Читать книгу A Girl Called Shameless - Laura Steven - Страница 7

7.14 a.m.

The thing about sex scandals is that you never quite get used to your grandmother having seen you naked.

I mean, obviously she’s seen me naked before. She used to bathe me and clothe me and rub baby oil on my butt. But that was a whole year ago! [I did tell you my jokes may have gone downhill.]

You know what I mean, though. Once adolescence strikes, your parents/legal guardians are highly unlikely to see you au naturel, especially if your nipples are of the pierced variety. Unless of course you have a nude picture leaked to the nation, à la Izzy O’Neill, in which case your bare tits and foofer are sort of on display to millions of people, forever and ever until death do us part.

It’s been a month or two since the media got over the whole fandango, and Betty has never ceased to be a supportive angel, but every single morning, without fail, I sit down to breakfast and immediately picture her picturing me. You know. Me. As in, a euphemism for my genitalia.

Which is ludicrous, because if I were Betty I would have immediately poured hydrochloric acid into my eyes had I seen my teenage granddaughter naked. Or as a less extreme solution, just tried to scrub the image from my memory as best I could. [And I’m in luck, because Betty’s memory is not all that great these days. I still remind her of the time she left her keys in the toaster and nearly murdered us all.]

The usual smell of waffle batter – just about to burn around the edges – and the sound of an upbeat pop song fill the kitchen. Betty and I perform our usual routine: she cooks, I make coffee. She sings along to the radio incorrectly. Dumbledore the dachshund loiters without shame. I can almost hear him praying Betty drops some sausage on the ground, but for once he’s outta luck.

It’s see-your-breath cold in here, because we can only afford to have the heating on for a couple hours a day, and it doesn’t make sense to waste our allowance in the morning when Betty’s about to head to work and I’m returning to school for the first day back after the holidays. So we’re both wearing two bathrobes each, to keep frostbite at bay, and Dumbledore is wearing the delightful wizard’s robes Betty knitted him for Christmas. I don’t think he fully appreciates the effort she went through to fashion a Gryffindor badge out of yarn scraps, which is rude, but he is a dog so I suppose we shall let him off the hook on this occasion.

“Looking forward to getting back to school, kid?” Betty asks completely earnestly and without a trace of sarcasm. Does she truly have no idea how traumatic the school system has become? No, because she’s a hundred years old and thinks an Instagram is a unit of measurement used by supermodels when purchasing cocaine.

“I guess,” I say, because I do not have the time nor the energy to explain, yet again, why education is a cruel and unusual punishment for being born. “Although I’ve loved having so much free time to work on my script.”

And it’s true. Having three weeks off school to polish my screenplay to within an inch of its life – with the help of my new agent [!!] no less – has been the stuff of dreams. I almost can’t believe that I actually have to go back to Edgewood and complete my senior year. For a hot minute it actually started to feel like I was a real screenwriter, and polishing scripts was my new normal.

One day, O’Neill. One day.

“You know, you’re going to have to let me read it at some point,” Betty says, scraping cheap sausages around a frying pan. They splutter aggressively, protesting their own low pork content. “You go on and on and on about your script and your agent and how you’re essentially Quentin Tarantino but with better boobs, and yet will you let your dear old grandma read the damn thing? Will you heck.”

[Guys, there is no way I’m letting her read it. My screenplay – a comedic, gender-swapped Pretty Woman with a myriad of distasteful sex jokes – is a whole other level of inappropriate. And no matter how filthy the old bird is, and no matter how much she would find the whole thing hysterical I do have some boundaries. I know. It was a shock to me too.]

A billow of steam erupts from the waffle iron. The kettle whistles just as I’m done scooping instant coffee and sugar into big purple mugs. I pour, Betty scrapes. We’re a noisy but well-oiled machine. A little too well-oiled in Betty’s case. While a good layer of insulation is generally a good thing for an older lady, sky-high cholesterol not so much. So she’s supposed to be cleaning up her diet, but the token punnet of grapes we bought to appease her fascist of a doctor is molding happily on the windowsill.

Nonetheless, I don’t want her to die or anything, so I spoon a tiny bit less sugar into her mug than usual. New year, new Betty, and all that crap. I top it up with enough creamer that she hopefully won’t notice.

But the old bat takes one swig and spits it dramatically all over Dumbledore. His Gryffindor robes are splattered with subpar coffee. He blinks in confusion, then raises a tiny little leg like he’s high-fiving the air.

Betty turns to me, aghast. “What is this crap? I raised you better than this.”

Honestly, there must be three fewer granules of sugar than normal. It’s like a poor-man’s Princess and the Pea reboot.

“Calm down, Hans Christian Andersen,” I retort. “I’ll get you more sugar.”

She just stares blankly at me. “Hans Christian who?”

See? Education is a total and utter waste of everyone’s time.

2.55 p.m.

The singular upside of the whole sex scandal fandango is the absurd surge in subscribers to Bitches Bite Back – specifically our weird, poorly directed sketch comedy. We’re a few hundred YouTube fans shy of breaking 10,000, which is all kinds of bonkers.

Today’s sketch, penned by yours truly, is about an army of sex dolls who become self-aware and seek revenge on their creepy owner, who not only uses them for some Messed Up sexual shit, but also likes to pretend they are his maids, and beats them when they do not adequately complete household chores. Many of his lines are direct quotes from famous politicians, actors and sportspeople who’ve been accused of abuse. He is an amalgam of all the horrible men in the world, and deliberately nameless and faceless in a way that implies he could be anyone. [Social commentary with dirty jokes = my MO.]

Weirdly, no dudes were up for the challenge of playing said Creepy Owner, so I have carefully constructed an understudy out of two trash cans and a trenchcoat.

This time, I’ve written a speaking part in the sketch for our new excellent human pal Meg, who has never acted before but has always shown a massive interest in our YouTube channel. She was actually a fangirl before we became friends, which is all kinds of sweet. Even though she was unsure about participating to begin with, I candidly filmed her chatting to Ajita, and she ended up loving the way she looked on camera – and didn’t hate the sound of her own voice as much as she expected to. So she agreed to be our newest actress, and proceeded to text me five times a day over the holidays asking exactly how a sex doll would pronounce the word “vagina”.

We’ve also managed to recruit most of the girls from theater to play crazed sex dolls, and freshman Fern Fournier – a ridiculously cool French-Japanese girl with awesome stage makeup skills – has agreed to give everyone a Crazed Sex Doll makeover. I did try going to the Mac counter in town and asking if they’d be up for the challenge, but apparently Crazed Sex Doll, while a name of one of their overpriced lipsticks², is not a makeover style they’re familiar with.

So now there are twelve of us on the makeshift set in Ajita’s basement, thanks to the general awesomeness of Ajita’s parents, who not only had a ramp installed so Meg had a hassle-free way of visiting, but who also provided coffee in an industrial-sized vat suitable to power a dozen hellbent sex dolls.

Fern has set up a mini makeup station beside the pool table, and is currently working her magic on Meg – who also loves makeup, and is chattering excitedly about contour palettes. The rest of the girls are changing into matching costumes we cobbled together from the drama department at school.

The only downside of no longer being friends with Danny is the fact he was the sole provider of fancy filming equipment. Ajita managed to find some basic tripods and collapsible reflectors online, but we’re sorely missing the expensive camera and array of microphones. So we’re just having to make do with Ajita’s parents’ DSLR.

Ajita and I are in the process of moving the sofa to make room for an army of sex dolls to assemble. [Another one of my strange sentences that doesn’t give off a great impression if you take it out of context.] From the corner of the room Meg’s girly giggle cuts through the sound of eight sex dolls running lines. Ajita shoots a weird look over to where Meg and Fern are fawning over a new shade of lipstick, then fluffs a cushion slightly aggressively.

“You okay?” I ask as quietly as I can – which is easier said than done when you have the voice of a malfunctioning foghorn.

Jaw gritted, she rearranges a fallen cushion, not meeting my eye. I’m pretty sure if you listen closely enough, you’ll hear the sound of Ajita grinding her teeth down into bleeding stumps. [That was an unnecessarily brutal mental image.] “Yeah. It’s just . . . I don’t know, dude. You could’ve asked me before you wrote Meg such a big part. It’s meant to be our joint sketch show, you know?”

This is not what I was expecting. Like, at all. And to be honest, it kind of rubs me the wrong way. Why would I need to ask her permission to have Meg in a sketch with us? I’ve always written all the material for our skits. Writing isn’t her thing, and she’s never shown an interest in it before.

This level of pettiness is pretty out of character for her, and I’m on the brink of calling her out when something stops me. Something oddly guilt-shaped. Because after everything that Ajita forgave last semester – after I accidentally outed her to the entire world and she welcomed me back into her life with open arms – I have no right to feel mad at her over a tiny niggle like this. So instead of prodding her for an explanation, I say, “Okay. Sorry. Next time, I’ll ask you first.”

At this point Meg comes over to where we’re sitting, pops the brakes on her wheelchair, and asks, “Do I look okay?”

Ajita paints a falsely bright smile on her face, worlds away from the agitated expression of three seconds ago. “Do sex dolls have regional accents?” She says it with the exact inflection of “Is the Pope a Catholic?” as though phrasing a rhetorical question, except in this instance, there is no clear answer.

6.04 p.m.

Just as we’re packing up after a successful afternoon of shooting, Meg wheels over to me, tinfoil choker round her neck and giant grin spreading from ear to ear. I look up from the lens I’m trying to force into the wrong case and return the smile. This was her acting debut and judging by the look on her face she’s hooked.

“Izzy!” she exclaims, breathless with excitement. “This was so, so fun. Thank you so much for letting me be in a sketch!” Her makeup still looks flawless; pillar-box red is so her color.

“Dude, you’re so welcome,” I say. “You were awesome. Like, was this really the first time you’ve ever acted? Or are you actually in a world-famous improv troupe and just wanted to hustle us?” I mean it too. Meg’s got a natural knack for nuance and didn’t overact at any point, which a lot of beginners do. I’m totally writing her a bigger part in the next sketch. With Ajita’s blessing of course.

Speaking of the devil, Ajita re-enters the room from the top of the stairs, clutching half a dozen cans of soda awkwardly to her chest. She tiptoes down the stairs one at a time, like she’s sneaking downstairs for a midnight snack and trying not to wake her parents, and looks more terrified of dropping the soda cans than if they were live grenades. Reaching the middle of the room five decades later, she lays most of them down on the sofa like newborn infants, then tosses one to me. I catch it and hand it to Meg, then catch the subsequent can she hurls my way. We both crack them open simultaneously with an aggressive puh-tsshhhhh, i.e. the most satisfying sound in the world. [With the possible exception of bubble wrap and/or sexual moans. Not that the two are in any way related. Or, you know, they might be. I don’t know your fetishes.]

Ajita taps the lid of her own can with purple-painted nails. “What’re you guys talking about? My impeccable camera skills? Which, BTW, are literally of an Emmy standard at this point.”

“Something like that,” I say.

“Are we really just going to skip over Ajita saying BTW out loud?” Meg snorts, shooting Ajita a playful look. “We all know how inaccurate her spoken text slang can be.”

I freeze for a second. Will this rub Ajita the wrong way? I mean, she didn’t even seem to want Meg here in the first place. But I need not have worried.

“Whatever,” Ajita says, swigging her grape soda. “I still maintain that LMAO should be pronounced luh-mao, like a dish at a Chinese restaurant. Yes, good evening, waiter, I’ll have the pork luh-mao with a side of egg-fried rice, please. That kind of thing.”

Meg giggles so hard her shoulders start to shake, and Ajita looks extremely pleased with herself, licking grape soda off her lips with her freakishly long tongue, which has the potential to look seductive and yet actually just looks like a slippery pink snake is climbing out of her mouth and ravishing her face.