Читать книгу Transit Girl - Jamie Shupak - Страница 13

CHAPTER FIVE

One new text message from Gemma.

WHAT HAPPENED, G??!?!?!?!? COME OVER

I have to lean all of my body weight into the heavy revolving door of Gemma’s building on Jane Street to make it spin around. I feel like a toddler trying to push their dad down during football lessons in the backyard—it’s almost impossible. I’ve circled through these doors almost as many times as I have those to my own building, but the familiarity does nothing to calm any of my nausea or confusion. Since Gemma quit what she thought was her dream job (being the right-hand woman to a certain stylist-to-the-stars) and moved back from L.A. about five years ago, I’ve been coming here almost every single day, so I don’t have to tell the doorman who I’m here to see. He knows I’m heading to 24J.

As I get off the elevator I check my phone (12:16 PM) and say a little thanks that Gemma runs her own business, which means she’s home in the middle of the day to field my emotional crisis. I’m so relieved to have made it through work and to her place that I fling open the door so hard it bounces off the wall and almost back in my face. She embraces me the way only a sister can, though technically she’s not related to me at all, of course. She holds me as I lose my breath, then my balance, and eventually all ability to even stand. I’m like a rag doll in her arms. She guides me to the couch and all but tosses me into my favorite corner of her tan suede L-shape and grabs for the blue fuzzy blanket behind me. It’s barely chilly outside and it’s actually pretty warm inside here, but I’m shaking.

“I’m freezing.”

“Let me get you some water, Guils. You don’t look so hot. Have you eaten anything?”

“I can’t … wait, Gem … let me …”

She walks over to the fridge and my eyes follow her every step. As she opens the door and it swings in my direction I wince as I catch a glimpse of the framed picture of us clipped into a magnet. I remember that night like it was yesterday. It was Gemma’s birthday two years ago. We got so drunk because JR and her boyfriend Luke were both out of town for work. Our faces are smushed together—“like two Gs in a pod,” as our moms like to say—and our two intoxicated smiles are almost joined into one. “Will you be my maid of honor?” is spelled out in brightly colored sticker letters along the border. As if I even had to ask her.

Gemma grabs for my shaking hands under the blanket and makes sure I have a firm grasp on the glass of water before she lets go. Then she puts the blanket back down over both of us. We’re sitting knee-to-knee, Indian-style. I glance down at my phone in my lap: 12:32 PM.

“I’m gonna kill him, G,” Gemma says. “And if I don’t, Luke will. Tell me. Tell me everything.”

I take a deep breath and start to cry. “Gem, I c-c-c-can’t … believe … this is happening. Wait, p-p-p-please can you promise me something first?” She nods. “You can’t say anything to anyone about this because once everyone knows, they’re gonna want me to pack, end it, and move out. And this might be a huge mistake, what he’s done. I mean it, no one. Not my mom, no tweeting, no nothing.”

She nods again. “I mean, Luke saw the look on my face when we were Gchatting this morning. So he knows something is up. But I won’t tell him anything else …” She pauses, looks at me, then continues. “Yet.”

Luke van Walken (or “V-Dub” as we often call him for short—“V” for van and “dub” for double-U) has been around almost five years now, and he looks as buttoned up as his name would suggest. I think he’s a classy dresser, always professional-looking in a perfectly tailored suit. Gemma says it reads too uptight-old-man for her, that he should lose the tie clip or pocket square. They got together right around the time JR and I moved in together, and although they don’t technically live together, he spends most of his nights at her place. He says it’s more convenient to get to his office in Midtown, but he’s not fooling anyone. Likewise Gemma says she wants to wait until her styling business is a bit more stable before they get engaged. The two of them are like the worst poker players ever—we all see their bluff.

I don’t have it in me to argue with her about how much she says to Luke, so I keep stuttering through my tears. “F-f-f-f-irst of all, I don’t even know when he’s coming home. He was arrested again; he’s in jail.”

“Oh my god, it’s exactly like your graduation! Remember? You called me on your way to bail him out at the police station, that son of a bitch.” Told you she doesn’t hold back.

“I know. He had that same annoyed look in his eyes this morning. It was like, screw you and whatever plans you have, to go to graduation or work or whatever. The rules don’t apply to me. I can smoke pot where I want, when I want.”

I look up from my glass of water. I had been staring into it, wondering what it would be like to be the water—to feel no emotion, no heartache, no betrayal—wouldn’t that be nice.

“I just don’t know what to do, Gem. She texted him ‘no matter what I love you’ and she was with him when he got arrested. I mean, they’re like boyfriend, girlfriend.”

“Wait—so you were sleeping, and the cop came and woke you up? And what the hell is she doing with him at three o’clock in the morning? Then what, she goes home and texts him? I can’t. I can’t! What a dumb little whore. I’m gonna kill her.”

“I mean, I should have known. They’ve been so close for so long now. Remember when I went to visit them last year on the set of The Real Housewives of Dallas and she picked the room right next to his in their production house, the only two rooms on the basement floor? She told me they would get high together every night and go over the shoot schedule for the next day and it was perfect because the rest of the team wouldn’t bother them. When I told him that it wasn’t cool—them smoking together, sleeping on their own floor, while I was back in New York—and that he should be sleeping with the rest of the guys on the team upstairs, he told me I was crazy.”

I can tell Gemma’s furious. She’s got the most thick, gorgeous eyebrows—the kind every girl plucks, brushes, and wishes for her own—but she does this thing with them when she’s mad: she scrunches her face so tight that the two thick, beautiful lines over her eyes come together to form one giant unibrow. It’s the only time you’re not jealous of them.

“The only crazy one here is him, G. Crazy not to know he’s the luckiest guy on the fucking planet to have you as his fiancée after all the shit he’s put you through.” She’s standing up now. “Crazy to think he can screw around with this little girl and not get caught.”

“Do you think they’re sleeping together? Has he been cheating on me this whole time?”

“I mean, Guils. I remember the day you met JR, your very first day at UCLA. You called and told me this gorgeous guy came up to you at a party, you talked all night, he walked you home, and then you stopped him from trying to make out with you because you were still going out with David.”

“Oh, David. Life was so much simpler back in high school. I wonder if David’s on Face—”

“Guils! Come on. When you told JR you had a boyfriend, he said, ‘Who cares, I have a girlfriend.’ He doesn’t get it. He never has!”

“But I wound up breaking up with David a week later after I went with JR to his lacrosse tryout. Plus we were seventeen and eighteen years old! We were babies. He’s my family, Gem. Families go through rough patches. They don’t just break up.” Now I was the one scrunching my eyebrows in fury.

“You know I love him, G. I love him for the man he tries to be and the man you wish he was. But G, he’s not. What about two days before Labor Day, after you spent all that time planning a long weekend away for you guys, and he says he’s going to that fucking film festival or whatever because he needs to ‘get away from life for a little bit’?” She curled her fingers into violent air quotes. “I mean, who does that? It’s always something with him. He disappoints you, then knows exactly how to get you back in his good graces. You love him, I get it, so you let him. But enough is enough.”

“I know, but that’s him. You know he’s a thinker and he likes time to himself. And he’s spontaneous. I love that about him. He’s not V-Dub, with his traditional suit-and-tie job. He’ll never be that guy. I know he changes and cancels plans all the time. I hate that, but that’s what I signed up for. His work is insane and demanding and unpredictable and I …”

“Love him. Just say it. But you love him.”

And with those words the floodgates open. There I am, moaning and sobbing into the couch cushions like a five-year-old in utter defiance of her bedtime. Nothing can console me. I’m a wild animal, thrashing and snotting and flailing about. I can see Gemma out of the corner of my foggy, bloodshot eye, and she looks concerned. She’s trying to figure out how to get near me, to pacify me, like a zookeeper might with an out-of-control ape. But she’s at a loss. And then I go still—we both do.

“What was that?”

“What was what?”

Beep, beep, beep.

“That.”

I struggle to pick up my face from the couch and grab for the phone before it has the chance to buzz again. One new text message from JR.

“G, what are you doing?” I’m not listening to Gemma, I can’t even see her. I’m on autopilot. I click OK.

GUILS, WHERE ARE YOU? THEY FINALLY LET ME GO. I’M HOME. I’M GONNA TAKE ZELDA FOR A WALK. WANT ME TO MEET YOU SOMEWHERE?

“It’s him! Oh my god, he’s home from jail. And shoot, it’s 1:34. I came here right from work and I didn’t get Zelda! I’m losing my mind, Gem. What am I supposed to do?”

“You go home, you tell him he’s the biggest piece of shit you ever met, you pack a bag and tell him you’re outta there. Enough is enough. You’re moving in with me.”

In a soft whisper, I reply, “So, I need to end it?”

We stare at each other. It feels like that second of silence between the point of impact in a massive ten-car crash when everyone jumps out of their cars screaming, sirens raging. A good friend will hate someone simply if you ask them to do so. A best friend doesn’t even need to be queried. Such is the case between Gemma and me. Few words ever need to be spoken for us to know how the other thinks or feels, or in this case, wants to happen next. My phone dings again, interrupting that precious silence, reminding me that I have yet to acknowledge his text.

GUILS, WHERE ARE YOU? THEY FINALLY LET ME GO. I’M HOME. I’M GONNA TAKE ZELDA FOR A WALK. WANT ME TO MEET YOU SOMEWHERE?

I try to take an honest account of my current status before getting up the nerve to tell her what I’m really thinking. My stomach is hollow, as is my heart, and my eyes are full of tears, so I just say it. “I’m not ready for it to be over.”

Pretending to ignore what I just said, Gem grabs the phone from me and starts typing. “Here, I’ll just say that you’re on your way home now. See you soon.” She turns the phone around to show me. “That work for you?”

As I scan the words she’s concocted into a sentence for me, another alert pops up. One new text message from JR. We stare at the screen together, reading aloud.

G, YOU OKAY BABY? WHERE ARE YOU???

“I gotta go take care of this.” As I jump up and grab for my bag on the end of the couch, she grabs for my shoulders. She holds them tight and looks me directly in the eye the way a football coach looks at his star quarterback about to take the field for a crucial third down in the fourth quarter. “You can do this. You have to do this. You’re GOING TO DO THIS.”

I shake her off and head for the door. I can hear her voice echo down the hallway until the elevator doors close: “Call meeeeeee.” But it’s not her words I hear in my head as I walk the three blocks home. No, it’s Stanley Smith again, boss-man from Miami. If only ol’ Stanley could see me now, I think as I wipe away a fresh batch of tears from my cheek. I guess it’s a lot easier not to smile when your house is the one on fire.