating a mayonnaise sandwich. It was a story so funny it deserved to be told again and again: TifAni was so hammered she walked around without pants for a few hours!
Life had shifted drastically while I slept, but Dean was looking at me like we were comrades in this post-party apocalypse, and it was so impossibly tempting to accept that reality over the other one that I did with a weak laugh.
Dean gave me a towel and dispatched me to the guest room. There, on the floor by the dresser, were my enormous panties crumpled into a little leopard ball. I shoved them in my gym bag, ignoring the blood.
CHAPTER 5
* * *
Oh come on. No one?” The editor in chief of The Women’s Magazine spun around her office like a Phillip Lim–outfitted lazy Susan, presenting a tray of macaroons to a circle of painstakingly malnourished editors in an unsuccessful bid to get one of us to eat.
“I’m off sugar,” I said, defensively.
Penelope “LoLo” Vincent dropped the tray on her desk and plopped into her chair. She waved her hand at me, her nails painted the color of gangren
e. “Of course. You’re getting married.”
“Oh, fine. I’ll bite the bullet!” Arielle Ferguson was our associate editor, very sweet and very clueless in her size eight dress. She lurched forward and selected a cookie, so pink it concerned me, between her fingers. Ugh, Arielle, I wanted to telecommunicate to her, LoLo only wants the anorexic editors to eat.
LoLo watched Arielle, aghast, as her jaw worked through the two hundred empty calories. Everyone held their breath, frozen in secondhand fear for her. Arielle brightened when she swallowed. “So good!”
“Right.” LoLo lingered on the word, her tongue snapping on the t, a deranged mother hen cluck. “So! What does everyone have for me?” She dug the heel of her YSL Tribute sandal into the floor and spun half an inch in her chair, her eyes holding Eleanor in their laser gaze. “Tuckerman, go.”
With a flick of her wrist, Eleanor transferred a pile of blonde hair from the front of her shoulder to the back. “So I was talking to Ani the other day and she mentioned how her friend used to work in finance, and how sexual harassment is still shockingly commonplace in that industry.” She nodded at me. “Right, Ani?” I was slow to smile at her. Only when I did, did Eleanor continue. “So Ani and I were talking, you know, it’s like we’ve come so far in terms of recognizing that sexual harassment is a problem and educating people about it. Which is great. But it’s like we’ve gotten really black and white and earnest about issues like this at the same time that raunchy humor—particularly from women—dominates pop culture. It’s bled over to how women speak and joke around, and that blurs the line in terms of what women are comfortable with, so how do you know what is unacceptable, or even illegal behavior in your professional life? I’d love to do a piece that examines what is sexual harassment in 2014 when nothing is sacred anyway.”
“Fascinating.” LoLo yawned. “What’s the hed?”
“Well, um, I thought, ‘What Is Sexual Harassment in 2014?’”
“No.” LoLo examined a chip in her nail.
“The Funny Thing About Sexual Harassment.”
LoLo spun in my direction with a gay little laugh. “Clever, Ani.”
I glanced at the notepad on my lap, bearing the words “THE FUNNY THING ABOUT SEXUAL HARASSMENT” in all caps, skimming all the research I’d collected underneath it. “Also, there’s this great book coming out and we could time it to our story. It’s by these two Harvard sociology professors. Specifically about how pop culture has influenced the workplace much more so than we realize.” The galley was sitting at my desk. I’d requested it from the publicist so I could read it before pitching this very idea to LoLo.
“Excellent.” LoLo nodded. “Be sure to pass that to Eleanor and help her with anything she may need.” The vein in her forehead throbbed like an angry heart over the word “anything.” I always wonder if LoLo knows more than she lets on. That she sees what a talentless hack Eleanor is, what an obvious kiss ass. Eleanor is from some Podunk town in West Virginia. But oh, the places she’s gone since she’s moved to New York. She’s tenacious, I’ll give her that much. We have so much in common that it took me a while to understand why we didn’t get along. Infighting. We both defeated the odds to get to where we are now, and we’re terrified there isn’t room enough for the both of us.
“Now”—LoLo drummed the armrests of her chair—“what have you got for me, Mrs. Harrison?”
Shifting in my seat, I gave her my backup option, the one I wanted to present as a fun little aside, a great cover line, once I’d wowed her with a pitch that actually had some gravitas. Eleanor makes me meet with her before we go into these meetings so we can discuss the issue as a whole, make sure the lineup is just the right amount of smart and skanky. She tends to pluck my sharpest idea and present it as this half-baked nugget I was struggling to make something out of until she swooped in and reshaped the whole thing into ASME-winning material. “The American Council on Exercise recently adjusted the calorie burn for a few activities,” I began, “and sex is one of them. It’s almost double what they assigned it twelve years ago. I thought it would be funny if we had some writer do the Sex Workout or something. She could wear a Jawbone and a heart rate monitor and actually evaluate her efforts in terms of calories burned.”
“Brilliant.” LoLo turned to our managing editor. “Can we bump ‘Dirty Talk’ from October and replace it with ‘The Sex Workout’?” Without waiting for her response, she barked at the digital director, “Let’s get that cover line up online and testing immediately.” She lowered her chin at me. “Well done.”
Eleanor trailed me back to my desk, a contrite little gnat. No, she was too gangly to be a gnat. More like a mosquito who had gotten a taste of my blood and wanted more. “I hope you don’t mind that I brought up your friend’s situation in the meeting. I know that’s a personal thing.”
My desk phone was lit up red with a voice mail. I hiked up my pants before sitting down—I’d been following the Dukan diet for the last seven days, and the waistbands of my skirts and pants were starting to pucker away from my stomach as I sat. It was so soothing that when I couldn’t sleep, the gnawing in my gut and the memories on an insomniac Tour de France, I would grab a pile of pants from my closet and model them for myself in the bathroom mirror, marveling at the way I could pull on size twos without ever unbuttoning them. This small, private victory almost made up for the fact that when I crawled back into bed, Luke flinging his sleep-heavy arm over my size twenty-six waist, I’d have to smell his searing middle-of-the-night breath. Did his breath smell this bad when we were dating? It couldn’t have. I couldn’t have ever been that in love with someone who had breath that bad. Something had happened. His tonsils maybe. I’d mention it to him in the morning. This was fixable. Everything was fixable.
I cooed, “Of course, I don’t, Eleanor.”
Eleanor perched on the edge of my desk. She was wearing a pair of white, wide-legged pants. “Love those trousers,” LoLo had said when she walked into her office for the meeting, and now I have the misfortune of knowing what Eleanor’s face looks like when she squirts. “Maybe she’d want to talk about her experience for the story?”
“She might,” I said. There was my green ballpoint pen, cap off, idling on my desk. I nudged it with my elbow, inch by inch, until the inky head grazed the seam of Eleanor’s pants. I maintained eye contact with her as I dutifully promised I would ask her that very afternoon.
Eleanor rapped her knuckles on my desk, and the corners of her mouth dug into her jowls. Not a smile, a conciliatory smirk. “Maybe we can arrange to get you an additional reporting byline. That would be so great for you.” Additional reporting bylines go to interns. My piece on birth control and blood clots had been nominated for an ASME the year before, and Eleanor would never forgive me for it. She removed her ass from my desk, and I admired my handiwork, the way the oily squiggles took on the appearance of green varicose veins on her outer thigh.
“So great for me,” I agreed, my smile finally genuine, and Eleanor mouthed “Thank you,” and pressed her hands together in prayer, like I was such a dear, before walking away.
I picked up my phone, triumphant, and dialed into my voice mail. After listening to the message from Luke, I hung up and called him back.
“Hey, you.”
I loved the sound of Luke’s voice on the phone. Like he was busy but having fun and stealing away to tell me something in confidence. I’d been the one to push for the engagement—obnoxiously push. The HBO producers had e-mailed me almost a year ago now, asking if I would want to participate in a documentary loosely titled Friends of the Five. I was no friend of the five, but the opportunity to redeem myself, to tell my side of the story—it made my mouth water. But if I was going to do this, I would do it right. There was no way I was mugging for the camera if I hadn’t checked off all the boxes in the hotly contested “having it all” category: cool job, impressive zip code; hungry body, and the kicker—dreamy, loaded fiancé. An engagement to Luke would make my rise unassailable. No one
could touch me if I was marrying Luke Harrison the IV. How many times had I fantasized telling my story to the camera, bringing my hand to my face, the emerald that would soon be mine gloating as I wiped away a dainty tear?
Luke and I had been dating for three years before the engagement, I loved him, and it was time. It was time. This was how I put it to Luke, solemnly over dinner one night. “I wanted to wait until next year’s bonus,” he said. But he caved, had Mammy’s ring reset for my tiny finger, and I happily agreed to participate in the documentary. I know I shouldn’t fall into the old trap that I’m not someone, that I haven’t really “made it,” until I have a ring on my finger. Fucking Lean In and all that. I’m supposed to be better than this, a more confident, independent woman than this. But I’m not. Okay? I’m just not.
“What if we do that dinner with my client tonight?” Luke asked. He’d been trying to set this thing up for a week. I still had two more days left on the “attack phase” of Dukan. After that, I would be allowed to eat a few select vegetables. Don’t even think about broccoli, fat ass.
I held the phone tighter. “Can we do it in a few days?”
The only sound was frat-boy hollering from Luke’s floor.
Back when we first started dating, I was terrified for Luke to meet my mother. Her nostrils would twitch—yup, that’s the smell of the real deal—and she would call me Tif, would ask Luke how much money he made, and it would all be over then. Luke would come to his senses, realize I’m the girl you meet in a bar and bang a few times until you fall in love with a natural-ish blonde with an androgynous first name and a modest trust fund. Instead, to my utter amazement, when we returned to his apartment after dinner with Dina and Bobby FaNelli, he bundled me in his arms, rolled me onto the bed, and said in between kisses, “I can’t believe I’m the one who got to save you.” Like I had a slew of blue blood Dumpster divers lined up before me, vying to wife away my garbage scent.
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