Love and Chaos: A Brooklyn Girls Novel

by Burgess, Gemma

  “I’m never in control.” I start laughing, though the lump of tears in my throat is so big and square it hurts. “I am, by nature, out of control.”

  “That’s your choice, girlie.” Vic stands up. “Night night. Sweet dreams.”

  CHAPTER 11

  “Stef is an evil cockmonkey,” announces Pia. “I hope he rots in hell.”

  “I hope he gets an STD!” says Coco.

  “I hope Hal gets an STD,” says Julia.

  “I can’t believe Hal told you his dick liked you,” says Madeleine.

  “Diving into the sea was the best idea ever,” says Pia.

  “You’re so lucky that guy had a private plane!” says Coco.

  “And your parents will have a much better relationship now,” says Pia.

  “Totally. No more fighting, no more problems. Divorce is great!” says Madeleine.

  “I wish my parents would divorce!” says Pia.

  “Being single is the best! Most of the time,” says Julia.

  “And you’ll get a job in fashion in a heartbeat. Who wouldn’t want to hire you?” says Coco.

  Don’t you just love girls? It’s so simple: I walked into the kitchen two hours ago, apologized profusely for being such a nightmare, confessed everything, and received total acceptance, affection, and absolution in return. It surprised me, but this is how they’ve always treated one another, so it’s how they’re treating me. I’m part of the group. That probably shouldn’t be a surprise, but it is.

  Well, I didn’t confess everything.

  I didn’t tell them about waking up in the Soho Grand with three thousand dollars in an envelope. I just can’t. I told them about the yacht, that Hal had assumed I was, erm, someone who’d take money for sex, that Stef had set me up, that it was a one-off, the culmination of bad luck and bad decisions. They are shocked enough at that. If they knew I’ve accidentally been playing the part of the happy hooker for the past few months with Mani, Jessop, and whoever the dude was from the hotel room … well, I don’t want to think about their reaction. How could they not judge me? I judge me.

  I told them about my parents divorcing. And about being unemployed and my money issues, i.e., that I don’t have any.

  “And I am sorry for going so wild with the vodka,” I said, looking each of them in the eye. “I know I’ve been, um, unreliable, and unpredictable. And a bad roommate. And I’m sorry. I was feeling crazy, I guess, and I acted accordingly. I’ll be different now. I swear.”

  And then they all started talking at once. It was an orgy of emotional support, a total validation binge.

  Just like Vic told me last night, the moment I shared my problems, I felt better. That cold, itchy feeling in my soul started to thaw and ease. I felt lighter, as if the weight that had been pressing down on me, keeping me from laughing or even smiling for the last few weeks, had magically disappeared. Secure is the word, I guess. I felt secure.

  Who knew sharing felt so good? I mean, I hated all those late-night compulsory deep and meaningful heart-to-hearts at school, remember them? When all the girls eat junk food and one girl talks about her parents and another talks about her abusive ex-boyfriend and another talks about her body issues and another talks about whatthefuckever and at the end everyone has a Care Bears hug and then the bulimic sneaks off to puke. I wasn’t really invited to those talks, mind you. But I was in the dorm when they happened.

  Anyway. During my confession, Coco got tears in her eyes, Madeleine frowned, Pia gasped, and Julia clenched her fists and muttered “Those fuckers” a lot.

  It should have been the easiest to confide in Pia. I’ve known her, literally, since I was born. But somehow, I felt most scared about her reaction. Maybe because she was always having her own crises, maybe because my parents aren’t exactly the pull-up-a-pew types, but I’ve never really burdened her with my problems before. I always kept everything to myself. Sharing things felt, I don’t know, like complaining, like asking for help, like saying I couldn’t handle life, like I was weak. Keeping my secrets to myself felt like the only thing I could do … well, keeping my secrets, drinking, and falling for the wrong men.

  Letting my friendship with Pia drift is just as much my fault as hers, I’m finally realizing. Maybe more my fault. How can she be around for me if I never tell her I need her?

  “So that’s that,” I say finally. “From today, I’m just going to stay single and concentrate on my career. Get a damn job.”

  “No you’re not,” says Julia. “It’s Saturday. You can get a damn job on Monday. Today you’re making up for the whole curtain thing by coming with us to Smorgasburg.”

  “You’re all going?” I don’t want to be alone, not when I’ve got so much to think about. And to try not to think about. “Pia? Even you?”

  “Yep. Aidan’s in San Francisco till tonight, he had some work thing,” says Pia. “It’s a special presummer preview event. I’m going as a corporate spy.”

  “She means she’s checking out the competition,” Julia explains to a confused Coco. “We’re going for the dudes.”

  “Smorgasburg doesn’t worship at the altar of SkinnyWheels?” says Madeleine, making a pretend sad face. SkinnyWheels is Pia’s food-truck business.

  “Apparently my salads don’t cut the Zeitgeist gourmet hand-cut mustard,” Pia says sarcastically, but I can tell she’s genuinely kind of pissed about it. “So let’s go eat quail’s egg quiche and banana-cheddar spring rolls and fig-studded mozzarella balls and crazy shit like that.”

  “And meet some dudes!” Julia cheers. “It’s Meet a Dude Day! Angie, are you in? High-five me! Fivies! Come on!”

  I’m not the high-fiving type, but Julia grabs my hand and forces me to high-five her.

  “There. Doesn’t that feel good? Next we’ll work on hugs.”

  At that, I laugh out loud, and suddenly feel happy endorphins flooding my body. Laughing! Who knew it felt so good? Fuck it, why not go with the girls and help them meet dudes? It’ll take my mind off … everything.

  Smorgasburg is a weekly open-air festival of unique foods that grew out of the Brooklyn Flea. By midday, in the interest of getting as many tastes as possible, we’ve shared fried anchovies, spicy beef noodles, chicken and waffles, chili mozzarella balls, a caramelized-onion-smothered hot dog, a buttery porchetta sandwich, a lobster roll, teriyaki shrimp balls, and a basil-and-raspberry popsicle. Yeah. There’s some funky food here, all right.

  Julia and I are by far the most enthusiastic eaters. Madeleine is picky and sniffs everything distrustfully before taking a tiny bite, and Coco is staring at the food longingly and talking about it a lot, but hardly touching it. (Between you and me, I think she might have a guilty-secret-eater thing going on, based on the number of times I’ve come home to find her scarfing Cheerios at midnight.) And Pia is frowning thoughtfully with every bite, taking notes. Apparently it’s called “competitor analysis.”

  “I could do something with basil and raspberries, if they’re really going to be the next big thing,” she’s muttering to herself. “But, merde, I need some protein in there, too. With what? Low-fat feta, maybe? Ricotta? Would chicken be too overpowering?”

  “Remember when Pia used to be fun?” Julia says to me, handing over a gigantic maple-frosted bacon donut.

  “I think I do,” I say, taking a bite. “Da-yam, that’s good.… Was that the Pia who applied Captain Morgan topically to all of life’s woes? The same Pia who is now permanently attached to her iPhone and says shit like, ‘Let’s action that’?”

  “Yes! And ‘Get back to me by EOP!’”

  “What the fuck is EOP?”

  “Exactly!”

  “So now you’re bonding over making fun of me?” says Pia, arching an eyebrow. “Whatever. I don’t care, as long as you’re getting along.”

  “Are we getting along?” asks Julia. “Ladybitch? Can I call you that?”

  I arch an eyebrow at her. “That’s Sir Ladybitch to you.”

  Julia giggles and chokes on some
frosting, making a strange quacky-bark sound, and I crack up.

  “What are you laughing at?” Pia sounds annoyed. Like Julia and I shouldn’t be allowed to have private jokes.

  “At Julia,” I gasp. “She gagged on some frosting.”

  “That sounds like a euphemism,” says Julia.

  “What, like … he frosted my mouth?” I say. “Mmm. Glaze me, you stud.…”

  Julia shrieks with laughter. Pia rolls her eyes.

  “Exsqueeze me, but there are no guys here,” says Coco, looking around plaintively.

  Oh, yeah. I nearly forgot. It’s Meet a Dude Day.

  I do a quick survey of the area. There are hundreds, probably thousands of people here, but she’s right. Hipstery girls, young families, older parental types, and bewildered tourists. This is not a target-rich environment for the single girl. You need two or three guys, alone, who are up for some flirty conversation over a drink. Or in this case, an artisan farm-reared slow-pulled-pork organic-sourdough sandwich.

  “You could talk to the food dudes,” I suggest.

  Madeleine laughs. “Ugh, they’d be all obsessed with their work like all food people in Brooklyn.”

  I glance over at Pia to see if she heard, but she’s too busy making notes. What is with Madeleine and the snide comments?

  “That guy over there is gorgeous,” says Jules. “See him? Next to the chick in the hat?” We all look over. “Don’t look now! Jeez, you guys! Oh, shit, he just kissed her. What a dick.”

  We all sigh in supportive disappointment.

  “I think the flaw in the Meet a Dude Day plan is that you need an excuse to talk to guys,” says Madeleine. “Like, you know, an activity, a conversation starter. Maybe you should take a cooking course or something.”

  “Yeah. All hot single guys just love a cooking course,” says Pia, deadpan.

  “I’m not a joiner. And the flaw in Meet a Dude Day is that we’re treating this like an excursion to the dude zoo,” I say. “They’re not wild animals waiting to be observed.”

  “No, the Meet a Dude Day flaw is that it’s practically impossible to pick up a guy sober,” says Pia. “You know, unless you work with him, or you’re, like, religious or something.”

  “So true. Alcohol is a social lubricant,” I say. “It makes everything slip just that little bit easier.”

  “Ew, gross.” Madeleine wrinkles her nose.

  “You’re a sensitive little flower, aren’t you?” I say. And a raging bitch, I don’t add.

  My phone rings. I glance at it quickly. It’s Annabel, my mother. But I’m not talking to her until Dad calls me and tells me the full story. So I quickly press silent.

  “Excuse me?” asks a voice. We all turn around. A dude! Slightly chubby, has not quite mastered the art of the clean shave, but a dude nonetheless. “I was wondering if you’ve seen the headcheese? One of my Twitter followers said it was going to be here, but we can’t find it.”

  “Headcheese?” I repeat. “That sounds…”

  “Fucking disgusting,” finishes Julia. “What is it?”

  “It’s kind of like meatloaf made from the parts of a pig no one else wants to eat. The face, the feet. Sometimes the heart.”

  We all gaze at him in total horror.

  “I think I might be sick,” I whisper to Julia.

  “I hope I will be,” she whispers back. “That shrimp is really repeating on me.”

  Coco is fascinated. “Wow! Are you a chef?”

  “No, I run a food blog called the Hungry Geeksters! You gotta meet my cobloggers, hang on—”

  We all turn around as two guys—one tall and flabby, one short and squat—come over. They’re not bad-looking, and they seem friendly. For a second, it looks like Meet a Dude Day might actually work out.

  Then they start to talk.

  Normally, I kind of like geeks. I hung out with them a lot at boarding school. They’re easy to make blush, they’re smart, they let you sit with them at breakfast. But these geeks are a different breed. Big-city geeks. Boring know-it-alls with superiority complexes who aren’t making eye contact and just talking to one another around us, if that makes sense. Maybe they have a touch of Asperger’s—hey, it’s not unlikely, let’s be honest—or maybe they just never hung out with people with real live breasts before. Whatever. It’s boring me.

  “… and remember that time you ate jellied eel, Gary?”

  “That was great! It tasted like river trout cooked in Vaseline.”

  “You’re such a gourmand! That was still our most successful post ever.”

  After a minute or two Coco is the only one still smiling at them hopefully. Madeleine surreptitiously started texting someone. Pia muttered something about making notes and wandered away. Julia is giving me “get me the fuck out of here” eyes. (You know the look: a stare, into a sort of eye-widening glare, back into a stare.)

  Time to take charge. I clap my hands together, hoping it makes me look authoritative. “Well, boys, it’s been great, but it’s time for us to get home before we turn into pumpkins.”

  “It’s two-thirty in the afternoon,” says the chubby geek.

  “And I believe that it was Cinderella’s coach that turned into a pumpkin, not Cinderella herself,” says the spectacled geek.

  “Right on.” I put a cigarette between my lips and walk away. The other girls follow me. “Why do I always have to play the bitch?” I mutter.

  “Well, it just seems to come naturally to you,” says Julia, and we both start laughing again.

  I think Coco and Madeleine have that slightly dejected feeling you get when you were hoping something would be the highlight of your weekend and it turns out to be totally not. But as we walk home through the frosty afternoon, Jules and I are actually having a good time.

  “You have such a cool walk, you know that? You sort of swagger like a cowboy,” says Julia.

  I arch an eyebrow. “Like I have a dick?”

  She cracks up. “No! You just … look like you own the world.”

  “Ha.” Yet another thing about my outside that doesn’t match my inside. “I’m sorry Meet a Dude Day didn’t work out, Jules.”

  She shrugs. “I haven’t met any guys in forever. You know what we need? Some platonic male friends who can introduce us to a continuous flow of new single men,” says Julia thoughtfully. “Only dudes know dudes.”

  “Like a dude dealer?” I say.

  “Yes! Exactly like a dude dealer. Or a pimp.”

  I flinch. Fuck. Stef is a pimp, I guess. A casual rich-kid high-end pimp with a “he needs a girl, you need money” mentality, and hopefully without a switchblade and a sideline dealing meth, but essentially a pimp nonetheless. All day, I’ve been trying not to think about how I was on the boat this time yesterday, or what was happening to me.…

  “Sorry,” whispers Julia. “I was only messing around.”

  I turn to her and smile. Man, she’s a nice person. “It’s okay,” I say. And all of a sudden, it is. Just like Vic said: it happened, now it’s in the past. I have to let it go. Or at least try.

  Coco skips up next to us. “Why did we leave? I liked them!”

  “You liked the fact that they were male, Coco. Aim higher,” says Julia.

  “Harsh,” I say, seeing Coco’s face fall, before she plasters on her usual “everything’s great!” smile.

  “Is it? I don’t mean to be harsh. Coco, honey, next time you decide you truly like someone, I swear we will all be one hundred percent behind you. Right, Angie?”

  “For sure,” I say. “I’ll get his name printed on a T-shirt with an ‘I heart’ in front of it.”

  Coco is trying to act flippant. “Well, I will never meet anyone. I work in a preschool. My job is the least guy-friendly job in the world.”

  “What about all those hot dads?” Pia finally tunes in to the conversation, though she’s still texting someone. Aidan, I bet.

  “Are you serious? They’re old. And married.”

  “Can you imagine being
a wife and having, like, children?” says Julia. “Right now I think it would be easier to learn Russian.”

  “I could learn Russian in six weeks if I tried hard enough,” I say. “But find a dude who might like me for me in six weeks? Not a chance.”

  “Aw, do you have low self-esteem?” Julia pulls my ponytail affectionately.

  “No, I really don’t,” I say. “I just know what guys see in me. And it’s never … me.”

  Julia is quiet for a moment, suddenly serious. “I know exactly what you mean. Sometimes I would kick a puppy just to have an interesting conversation with a good-looking guy who also happened to find me attractive.”

  We stroll along in silence, Julia’s words echoing in my head.

  An interesting conversation with a guy.

  You know, I can’t even remember the last time I actually talked to a guy. Like, really talked.

  Take any of the guys I’ve dated (please! Boom, tish). Mani, Marc, Jessop, Hugh, the guys I met at college, in bars, on vacation … My entire life, it’s always the same.

  They talk, I listen. They joke, I smirk. I never reveal anything about myself, I never trust them enough to show them who I really am or how I really feel, so it’s just chase, flirt, party … and then sex. Which is always shit, anyway, the kind of sex where afterward I feel inexplicably like crying, and I go to the bathroom alone and look in the mirror and wonder what the hell I’m doing and why I feel empty inside. (Urgh, sorry. Drama, I know. But it’s true.)

  And then in the morning I always wake up next to them and feel more alone than ever. But I stick around in the hope that next time, they’ll try to see past the tough shell I’ve built over the years. That they’ll suddenly know me, and I’d understand them and feel a connection. A real connection.

  It never happens, of course. Why would a guy bother to get to know me? So I act flippant and cool and tough, and eventually they dump me, and I never hear from them again. They even defriend me on Facebook. Like there is no point in keeping in touch. Like I am disposable.

  No wonder I’ve always liked that moment before the first kiss so much. The prekiss. That is the moment when there is still a chance that this time, it will mean something. Like I might meet someone worth trusting, someone to whom I can show my true self. Like there might be a happy ending.