She's Faking It

by Kristin Rockaway

Another cluck of the tongue, followed by a sigh. To Natasha, my whole life was exasperating. “You can use mine.”

  This was the thing about my sister: even though she often made me feel like the biggest screwup on the planet, she never left me out in the cold.

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem. I’ll call for you right now. Where are you?”

  “Um...” I looked around the cul-de-sac. A man across the street was rolling a large gray trash can out of his garage. As he plopped it in the gutter with a loud thunk, he paused and narrowed his eyes in my direction. People in this neighborhood didn’t appreciate stragglers, especially those in beat-up cars. I quickly looked away. “I can just call myself.”

  “No, you can’t. It’s my account, I need to authorize the pickup. You said you’re parked in someone’s driveway. What’s the address?”

  I thought about aborting the mission at this point, telling her the car miraculously started all of a sudden. But this guy was still glaring at me from behind his trash can, and I couldn’t just linger here forever. There was no other choice than to tell her where I was.

  “I’m outside 1846 Blue Bonnet Court.”

  There was silence on the line. I held my breath, hoping against hope that she wouldn’t recognize the street name. But that was me being willfully naive.

  “In Encinitas?”

  My silence was all the answer she needed.

  “You’re, like, three blocks away from my house. Why didn’t you just say that?”

  “I didn’t wanna bother you,” I said, which was a partial truth. Mostly, I just didn’t want her to see me in this state. Or hear the myriad “I told you sos” that were inevitably coming my way.

  “Have you eaten dinner?”

  “Not yet.” My stomach reflexively rumbled. “I’ve been working since three.”

  “I’ve got some leftovers I can bring you. Let me call the tow truck and I’ll be right there.”

  She hung up. I felt a wave of relief, which was swallowed quickly by a larger wave of regret. Natasha had always warned me to have a plan B. To have an alternate stream of income lined up, in case I ever decided to stop being a GrubGetter. I’d dismissed her because up until recently, being a GrubGetter was working out just fine. Plus, it wasn’t like I had a burning desire to do anything else, and more to the point, I was too terrified to try anything new. New endeavors introduced the possibility of failure, which I’d already experienced enough of in this lifetime, thank you very much.

  But now, the decision had been made for me. I couldn’t deliver food if my car wouldn’t start. Which reminded me, I had to turn down that Burger Bar order I’d claimed.

  I pulled up the GrubGetter app and tapped the “Cancel” button. The screen flashed with a message.

  Are you sure? Canceling orders this close to pickup time can result in low GrubGetter performance ratings.

  Reluctantly, I tapped “Yes,” then tossed my phone into the open hot bag on the passenger seat. Closing my eyes, I tried my hardest not to cry. It didn’t work, though, and within seconds, I was full-force sobbing into the steering wheel. Given the facts, it was impossible to hold back the tears.

  My rent was due in three days, I was light-years late on my student loans, I had no clue how I was going to pay for whatever repairs my car would need, and my sister was about to save my ass, yet again.

  This wasn’t how I’d envisioned myself living at age twenty-five. It was way past time for me to get my shit together.

  I just wished I knew where to start.

  Chapter 2

  A sharp rat-tat-tat on the driver’s side window cut in on my crying jag. Natasha stood on the pavement holding a Tupperware container full of something green and cheesy-looking. I swiped the tears from my swollen eyes and opened the door.

  “Thanks for coming,” I said.

  “Don’t be silly, I wasn’t about to leave you out here all alone. The tow truck should be here in thirty.” She jiggled the container in her hands. “I brought something for you to eat while we wait.”

  Natasha surveyed the interior of my car with an air of disgust. Frankly, I couldn’t blame her. While she was a special kind of snob when it came to keeping spaces tidy, I was also a special kind of slob. The floors were littered with burrito wrappers and empty Big Gulp containers. Random papers and forgotten pieces of junk mail crowded the back seat, along with a ripped hoodie and a solitary flip-flop. There were coins and crumbs and errant M&M’S wedged in the center console, and I’m pretty sure I hadn’t dusted the dashboard in the nearly ten years I’d owned this thing. Thankfully, Natasha couldn’t see the state of my trunk.

  “Let’s sit in my car,” she said, rather diplomatically.

  We settled into the buttery leather seats of her Audi Q8, with its gleaming oak dashboard and immaculate floor mats. She tapped one of the three touch screens beside the steering wheel and the panoramic sunroof retracted above our heads.

  “Such a gorgeous night.” Natasha breathed deeply. “You can almost smell the ocean from here.”

  All I could smell was her sweet, waxy air freshener and the remnants of fried chicken grease. Even though I never came into direct contact with food, the scent always seeped out through the delivery bags and clung to my clothes. No matter how many times I’d thrown this shirt in the wash, it inevitably came out smelling like a strange combination of French fries and teriyaki sauce. Between the horrible stink and the faded ketchup stains, my GrubGetter polo was beat. I’d been thinking about ordering a new one, but it didn’t make any sense to do that now. Seeing as I was temporarily out of a job and everything.

  Although, since I couldn’t afford to fix my broken car, it was entirely possible that I’d be permanently out of a job.

  The thought set me off crying again, which made Natasha sigh. “You’ve got to get it together, Bree.”

  “Thanks,” I said, my voice thick with tears. “That’s such helpful advice, it really makes me feel better.”

  “Stop. You know I’m only saying this because I love you.”

  My sister was a firm believer in “tough love.” It’s not that she didn’t sympathize. She just thought there were far more productive ways to handle your problems than wallowing in tears and despair. She was right, of course, but I wasn’t in the mood for a lecture right now.

  “I’ve told you before,” she continued, “you need to have a plan B.”

  “Yes, I know, I’m a massive failure. Why don’t you go talk to Eddie Trammel about all the ways I’ve screwed up my life?”

  “You’re not a failure and you haven’t screwed up your life.” She pulled a tissue from her purse and thrust it toward me. “You aren’t making the best choices, but you can change that. And who’s Eddie Trammel?”

  “My old physics professor.” I snatched the tissue from her hand and nodded to the house beside us. “I just delivered his chicken. He didn’t recognize me.”

  “Hmm.” Natasha studied his front lawn, the sprinklers still blaring, the bright green blades of grass completely saturated. “That guy was a jerk to you, wasn’t he?”

  “Yeah.”

  To be fair, he was a jerk to everyone. He was one of those academics who was hyperfocused on his research and resentful that he had to teach an undergraduate class, especially one as rudimentary as Physics 1A. I’m not sure if he’d ever insulted anyone quite so thoroughly as he’d insulted me, though.

  I blew my nose with a resounding honk as Natasha snapped a photo of his lawn. “What are you doing?”

  “It’s before sundown,” she said. “These sprinklers shouldn’t be on right now. This city has very explicit regulations about water usage.” She pulled a thick planner from her purse and jotted down a note in the margins of her weekly layout. “My friend Lara is on the Municipal Code Enforcement Board. I’m gonna shoot her an email tomorrow and get this guy ticketed.”
/>   “Is that really necessary?”

  Natasha stopped writing and met my eyes. This wasn’t about improper water usage; this was about getting revenge on someone who’d wronged her little sister.

  “Yes. It’s really necessary.” She slapped her planner closed and tucked it in her bag, then passed me the container of food along with a fork. “Here, eat. It’s still warm.”

  I popped the top and the smell of sulfur and hot feet hit my face. “What is this?”

  “Spinach-cauliflower casserole.” She shrugged one shoulder apologetically. “It’s keto.”

  “Since when are you doing keto?” Natasha was slender and athletic, an Orangetheory fanatic who did yoga on a stand-up paddleboard to “relax.” She liked to eat “clean,” whatever that meant, and every so often, she’d try whatever new fad diet was making headlines on the mommy blog circuit. “You know you don’t need to lose weight, right?”

  “It’s not for weight loss. I read that ketosis can spark higher energy levels and improve your mental focus. It’s only been a few days, but I’m definitely noticing an upward trend in my mood tracker. Oh! That reminds me.” She pulled a small Moleskine labeled FOOD DIARY out of her purse, which was apparently a bottomless pit of storage. “I didn’t log my dinner yet.”

  “How many notebooks do you have in that thing?”

  “Just four.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “My daily planner, my gratitude journal, my client log, and this.”

  “Oh. That’s all.”

  Natasha was too busy scribbling in her food diary to pick up on my sarcasm, so I dug my fork into the casserole and took a big, gloppy bite. It tasted exactly as odd as it smelled, but I was hungry, and Natasha was saving my ass, so I swallowed without chewing and lied through my teeth. “It’s great!”

  “It’s gross, but I appreciate the attempt to make me feel better.”

  I pushed the casserole around the container, searching in vain for something delicious, as if a mound of Tater Tots would magically appear amidst the vegetable slurry. “Is all keto food like this?”

  “No, there’s some really good stuff. Lots of meat, mostly. This was a new recipe I pinned the other day. Don’t think I’ll be making it again, though.” She wrote “PINTEREST FAIL” in her food diary and returned it to her bag.

  “Don’t these books make your purse really heavy? There’s gotta be some app where you can store all this information.”

  “Studies show you’re more likely to remember things you’ve written by hand, with physical pen and paper.” She reached across my lap and opened the glove compartment, removing a notebook with an antiqued photograph of a vintage luxury car printed on the cover. “For example, this is my auto maintenance log. Maybe if you’d kept one of these, like I told you to, we wouldn’t be in this predicament right now.”

  I loved Natasha, I really did. She was responsible and generous, and without her I’d likely be far worse off than I already was, which was a horrifying thought to consider. But at times like this, I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake the shit out of her.

  “A maintenance log wouldn’t have helped me.”

  “Yes, it would have. Organization is about more than decluttering your home. It’s about decluttering your mind. Making lists, keeping records—these are all ways to help you get your life in order. If you’d had a maintenance log, this problem wouldn’t have caught you off guard in the middle of your delivery shift. You’d have seen it coming, and—”

  “I saw it coming.”

  “What?”

  “This didn’t catch me off guard. The check engine light came on two weeks ago.” Or maybe it was three.

  “Then why didn’t you take it to the mechanic?” She blinked, genuinely confused. Everything was so cut-and-dried with her. When a car needed to be serviced, of course you called the mechanic.

  That is, if you could afford to pay the repair bill.

  Fortunately, she put two and two together without making me say it out loud. “Oh,” she murmured, then bit her lip. I could almost hear the squeak and clank of wheels turning in her head as she tried to piece together the solution to this problem. No doubt it included me setting up a journal or logbook of some sort, though we both knew that would be pointless. The last time she’d tried to set me up with a weekly budget planner, I gave up on day two, when I realized I could GrubGetter around the clock for the rest of my life and still never make enough money to get current on the payments for my student loans. You know, for that degree I’d never finished.

  But Natasha was a determined problem solver. It said so in her business bio: “Natasha DeAngelis, Certified Professional Organizer®, is a determined problem solver with a passion for sorting, purging, arranging, and containerizing.” My life was a perpetual mess, and though she couldn’t seem to be able to clean it up, that didn’t stop her from trying. Over and over and over again.

  “I’ll pay for the repairs,” she said.

  “No.” I shook my head, fending off the very big part of me that wanted to say yes. “I can’t take any money from you.”

  “It’s fine,” she said. “Business is booming. I’ve got so much work right now that I’ve actually had to turn clients away. And ever since Al introduced that new accelerated orthodontic treatment, his office has been raking it in. We can afford to help you.”

  “I know.” Obviously, my sister and her family weren’t hurting for cash. Aside from her wildly successful organizing business, her husband, Al, ran his own orthodontics practice. They owned a four-bedroom house, leased luxury cars, and took triannual vacations to warm, sunny places like Maui and Tulum. They had a smart fridge in their kitchen that was undoubtedly worth more than my nonfunctioning car.

  But my sister wasn’t a safety net, and I needed to stop treating her like one. She’d already done so much for me. More than any big sister should ever have to do.

  “I just can’t,” I said.

  “Well, do you really have any other choice?” There was an edge to Natasha’s voice now. “If you don’t have a car, how are you going to work?”

  “I’ll figure something out.” The words didn’t sound very convincing, even to my own ears. For the past four years, all I’d done was deliver food. I had no other marketable skills, no references, no degree.

  I was a massive failure.

  Tears pooled in my eyes. Natasha sighed again.

  “Look,” she said, “maybe it’s time to admit you need to come up with a solid plan for your life. You’ve been in a downward spiral ever since Rob left.”

  She had a point. I’d never been particularly stable, but things got a whole lot worse seven months earlier, when my live-in ex-boyfriend, Rob, had abruptly announced he was ending our three-year relationship, quitting his job, and embarking on an immersive ayahuasca retreat in the depths of the Peruvian Amazon.

  “I’ve lost my way,” he’d said, his eyes bloodshot from too many hits on his vape pen. “The Divine Mother Shakti at the Temple of Eternal Light can help me find myself again.”

  “What?” I’d been incredulous. “Where is this coming from?”

  He’d unearthed a book from beneath a pile of dirty clothes on our bed and handed it to me—Psychedelic Healers: An Exploratory Journey of the Soul, by Shakti Rebecca Rubinstein.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s the book that changed my life,” he’d said. “I’m ready for deep growth. New energy.”

  Then he’d moved his belongings to a storage unit off the side of the I-8, and left me to pay the full cost of our monthly rent and utilities on my paltry GrubGetter income.

  I told myself this situation was only temporary, that Rob would return as soon as he realized that hallucinating in the rainforest wasn’t going to lead him to some higher consciousness. But I hadn’t heard from him since he took off on that direct flight from LAX to Lima. At this point, it was p
robably safe to assume he was never coming back.

  Which was probably for the best. It’s not exactly like Rob was Prince Charming or anything. But being with him was better than being alone. At least I’d had someone to split the bills with.

  “Honestly,” she continued, “I can’t stand to see you so miserable anymore. Happiness is a choice, Bree. Choose happy.”

  Of all Natasha’s pithy sayings, “Choose happy” was the one I hated most. It was printed on the back of her business cards in faux brush lettering, silently accusing each potential client of being complicit in their own misery. If they paid her to clean out their closets, though, they could apparently experience unparalleled joy.

  “That’s bullshit, and you know it.”

  She scowled. “It is not.”

  “It is, actually. Shitty things happen all the time and we have no choice in the matter. I didn’t choose to be too broke to fix my car. I work really hard, but this job doesn’t pay well. And I didn’t choose for Rob to abandon me to go find himself in the Amazon, either. He made that choice for us.”

  I almost mentioned the shittiest thing that had ever happened to Natasha or to me, a thing neither of us had chosen. But I stopped myself before the words rolled off my lips. This evening was bad enough without rehashing the details of our mother’s death.

  “Sometimes things happen to us that are beyond our control,” Natasha said, her voice infuriatingly calm. “But we can control how we react to it. Focus on what you can control. And it does no good to dwell on the past, either. Don’t look back, Bree—”

  “Because that’s not where you’re going. Yes, I know. You’ve said that before.” About a thousand times.

  She took a deep breath, most likely to prepare for a lengthy lecture on why it’s important to stay positive and productive in the face of adversity, but then a large tow truck lumbered onto the cul-de-sac and she got out of the car to flag him down.

  Grateful for the interruption, I ditched the casserole on her dashboard and walked over to where the driver had double-parked alongside my car.