Bad Boy Boxset

by JD Hawkins

  In short, it’s everything I hate, and everything I desperately want to be a part of.

  “Absolutely!” I say, but at that exact moment my voice is drowned out by the incessantly-hammered horn of a Prius. I look up to find my Uber driver crawling along the street, punching his steering wheel as he scans the road.

  “Absolutely!” I shout more loudly, as I run toward the car, waving at him to stop.

  “Is now not a good time?” Cassandra says, and I wonder if I’m only imagining the wry grin and arch expression.

  “No…I mean yes!” I mumble, as I manage to flag the driver and maneuver myself into the back seat. “Now’s great!”

  I gesture at the driver to go, but instead he starts talking through a broad grin.

  “Damned GPS gave me the wrong address! Led me back there to the elementary school—”

  Cassandra starts talking too.

  “Great. So I was looking through some of your portfolio pieces and—”

  “…was there for ten minutes before I figured something was up. I guess they got the numbers on this street wrong…”

  “…superb work, but some of it—I have to say—seems a little frivolous for what we produce here, if you don’t mind me saying, particularly your piece on…”

  “…or the app just got it wrong—it does that sometimes—but the goddamned thing put me nearly a mile out!”

  “…video creation, which is not something upon which we’re particularly invested in having our writers focus…”

  “…never understood why they do that thing with the odd numbers on one side of the street and the evens on the…”

  I do my best to politely get the driver to shut up, pointing at the phone and trying to get him to notice my wincing, strained expression. Eventually, after tapping his shoulder, he looks back and my combination of gritted teeth, tilted head, and a thumbs up seems to convey that I would really love to talk about town planning in the Valley Village region of L.A., but I’m a little preoccupied right now.

  “…produce work that is thematically consistent?”

  Cassandra’s question ends and I realize I have no idea what she’s just said. I immediately dismiss the idea of asking her to repeat it, partly because it took her five minutes to ask it, and partly because I suspect it would make her think I’m too dumb to get it.

  “Well…” I say, if only to stop the silence venturing into ‘awkwardly long’ territory. “I think of eclecticism as a virtue,” I begin, piecing together the snippets of what I remember she was saying, and figuring confidence and conviction will cover for the rest. “As important for the critic as the artist—which is often dismissed in lieu of specialization. Especially as so much art continues to transgress boundaries and to…essentially cross-pollinate between the mainstream and more exploratory fringe. As a critic I believe it’s imperative to understand those reference points too, rather than simply allow oneself to be led there by the artist alone. I think modern criticism is—right now—so often dependent on a broader context.”

  “Hmm,” Cassandra hums into the phone, thoughtfully, and I can almost see that high-brow lower itself ever-so-slowly. “Yes. I might agree with you on that. So you believe your work at…TrendBlend gives you some added cultural perspective?”

  “Yes,” I say, almost sighing with relief once I realize I’ve scrambled onto a foothold in the conversation, “even a piece as superficially frivolous and seemingly insignificant as the one I did on expensive cakes reveals a lot about, say, attitudes of consumption and capitalist manifestations of success, at least when you step back and apply cultural—or even economics-related—subtexts to it…”

  The phone interview lasts almost until we pull up outside of the TrendBlend offices. Cassandra doesn’t let the ice-cool sharpness of her questions slip, but I give about as good an account of myself as I can, and at the end, when Cassandra tells me she’ll get back to me soon, it doesn’t feel like she’s just saying it. When I hang up I realize I’m smiling, and that the adrenaline has blown away my hangover.

  I tip the driver well and open the door to get out, stopping with one leg on the curb to turn back to him.

  “Oh, by the way,” I say, “they do that thing with the numbers because otherwise you’d have, like, building number forty-six on one side and house number ninety-eight on the other. It would be messy. And you’d have no idea which way to go to find…I don’t know, number sixty-four, say.”

  The driver looks up as he thinks about it. After a few moments he nods and smiles slightly. “Oh yeah…that kinda makes sense,” he says.

  I laugh a little, thank him, and get out of the car, feeling full of good energy as I move toward the office block.

  Standing outside the elevator doors I hear the unmistakable sound of Cassie’s trademark squeal. She’s one of the biggest ‘characters’ on the TrendBlend website, if only for the fact that she’s like a Disney princess on amphetamines.

  “Ohhh!” she yells as she glides across the lobby with her arms already reaching out to me. “You are a kitten, honey!”

  “Hey Cassi—oof!” I blurt out as she bear-hugs me so tightly that the rest of her words come across muffled by her warm embrace.

  “You’re so awesome, Margo. We’ve got to have lunch this week. Let me know when.”

  As soon as she lets go I manage a meek smile and a simple, “Sure,” before she wheels away and flounces down the hall toward the lobby café. I watch her with a confused look on my face, trying to figure out what prompted that kind of reaction, but then the elevator doors ding open and I decide to forget it.

  At the studio floor—just a few down from the writers’ offices—one of the TrendBlend bosses, Melissa, gets in beside me. I’m not the sort of person who hero-worships, but if I was, Melissa would be one of the first names on the shortlist.

  Taken as a whole, the TrendBlend site and its offices are chaotic, ever-changing, and bordering on schizophrenic. Sometimes there are so many new ideas buzzing around the offices that it’s a wonder any of them come to fruition.

  That kind of madness needs someone pretty visionary to keep it in check, and Melissa’s so effortlessly cool, calm, and assured that she does it almost single-handedly. She’s a six-foot tall tower of understated designer clothing, an intimidating and vaguely Scandinavian accent, angular cheekbones, and short blonde hair. Nobody knows too much about her, but it’s clear within seconds of meeting her that she knows what she’s doing. She can edit a half-botched article about handmade stationery into one of the best think pieces you’ve ever read, and for her party trick she’ll tell you what the news is going to be next week. I’ve heard co-workers say she worked her way up in the publishing houses of NYC, while others say she was a foreign correspondent for the LA Times. Some people say she’s a lesbian. I believe none of it and all of it. All I know is that when she talks, people listen, although she doesn’t even need to open her mouth most of the time with eyes like hers.

  So when she gets into the elevator, stands beside me, and says, “Good work yesterday, Margo,” as soon as the doors close, I almost freak out.

  “Thanks,” I say, mentally searching for what she could be talking about.

  The doors open on the offices, and Melissa marches out, pointing at people and asking for status reports as she makes a beeline for her office. I walk out a split-second later, dazed and confused.

  By the time I reach my desk, so many people have smiled, congratulated, and said overly-positive hellos to me I genuinely start to wonder if I’ve forgotten my own birthday.

  I sit down slowly and without even turning on my screen start to run through the events of yesterday. There was the fight with Carl…then Owen talked me down and took me somewhere for a drink…then we were in the studio…I got a ride home…am I forgetting something?

  “Hey, catwoman.”

  It’s the last voice I want to hear right now. Brad. Another ex-boyfriend, and possibly one of the most objectively awful people I’ve ever met (noticing the pat
tern, yet?). He’s got the orange tan, broad torso, and wavy-blonde hair of a surfer, but the maturity and class of a spoiled toddler after a disappointing Christmas. Every time I see him I struggle even harder to figure out why we dated in the first place, and why it took so long for me to realize we actually had nothing in common other than the desire to establish our writing careers.

  I suppose I should be at least a little grateful, since he’s part of the reason I’m working at TrendBlend, having recommended me to Tillie in HR for a mailroom job a few years ago. Although ever since I became a lead writer and broke up with him, he’s been trying to reverse that act of kindness and get me fired.

  “Not now, Brad. I’m late and I really need to catch up on this article,” I say, refusing to look at him as I turn on my screen.

  He leans a little further over me, and I feel the air go cold.

  “You know,” he continues, through a big shit-eating grin, “I always said you’d turn into one of those crazy cat ladies, didn’t I?”

  Suddenly, the memory of what happened yesterday slams into me like a packed commuter bus. The tequila. The studio. The cats.

  “Hang on a second,” Brad says, as he turns to speak to a passing coworker, as if I’m genuinely interested in participating in this asinine conversation.

  I steal the moment to skim through my social media accounts, almost gasp when I see how many views the video I appeared in has, then drop my head into my hands when I see that I’ve become a hashtag.

  “So how does it feel to be an overnight celebrity?” Brad says in that smarmy voice of his, once again leaning over my monitor.

  “Not now, Brad, please.” My voice is tense, and I hate my inability to hide that he’s getting to me right now.

  “What?” he says, with mock-humility. “I only came by to congratulate you—you’ve finally found your niche! I mean, wow…you spent all those years writing your cute little pieces about ‘politics’ and ‘art’ when your real calling all along was acting like a dumbass in front of the camera!”

  “Well acting like a dumbass off camera hasn’t worked so well for you, Brad.”

  “Ooh!” Brad says, laughing and chewing his gum loudly. “That little ‘sassy bitch’ routine you have is hard to take seriously when you’ve just humiliated yourself in front of millions of people, Margo. Might be a good time to drop it, mmkay?”

  Brad winks and I struggle to keep my hands from his neck.

  “Isn’t there an idea you should be stealing somewhere, Brad? Maybe a college intern you should be getting rejected by? Don’t let me keep you.”

  “You know, my favorite part,” Brad goes on, rolling his gum as he relishes the moment for all that it’s worth, “is the bit where you say ‘I want this kitten to be my boyfriend.’ It’s funny ‘cause it’s true! You really would be better off with a cat rather than a man.”

  “Well I’ve dated dogs before, so why not?” I say, glaring at him.

  Brad’s in too good of a mood to get as annoyed as he usually does when I give as good as I get. He looks down at my monitor, noticing that I’m on my social media account.

  “Oh! You should check out my feed. I spent all morning trying to make you into a meme. I bet that shit’s gonna go viral any minute now.”

  “Shame nobody follows you though,” Owen says loudly, as he draws close behind me and moves into his seat. “Doubt it’ll get picked up. Your feed’s like the internet equivalent of a mausoleum. Even I only saw it by accident.”

  Brad’s happiness drops a few levels, from annoyingly smug to defensively sly at Owen’s presence. He’s the kind of guy who’ll mock a woman for hours but shrink like a violet when another man is around, calling other guys ‘bro’ like it’s the only way he can be sure of his continuing membership in the man club.

  “Well at least I’m not a national embarrassment,” Brad hisses in my direction.

  “And you never will be, dude,” Owen says casually as he clicks on his laptop, “because nobody will ever notice you exist. What did that video about the World Cup get? Five hundred views, maybe? Shit. That’s an achievement. Biggest competition on the planet, one of the biggest entertainment sites on the planet, and still nobody cares what you have to say…I mean, it’s embarrassing, but I guess it’s not on a national level, so you’ve at least got that going for you.”

  I can almost feel the heat radiating away from Brad’s shiny skin.

  “I don’t even like sports. That’s why,” he says, on the back foot now, his sore spot struck. “I’m only covering it until something else opens up here.”

  Owen turns away from his computer and wheels his chair closer to me, looking at Brad.

  “Dude, I keep telling you: I’ll take the sports section from you in a second. I’d fucking kill it doing sports. I could hardly do any worse than you, could I?”

  Brad purses his lips and glances from me to Owen, vein throbbing on his forehead as he searches his infantile mind for a comeback.

  “Whatever,” is all he can manage, waving a palm in Owen’s direction to dismiss him before pointing a finger at me. “I’m gonna enjoy this. And I would tell you to do the same. This is the biggest thing you’re ever gonna do here.”

  Once he’s put on his gum-chewing, open-mouthed grin again, he turns away and walks off, leaving me and Owen alone.

  I turn back to my article, frowning deeply, and Owen says, “I know I always ask this, but why the hell did you ever date that guy?”

  I turn and stare at him, waiting for him to hang his head and apologize profusely for somehow thinking ‘helping me through a breakup’ and ‘turning me into an internet meme’ were the same thing.

  Instead, he interprets my angry silence as actual emotional pain over Brad’s douchebaggery and says, “Hey, don’t get mushy on me. I hate that guy as much as you do. No need to thank me.”

  My mouth drops open. A few seconds later I can finally speak, and my voice comes out full of venom.

  “Are you fucking kidding me? Are you for real, Owen?”

  “What?”

  Too overwhelmed to speak I turn and jab a hand at the screen, still scrolling with live comments on my video.

  “I…fuck…he’s right! I’m a national embarrassment!”

  Owen looks at the screen, then back at me. There’s a smile playing on his lips that gets my rage going all over again.

  “What? No! Come on, Margo. You just appeared in a viral video. People love you. They’re quoting you all over the place. You’re funny. They see that. What’s the problem?”

  “The problem,” I say, “is that I’m a writer. I might work at TrendBlend, but I’m trying to create work with integrity, with depth. I want to be taken seriously—not quoted like a fucking sitcom character!”

  “Don’t be so negative. You’re so much more than a five minute cat video, anyone can see that. And since when did you start apologizing for who you are? That’s not the Margo I know.”

  I point at the screen again. “This is not who I am, Owen. This drunk, sorry mess is not at all who I am. ‘The Margo you know’ has her shit together now. And she would like to gain respect in the future—not lose it. How can anyone take me seriously when I’m in a viral video drunk as hell and cooing over cats? This is all your fault!”

  Owen shakes his head, refusing to see it from my perspective.

  “I get why you’re upset, I do, but the truth is, you come across great in that video. Like the funny, chill, and awesome girl you are. Nothing to be embarrassed about. Only a real asshole would see that video and laugh at you rather than with you. Like Brad, for instance.”

  I’m about to give it to Owen loud and clear before catching sight of a couple of coworkers passing close by. I sit up and flash the kind of ‘nothing wrong here’ smile I haven’t had to use since high school, then lean back in toward Owen, directing my words at him low and hard like a silenced gun.

  “I got a text this morning from my teenage cousin saying that she loved my latest piece and that it finally ma
de her realize what she wanted to do when she left high school. I thought she meant the air quality control board study I reported on, and that she wanted to be a journalist—so I told her to go for it and not let anyone hold her back.” I gesture at my screen again. “Now I realize she meant she wanted to make an idiot of herself online to get attention!”

  Owen shrugs and smiles, unfazed by the boiling anger I’m only suppressing because we’re at work. “Follow your dreams, that’s what I always say.”

  “Argh!” I growl in his direction. “I can’t believe I let this happen! And you. How could you take advantage of me like that?”

  Finally, Owen’s brow furrows. “What are you talking about?”

  “There I was, vulnerable and not thinking straight, and you get me hammered then stick me on a public video!”

  “I didn’t know they were making a video! I thought we’d just have a few drinks downstairs and you could vent— let your hair down a little and forget about things.”

  “I forgot about everything! That’s the problem. And now I can’t do anything about this,” I say, throwing a helpless hand in the direction of the screen. “It’s done…”

  I hear Owen clear his throat beside me, then feel his hand press gently on my arm.

  “When I found out what they were filming yesterday,” he says, the tone of his voice gone low and soothing, “I honestly thought it would just be a funny little video. Something a few people would see online; that you’d watch later and have a laugh at, and that would be all. If I knew it was going to be this big I wouldn’t have let you do it. I’m many kinds of asshole, but I’m not the kind who ruins careers for fun. And I truly don’t believe your career is in jeopardy. Can you forgive me?”

  I sigh a little, brush my hair behind my ear, and nod.

  “But in a way…” Owen says, “it’s kinda your fault, for being so damned charismatic and cute.”