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“Then I’m going to have to give you change in small bills.”
“That’s fine,” I said.
I waited patiently as he counted out ninety singles and five dimes. The sun was completely up by the time the transaction was complete.
“Is there a bathroom I can use?” I asked.
“Past the ice-cream freezer.”
I headed to the back of the store. When I opened the bathroom door, I almost passed out from disgust. There was so much dried pee on the toilet seat that you could barely read the wordgonorrheawritten across it in green Sharpie. But despite the sights so bad you could smell them and smells so bad you could hear them, I was never so happy to gingerly squat over a toilet in my life. Or to brush my teeth. There were multiple reasons I avoided alcohol, and the diuretic effect and morning-after breath were in the top five. After brushing the fur off my tongue, I downed a painkiller with a swig of coffee, and then washed my face. The hot water felt good. Wonderful even. I briefly considered taking a bath in the sink, but the basin was so small I’d have to bathe one ass cheek at a time; it was worth neither the effort nor the syphilis. So instead, I gave myself a very pathetic sponge bath with the wipes.
After pulling my hair into a ponytail, I rewarded myself with another well-earned Excedrin. Emotionally I was still a train wreck, but physically, at least, I looked okay.
I stepped out of the bathroom.
To find the stranger from the car waiting.
“Oh my God, you’ve got to be kidding me,” he said.
I made a grandentrez-vousgesture at the opened bathroom door. “It was like this when I got here,” I said. “Enjoy your visit.”
He reluctantly entered, and I gladly departed.
I stepped out into the street. Now came the hard part. Finding my car. I looked across the street.
And found my car.
It was parked directly behind the stranger’s car. I could see how, in my drunken state, I had confused the two. They were both blue, both coupes, and roughly the same shape and size. But his car, a Toyota, was about a hundred times nicer than my 1999 Mercury Cougar. Too bad I didn’t go all the way and steal the damn thing.
The first thing I did after I climbed into the driver’s seat—mydriver’s seat—was reach into the backseat for my backpack. My rescue work with Eco-Justice required a lot of drudging through swamps and marshlands, so I always kept a few changes of clothes in my car. Looking around to make sure no one could see me, I slipped out of my miniskirt and wiggled and jiggled my way into my jeans. I then slipped off my red blouse and grabbed my favorite cotton T-shirt. But just as I pulled it over my boobs, I realized I’d grabbed the wrong shirt. My favorite shirt bore a minimalist picture of an egret. The one I’d just put on said “Stop This Fracking Asshole” on it. I had personally designed it for Eco-Justice to raise funds for a lawsuit we were filing against a fracking start-up. The sale had been a huge success, with over ten thousand shirts sold at twenty dollars a pop. There was even one person who bought a hundred of them in a single order (a hundred and ten, actually—they were buy ten get one free). But I rarely wore mine. It wasn’t designed for busty women and no matter what size I attempted to wear, the word “asshole” always ended up stretched out across my enormous boobs and was the only part of the shirt anyone ever noticed.
I folded it back up, returned it to my duffle bag, and grabbed my egret shirt. Then I kicked off my heels and slipped into a pair of loafers.
Ah, I looked like me again. Time to start eating like me again. I reached into the backseat and grabbed one of the six bakery boxes that were stacked on the floor. I’d always been a sucker for those stupid Valentine candy hearts, so for the wedding, I’d had this idea that instead of one gigantic cake, we’d have individual heart-shaped cupcakes, each with a cutesy expression on them—4ever Yours, UR a QT, B Mine, and so on. But they were a custom order and the bakery refused to cancel them. So I picked them up yesterday and decided to prove Tyler right by quite literally eating my feelings. It would be a purge, kind of like that urban legend about the father who makes his son smoke every single cigarette in the carton until the son never wants to see another tobacco product again. In the spirit of self-disgust, I would eat every single gooey feeling I ever felt for Tyler until I was so sickened by the thought of him that I’d never want to feel anything for him again.
I started with a white frosted cupcake withB Mineon it. Next, I ate a pink one that saidU & Me. After eating my third cupcake and then a fourth, it became clear that my plan to eat until I was disgusted was never going to work. These tacky little cupcakes were the yummiest things I’d ever eaten. I decided then and there to revise my purge: I would eat so many cupcakes that I’d never fit into a wedding dress again. Fuck Tyler. Who needs a man when you have eleven pounds of frosting?
I finished off one last cupcake and returned the box to the top of the stack. Then, I bent over and felt around the underside of my seat for the spare key I kept taped there in case of emergencies. The back of my hand brushed some spare change, a few stray pencils, and a sanitary napkin. Dammit. The key had to be here somewhere. Maybe I’d put it in the glove box.
But when I sat up and reached for its handle, I spotted the man from the Toyota standing outside his car, grabbing his door handle. And pulling. And pulling again. He stuck his hand in his pants pocket, presumably digging around for his keys. He then searched his other pocket. I saw him bend over, cup his hands around his eyes to block out the glare, and peer through his window.
When he returned to a fully upright position, he raised his hands and eyes to the sky and mouthed,Fuck me. Dramatically.Fuuu-uuu-uuck me.
I knew exactly what was going on, as I’d made the very same plea to the heavens many times before. He’d locked his keys in his car.
I rolled down my window. “Is there something I can do to help?” I called.
He turned at the sound of my voice, shocked. I almost felt sorry for him. Every time he thought he’d seen the last of me, I reappeared. Poor bastard.
CHAPTER 4
Ian
God help me. Every time I thought I saw the last of this woman, she reappeared.
Her head was jutting out the window of a car that looked like a prop from the set ofLaw & Order. There was a hole in the hood where the emblem should be, and I could only assume there was a headless body in the trunk. Yet at the same time, I kind of understood how, in her drunken state, she could have mistaken my car for hers. Except for the part where my car was only five years old and hers looked like it had rolled off the lot sometime during the Eisenhower administration, they were eerily similar. It was as if her car were my car’s great-grandfather.
I wasn’t looking forward to what I had to do next. But a millionaire’s gotta do what a millionaire’s gotta do, and right now this millionaire had to borrow ten bucks from a prostitute. Lucky thing we were related via vehicular lineage. Otherwise it might have been awkward.
