by Zoey Dean
“If you’d like to make an appointment with one of our trainers, you can do so at the front desk,” Gerald suggested. “I’d recommend it.”
“I need some water,” I muttered to Lily. Red-faced from both exertion and embarrassment, I made a beeline back to the locker room.
“Megan!” Lily was at my heels.
“I don’t want to hear it.” I pushed through the locker room door to the drinking fountain right inside and guzzled thirstily.
It was all too much: leaving Palm Beach, being poor, breaking up with James, working as a waitress, having sex on the beach with the guy I was crazy about—a guy Lily had kissed on New Year’s Eve—only to have him reject me afterward. More proof, obviously, that I could never, ever compete with my sister. Even as I drank, I felt my eyes fill with tears.
Then my sister’s hand was on my shoulder. “What?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Everything.” I stood up and wiped the tears from my cheeks with the bottom of my T-shirt.
She put her arm around me. “Come on.”
We went to the very back of the locker room, where there were a few modern-looking sofas along with a table of complimentary refreshments—juices, bottled water, baked goods. Lily poured us glasses of caffeine-free iced mint tea, but we took a pass on the sugar-free vegan cookies.
“Okay, tell me,” Lily commanded as we took over one of the couches.
Keeping it all bottled up inside was too much work. So the truth came spilling out—partially, anyway. I told her about the exposé I’d planned to write and how the twins had found out about it. And how the twins had come to think I was someone I wasn’t. When I was done, I almost smiled. I sipped the mint tea, which I’d have preferred surrounded by some really good dark chocolate.
“You know what’s funny, as in ironic, not ha-ha?” I asked, bringing the conversation back to what had happened in the gym. “In some weird way, living with the twins made me feel like I was the plainer, plumper little sister all over again.”
“Is that how you see yourself?”
“No, I’m downplaying my perfection in the hopes that it won’t bruise your ego too badly,” I said sarcastically, since the truth was too obvious. “You can’t imagine how much it sucked to grow up in the shadow of beautiful, sweet, talented you.”
Lily looked uncomfortable and pushed some hair behind her ear. “I hid behind that, you know.”
“Behind what?”
“Being the pretty one,” she said, her voice low. “You were the brainy one. I was the pretty one.”
Oh, no, I was not letting her get away with that.
“Lily, you went to Brown—”
“And I worked my ass off for it, too, because just once I wanted Mom and Dad to talk about my brain the way they talked about yours.”
“In other words, being prettier, nicer, and more talented than me wasn’t enough for you,” I translated. “You had to beat me at everything?”
“Right back atcha, sis,” Lily said.
God, was that true? It was. Brains were the only category I’d won. “Well, aren’t we the walking cliché?” I mused.
“Sitting clichés,” she corrected. “But Megan, have you looked in the mirror lately? I mean really looked?” She set her iced-tea glass on an end table next to fanned copies of Fitness magazine. “When I walked in today and saw you in the snack bar, it hit me how gorgeous you are.”
I cocked a brow. “Are we playing nice Lily now?”
“No, we are playing honest Lily now. Something happened while you were in Palm Beach. In addition to the bad stuff, I mean. You’re beautiful, Megan. You’ve always been, you just never noticed. And I’m not saying it to be nice. You are the whole package—smart, talented, andgorgeous.”
I nearly laughed. “Do you know how many times I wished you were a bitch so I could hate you?”
“That’s funny. I forgot to add funny. Smart, talented, gorgeous, and funny.”
“And broke. Don’t forget broke. And a waitress. A broke waitress.”
“You never want to take anything from me, Megan, I know that,” Lily began. “But I’m your sister. Please let me loan you some money? I’ve got it, I’ll never miss it, and you need it.”
She was right. Taking a loan from her would mean I was beholden in some way. But wasn’t it about time for me to grow up and admit that love carried with it certain responsibilities? Like accepting help when you needed it, the same way you would give it if it were needed from you? Like being completely honest?
God. Maturity sucks.
I cleared my throat. “There’s something else I didn’t tell you about Palm Beach.”
“What?”
This was the hardest thing of all. “That guy I introduced you to on New Year’s Eve? Will Phillips, who lives next door to the twins? We kind of . . . sort of almost had a thing.”
The equivocation queen strikes again. Oh, fuck it.
“I fell for him so hard,” I blurted out. “And then at New Year’s, I saw him kissing you, but he didn’t know you were my sister, and you didn’t know I cared about him because I was lying to everyone about everything. Will and I hooked up that last night I was in Palm Beach. He was with me when the twins confronted me, so now he hates me as much as they do.” I drained the last of my iced tea. “And that is that end of my sordid little confessional.”
“Relax. It was one kiss at midnight,” Lily assured me. “Besides, he’s all wrong for me.”
“Yeah, gorgeous and rich—there’s a romantic deal-breaker,” I quipped.
“The truth is, I kind of wanted more to happen, but then . . .” She smiled. “He said he was still kind of holding out for someone else.”
Me? He’d been holding out for me all that time? I rubbed my chest as if touching the place that was breaking inside of me would somehow help.
The pain would fade with time, I knew that. But I also knew a scar would remain, a ragged place inside of me, yearning for what might have been.
Choose the definition that most accurately describes the following word:
HIPSTER
(a)a trendy individual
(b)someone who spends the grocery money on navel piercings
(c)hygienically challenged
(d)indie-rock poseur
(e)too cool for school
Chapter Thirty-nine
An intern stuck in her multiple-face-piercings-means-I’m-so-hip phase ushered me into Rockit’s conference room and told me to wait. I pulled off Charma’s puffy jacket and took a seat. It was eerie being there, an exact replica of Scoop’s conference room seven floors below: same standard-issue black table, same Office Depot leatherette chairs. The only difference was that here, someone in charge had a whiteboard fetish. There were three of them on the walls, and one had somehow been attached to the picture window, destroying a perfectly lovely view of the Metropolitan Life clock tower across the street.
So many times at Scoop, when I’d been creating photo captions about the stars and their diets, the stars and their boyfriends, and the stars and their anorexia, I’d dreamed of seeing my byline in Rockit. Now, at long last, I was just an editor’s okay away from having my dream come true. I’d uploaded my article to Gary—now that we were on professional terms, I willed myself not to think of him as Wolfmother—on Wednesday and asked for a meeting on Friday to discuss it with him. I knew I was being pushy, but this was my chance.
“Morning, Megan.” Gary loped into the room. He wore a blue shirt with frayed cuffs and jeans with the baggy butt that comes from too much wearing and not enough washing.
“Hi, Gary,” I greeted him hopefully.
He tossed my manuscript on the conference table and dropped into a seat. “I don’t get it, Megan. You know what we publish here at Rockit. We talked about what I wanted, so you must know that this isn’t it.”
I’d known that what I’d turned in wasn’t the story he’d wanted. But I’d hoped that what I’d written was so good, so compelling, that he’d publ
ish it anyway. That was why I’d asked for the meeting.
It was the story of a recent Yale graduate up to her eyeballs in debt who goes to Florida to transform two filthy-rich girls into people who could pass for scholars, but in the process gets transformed herself in ways that she never could have imagined. Turns out the filthy-rich girls have brains and heart; they were just waiting for someone to come along and nurture it. The tutor, who spent so many years resenting her sister for being the beautiful one, has something to learn, too. The twins and the people around them, especially the estate cook and his lover, show the tutor how beautiful she really is.
I’d even put in the romantic angle—me still with J. but pretending to be single. Falling for W., the Palm Beach version of the boy next door. I’d assumed he was a shallow player because he was so rich and handsome, and then it turned out the only one playing was me.
I told Gary all that.
He listened intently. “Go on,” he said with a wave of his hand. “I’m with you.”
“Of course there’s wretched excess,” I explained. “And I wrote about it—you saw that. But there are also hundreds of women in Africa who have started businesses because of Laurel’s foundation, kids in hospitals who got Christmas presents, tens of millions raised by those wretchedly excessive balls. People should know that, too.”
I knew I hadn’t submitted a typical Rockit story about the seamy underbelly of life in these United States. But I was confident his readers would eat it up. They’d be inside the soul of a girl from small-town New Hampshire who had taken advantage of the assumptions of the people around her to fool one of the country’s most exclusive societies into believing she was one of them. While she was doing it, she’d possibly— maybe—preserved the fortune of two Palm Beach party girls.
“They’ll see it how I saw it,” I told Gary. “They’ll have their assumptions rocked and their prejudices exploded, just like I did. We can add a sidebar in a couple of weeks, depending on whether the twins get in to Duke or not.”
I’ll say this for Charma’s squeeze. He really listened. Now I took a deep breath, and awaited his verdict.
“Strong pitch,” he told me.
Please-please-please . . .
“You’re a really good writer, Megan. But it’s just not for us.”
No. I’d given it my best, most impassioned shot, and he’d said no.
“Good luck placing it.” Gary stood and offered his hand. I stood and shook it, then slid my rejected article into a folder and put on that fucking puffy down jacket.
He walked me to the elevator, then said goodbye. And that, as they say, was that.
I pressed the down button and let my forehead rest against the cool wall. I’d been close. So close.
The door opened. I got in and pressed the “L” button, realizing I had no idea what to do with the rest of the day. Since I’d come back from Palm Beach, I’d been tooling and retooling this article. Never had twelve thousand words been so carefully rewritten and self-edited. My shift at Tver didn’t start until four. It was far too cold to go for a walk. I didn’t want to spend the money on a movie.
The elevator stopped on eight—one of the two floors occupied by Scoop.
The door opened. Debra Wurtzel, the last person on the planet I wanted to see at that particular moment, stepped on.
And the fun kept on coming.
She eyed me coldly. “Nice makeover, Megan. Maybe you should also consider a new set of ethics.”
Fuck. She knew. Well, that made sense. Laurel Limoges was her friend.
“You heard.” My voice was hollow.
“Of course I heard. It took me an hour to convince Laurel that I had nothing to do with your ‘research.’”
We rode in silence the rest of the way down.
“I wasn’t going to write it, ” I told her as we got out of the elevator. I knew it sounded as empty as it had that last night at Les Anges.
“Uh-huh.” It was obvious she didn’t believe me. “What brings you to the building?” she asked as she pulled on a pair of leather gloves.
“I had a meeting at Rockit.”
That got her attention.
“They’re interviewing you?”
“No, I . . . I wrote a story. Freelance.”
“About Palm Beach?” She narrowed her eyes at me. “You’re a disgrace, Megan.”
Everyone reaches her limit. Even me. “Think whatever you want, Debra,” I said wearily. “I killed the Palm Beach exposé because while it was completely true, it wasn’t a completely honest picture. What I gave to Rockit was a story about me and how being in Palm Beach changed me. It’s a hundred percent true and a hundred percent honest. But you’ll be happy to know Rockit had about as much interest in it as you have in me.”
I was on my way to the door when Debra called to me. “Hold on, Megan.”
I turned back to her cautiously. “What?”
“You have that story with you?”
“Yeah.”
“I want to read it.” She held out a hand.
I shook my head. “I don’t think—”
“Megan.” Debra deadeyed me. “I would say that after all of this, you owe me.”
What the hell. It wasn’t like I needed it anymore. I pulled out my story and slapped it into her palm. She curled it into the same oversize moss-green Fendi bag I’d seen Sage carry once. Then we stepped through the revolving door and into the biting wind of late January.
Debra tightened her ivory-colored cashmere scarf around her neck and started toward her waiting black Town Car.
“Debra?” I called after her. “I just want to say . . . if I let you down, I’m sorry.”
She stopped and turned. “Did you meet anyone interesting down there?”
“Actually, I did,” I admitted, despite it being a very strange moment for her to become interested in my personal life. “But it didn’t work out. It’s all in the article.”
“That’s too bad.” She sounded oddly disappointed. The she reached for the door handle of the car. “What do you want me to do with the story when I’m done?”
“Chuck it, I guess.”
“Take care, Megan.” She ducked into the backseat of the car before the driver could get out and open the door.
I turned toward Broadway and the downtown R train, just another unemployed New Yorker trying to fight the cold and get through the day.
Choose the definition that most accurately describes the following word:
ELATION
(a)giddiness
(b)delight
(c)delirious
(d)high as a kite
(e) so thrilled that you want to throw your arms out and spin and sing like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music
Chapter Forty
You want flirtini?” Vitaly asked as I finished filling his olive tray.
It was the Monday night after my ill-fated double-dip encounter with Gary and Debra. I’d been working and spending more time with Lily since our session of True Confessions at her gym. I was even going to let her buy me a new winter coat tomorrow, but for tonight my bed was calling.
“No drink tonight,” I told Vitaly. “I’m going home to change into my spare feet.”
He looked at me blankly, confirmation that appreciation for my sense of humor is something acquired late in the English learning curve.
My feet were throbbing, and even though Tver had been busy for my entire shift, I’d made only twenty-five bucks in tips. Every lowlife in New York had decided to sit in my section. There’d been the drunk at booth one who had grabbed my ass as I set his rice pudding in front of him, and the lesbian couple in booth four who changed their order three times without ever actually making eye contact with me. Late in my shift, ten girls from New Jersey took booths two, three, and four, ordered half the menu, wolfed it down, and then pointed to a dead roach under the lettuce leaf of one girl’s cheeseburger special. Her snicker led me to believe they’d provided said bug themselves to get out of paying
. The Tver surveillance camera backed up my hunch. Vitaly and Vadim made them pay up, but there was no tip for me.
I said good night to my coworkers and stepped out into a crisp, fresh evening. The walk home featured the usual sights and sounds—sirens wailing in the distance, a junkie peeing between two trash cans at the corner of A and Tenth, a couple screaming at each other in front of my stoop. They were still going at it when I let myself into my building and made the five-flight trek up the stairs. I’d called ahead, since the last few nights I’d walked in on Charma and Gary doing the do on their side of the partition.
I undid the three locks and stepped into our Levittown kitchen. If Charma’s grandmother had been visiting us, there would have been homemade chicken soup on the stove instead of what I saw: champagne flutes and an unopened bottle of Taittinger.
Either Charma had just gotten cast in something major, or Gary had gotten a huge raise, or—
“Surprise!”
Out jumped the Baker twins. They were beaming at me. As in not mad. As in they threw their arms around me in a group hug.
“What are you doing here? When—how did you get here?” I babbled.
“Not you, we,” Rose corrected. “What are we doing here? That would be first-person plural. I should know, since I’m going to Duke next fall. I had to come tell you in person.”
“Oh my God, you did it!” I hugged the girls again. The implications were not lost on me. If Rose got in, the twins were halfway—
“I got in, too,” Sage said laconically, then assessed my waitress uniform. “Have we taught you nothing?”
“You got in! You’re going! You got your money!” I found myself dancing around the kitchen. “I’m so happy for you guys!” And I was, I really, truly was. “You’re rich!”
“And you know who else is happy for me?” Rose was beaming. “Thom!” she yelled before I could even ask.
Sage smiled. “They’re madly in luh-luh-love,” she informed me. “And I’m not even being bitchy about it. At least not to their faces. Joking.”
Rose stuck her tongue out at her sister before turning back to me. “Hey, don’t you want to know how we found you?” she asked eagerly.
