“Wait! What about the mouse?” I called after him.
Without missing a beat, Noob walked up to him and scooped him up in his palm. “Hey, little guy. How ya doing? We may be a lot bigger than you, but we come in peace.”
Noob may have been lacking in the brain cells department, but apparently he was a mouse whisperer, because the thing didn’t squirm or squeak or do any other sort of frightened mouse–like things. Instead, he scurried up Noob’s arm onto his shoulder. “Want to say hi?” he asked me as he walked over and turned his shoulder toward me.
In what was probably not the most friendly gesture, I screamed again. Which made the mouse attempt to hide under Noob’s armpit.
“He’s not going to hurt you,” Noob said. “He just wants to be friends,” he said as he moved closer to me.
I moved farther away. “I don’t have a lot of rodent friends,” I said. “In fact, I don’t have any.”
He shook his head sadly. “You know, I totally get that we still have a long ways to go before we’re a color-blind nation. And I think the fact that women aren’t paid as much as men for the same work or the fact that we only allow gay people to get married in some states but not all of them is total BS. But it really hurts my heart when I think about how little respect we give to our four-legged brothers and sisters. It’s like the Native American issue all over again.”
I sat there, speechless.
Doc walked back in the room holding a pad of paper and a pen. “Noob, take the mouse outside, please,” he said. “Simone and I are going to have a meeting.”
We were?
“Fine. I don’t do meetings anyway,” Noob sniffed. “Too much pressure.” He looked down at his armpit. “Come on, hermano.”
After they were gone, I jumped off the counter, barely missing a dented pizza box on the floor.
“Okay, so this is what I was thinking,” Doc said, flipping to a page filled with a very long list written in very neat handwriting. He handed it to me. “I’d love to hear your thoughts.”
“Okay, but I need to get my glasses.”
He whipped his off and handed them to me. “Here. Try mine. I’m working on trying to overcome my poor eyesight.”
I put them on and blinked. “Hey! We have an almost identical prescription!”
He smiled. “Really? Wow. I knew there was a reason I liked you right off the bat!”
I smiled. So far, out of all of the guys, Doc seemed to have the most brain cells.
“Okay. Let’s see . . . ’Oh seven hundred hours—morning meeting to go over each housemate’s tasks and responsibilities for the day. Said meeting will occur at oh eight hundred on Sundays, in order to give everyone an extra hour’s sleep,” I read aloud. “Twenty-two hundred hours—evening meeting to go over aforementioned tasks and make sure all have been completed. For those who are unable to attend meeting at that time due to prior commitment such as job/surfing/etc., there will be an alternative one at nineteen hundred hours. For those unable to attend that one, please e-mail Doc with the subject line reading—” I looked up from the notebook and pushed the glasses up the bridge of my nose. While our prescriptions were the same, the size of our heads definitely was not. “Um, Doc, I totally get the fact that this place would really benefit from a little more organization—”
“I know you do,” he said. “That’s why I knew you’d be the right person to ask for help—”
“But I think that all this”—I flipped through the pages that were covered with writing—“might be a little too much.”
“You do?” he asked, disappointed.
I nodded.
“Even the part where we hire a shrink for a day to oversee a group therapy session in an attempt to facilitate better communication between group members?”
“Especially that part.”
“Oh.” His face turned red as he looked down at the ground. “Yeah. I guess when you think about it, it’s kind of a dumb idea.” He sighed as he reached out for the notebook. Which, because he wasn’t wearing his glasses, he missed completely.
I took off his glasses and placed them back on his face. “It’s not a dumb idea at all,” I said gently. “It’s more like, when you’re dealing with people who don’t have the same values as you, you just need to . . . adjust your expectations a little.” I had overheard my dad use that term once when he was talking to my grandmother, who had called him to complain about how she found the way that Hillary had offered to get her in for an appointment with her dermatologist to do something about all her wrinkles incredibly rude. That was definitely how I had dealt with Hillary. To the point where I now had zero expectations.
He took his pen from out behind his ear and began to write. “Rules for dealing with people,” he said, “adjust expectations.”
“I would also add ‘Try to remember that sometimes you just have to stay in the moment and just read the room in order to get a take on people rather than look at a list for directions’ to that particular list,” I said.
He nodded. “Okay. I like that,” he said as he kept writing. “Stay in the room and . . . what came after that?”
“Look, Doc, here’s the deal,” I said. “You and I know that these guys are a little on the . . . messy side.”
“A little?!”
“Okay fine. If they sent someone from the Department of Health to this kitchen to give it a letter rating like they do with restaurants, it would probably be a letter near the end of the alphabet,” I admitted. “But what I’m thinking is that instead of setting ourselves up for failure, we just work on the basics. Like, you know, telling everyone that from now on, all food must be disposed of in an actual garbage can rather than just left out on tables and counters in hopes that someone else will do something about it.”
He nodded. “Okay. I can get behind that,” he said as he wrote it down. “What else?”
“And . . . that each day it will be a different person’s responsibility to make sure the sink is clear of dishes,” I said. “And not by throwing the dishes in the garbage, but by washing them.”
“Another good one,” he said as he scribbled away. The thing was, Doc’s scribbling was still neater than most people’s best handwriting. Which, for a doctor, was pretty rare. “Oh! Oh! I know— How about we all take turns sweeping, vaccuming, and mopping?” he asked. “Because there’re eight of us, we’ll only each have to do it less than once a week!”
“Sweeping and mopping? These guys?”
“Yeah. You’re probably right,” he sighed. “That’s more like an inflated expectation.”
I nodded in agreement. “How about this, though? What if you and I take turns doing that every three days?” I asked. “Actually, because the sweeping and vaccuming will take care of dust, I bet we could even rope Wheezer into helping out with it.”
“You’d do that? Really?”
I shrugged. “I don’t mind cleaning.” I didn’t love it, but I loved living in total chaos even less.
“Wow. I’m really touched, Simone.” His brow furrowed. “That being said, I’m afraid of the flack we might get—you know, adding fuel to the stereotype of the idea that it’s a woman’s role to clean.”
“I think I’d rather be a stereotype than walk around with sticky feet that are covered with I don’t even want to know what. Plus, you’ll be cleaning, too, and you’re not a woman.”
“Good point.”
“Now. In terms of groceries,” I went on, “what if we start a fund where everyone chips in thirty dollars a week and—” Just as I was about to go into detail about how, if you shopped at Ralph’s instead of Whole Foods, 240 bucks went a long way, Blush walked into the room. Actually, because of his height, it was more like he . . . lumbered. In a surprisingly graceful way.
“Oh, hey, Blush,” Doc said.
“Hi, Blush,” I s
aid.
“Hey,” Blush said, blushing a little.
“Simone and I were just coming up with a game plan for how to make this place less of a health hazard,” Doc explained. “She’s got some great ideas.”
Now it was my turn to blush. My inability to take compliments wasn’t just limited to stuff about my looks.
“Oh yeah? Like what?” Blush asked.
“Nothing that special.” I shrugged. “Just stuff like making sure food ends up in the garbage rather than on the floor. And then I thought that once a week someone could go to the supermarket and do a big shop so we had food for the week. You know, maybe stuff other than chips. Or Mallomars.” For some reason, when I looked in the kitchen cabinets the night before for some sugar, I had found six packages of unopened Mallomars. I was really glad I did not like Mallomars, because the stash could have been quite tempting.
“The Mallomars are Noob’s,” Blush explained. “He plays this game where he tries to get the chocolate part off the marshmallow using nothing but his two front teeth.”
You had to give the guy points for creativity. Of all the things a person could spend their time doing, never in a million years would I have thought of that. “That sounds . . .”
“Very Noob-like?” Blush suggested.
“That’s a good way of putting it,” I agreed.
“So far he hasn’t been successful.”
“I love the supermarket idea,” Doc said. “We should really go soon, though, since we don’t have anything here. I’d go, but I have to study.”
“But I thought you had the summer off?” I asked, confused.
“I do, but I’m trying to get a jump on second semester of next year.”
Wow. Talk about an overachiever.
I looked at Blush. “I don’t have any plans today.”
He shrugged. “Neither do I.”
I guessed we were going together.
Later that afternoon, after collecting money from our roommates, Blush and I set off for the market. In a very non-L.A. move, Blush suggested we walk there, since he had one of those metal carts little old ladies used to carry groceries home.
Which, I decided as I unsuccessfully wracked my brain for a good conversation starter, was probably a very bad idea. Because of the fact that everyone drove everywhere in L.A., it was tough to predict how long it took to walk places, but by my estimation, we were in for a long one.
I quickly discovered that Blush was very comfortable in silence. Like to the point where I wasn’t sure he remembered I was with him. I was comfortable in silence, too, but more like when I was alone. When I was with another person, it just felt awkward.
“So, uh, do you have any pets?” I yelled over the whoosh of the cars as they zoomed passed us on Lincoln Boulevard. Not only was it going to be a long walk, it was going to be a loud one. And—because of the new black ballet flats I was wearing with a pair of black pedal pushers and a sleeveless red shirt—one probably full of blisters.
He looked at me and smiled. “Nope.”
I waited for something more—like, say, “. . . but if I did, I would have a dog.” Or a cat. Even a ferret, although I had no idea why someone would want one of those. But nothing came other than more silence between us and more whooshing from the traffic.
“I don’t, either,” I replied. I wracked my brain some more. “Hot, today, huh?” Great. I had just uttered the most clichéd thing possible.
“Sure is,” he said.
And . . . nothing. Not a “Too bad we don’t have a pool” or a “At least, because it’s L.A., it’s not humid.” Just more silence. Punctuated by some obnoxious honking by a kid in a Prius driving behind a very old woman in a silver Buick who was barely visible over the steering wheel.
I stopped walking and put my hands on my hips. “Um, Blush?”
He stopped and turned. “Yeah?”
“Look, this isn’t a judgment or anything, but I get the sense you don’t spend a lot of time with other people.”
Not surprisingly, he blushed. “You’re right.”
“And the reason I can say that is because if you spot it, you got it,” I said. “Meaning, I’m the same way. That being said, you gotta work with me here.”
“Huh?”
“Well, two people, when they’re walking down a street together, usually have a conversation. You know, with both people talking instead of just one.”
More blushing. “Sorry. So what do you want to talk about?” he asked as we started walking again.
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
It was quiet for a while. Well, other than the pounding bass coming from the tricked-out Chevy waiting at the light. Trying to talk was proving to be more uncomfortable than the silence. I turned to him. “You know what? It’s okay, forget it. We don’t have to talk.”
Maybe it was because it took the pressure off us, but after I said that Blush relaxed and did start talking. And talking. And talking. In fact, by the time we got to Ralph’s, I was pretty sure Blush may have said more in a half hour than he had in his entire life.
Not like I was complaining. Unlike some people who yakked away because they literally loved the sound of their own voice (“I think my voice has a real honey quality to it, don’t you think so?” Hillary had asked me as we had driven home from Kmart that day) or felt like what they had to say was incredibly important (“Obviously, having just been voted one of the most powerful Thirty Under Thirty by the Hollywood Reporter, I barely have a minute to myself, but still, I feel like I owe it to the world to start a blog” she said one morning as she tried to get me to eat French toast), Blush was interesting.
He grew up in Watts, which was in South Central L.A., with four sisters and his mom, who supported the family by working two jobs. (“When you’re surrounded by all those women, you learn to carry Kleenex with you because chances are someone’s gonna start crying at some point.”) When he got into junior high, the fact that he was the kind of kid who liked staying inside drawing and painting rather then playing outside literally saved his life, as that was when a lot of his friends joined gangs. Because of his size, and his ability to dunk, he got a scholarship to a private high school in the Valley, but when it came time to apply to college, instead of taking a basketball scholarship at USC or UCLA or any of the other schools that wanted him, he applied to CalArts.
“Wow. That’s cool,” I said as we pushed the cart through the produce section. I was both pleased and impressed to learn that Blush really knew his way around fruits and vegetables when it came to ripeness. Every melon and mango he handed me was just right. “To follow your dream instead of doing something that could earn you millions of dollars and let you date supermodels. Most guys wouldn’t do that.”
Blush blushed as he effortlessly picked up an entire watermelon with one hand as if it were an apple and placed it gently in the cart. That was something else you didn’t see often—people handling fruit with the respect it deserved so it didn’t get bruised.
“So you’re studying painting?” I asked as we made our way through the snack aisle. Obviously, with the crowd we were living with, I knew there was only so far I could push the whole healthy-eating thing before the group staged a mutiny and voted me off the island. But I was pleased to see that when Blush reached for some potato chips, they were the baked kind.
He shook his head. “Nope. Puppetry.”
I looked at him. As did the gum-snapping woman deliberating over Hawaiian- versus Asian-flavored tortilla chips. (Even pre-weight loss, I would’ve passed on both because they sounded equally disgusting.) “Puppetry as in . . . puppets?” I asked, confused.
He nodded.
“As in . . . puppets puppets?” I asked, more confused.
“Yeah. The Cotsen Center for Puppetry and the Arts is one of the best in the country.”
“Wow, that’s, um . . .”
“. . . weird,” the woman offered, snapping her gum.
I turned to her. Obviously, the memo regarding supermarket etiquette and the importance of not only not invading someone’s personal space but also not offering any sort of feedback unless asked for it had gone to her spam folder. “No, it’s not,” I said defensively.
“No, she’s right,” Blush said. “It is weird.” He shrugged. “But I’m okay with that.” He shrugged again. “Not only do I like it, but I’m good at it. My dream is to open up a puppet theater in Watts and put on shows that deal with stuff the kids in that neighborhood see on a regular basis. You know, gang violence, drugs. So there’s a safe place for them to process all of it.”
The woman rolled her eyes. “Tons of money in that,” she said sarcastically as she grabbed a package of French onion–flavored biscuits. I’m sure her husband liked kissing her after that.
Blush shrugged. “No. Probably not. But I’m cool with that.”
I gave her a dirty look. “I think that’s awesome,” I said to him. “Like . . . maybe the most awesome thing I’ve ever heard.”
We pushed the cart down the aisle. Never in a million years would I have pegged Blush for a puppeteer. But the fact that that’s what he was made the whole thing—and him—that much cooler. Who knew—maybe living here wasn’t going to be so bad?
One of the first secrets I learned about guys was that as much as they may have rolled their eyes in front of their friends in order to seem all cool and save face, they actually liked to be told what to do. Especially if the order came with the threat that if they didn’t do it, the house Xbox/DVD/Roku player/insert other high-end-electronic device here would be placed for sale on Craigslist. According to Doc—who had taken a few psychology classes at UCLA in case he decided to become a shrink instead of a plastic surgeon (“There are just as many crazy people as shallow and vain ones in this city,” he explained)—much like children, guys liked structure and boundaries. They said they didn’t, but it made them feel safe.
Wicked Jealous: A Love Story Page 13
