Wicked Jealous: A Love Story

by Palmer, Robin

  But the veggies and the movies didn’t help. Neither did Brad’s offer to lend me this cool seventies-style paisley maxi dress I had been coveting that had once been worn by Janeane Garofalo (Reality Bites was one of my favorite non-French movies) at an awards show. For two days I just moped around. I didn’t even have the energy to wash my hair, which resulted in a little trail of pimples on my hairline because of all the stupid product on it.

  There was a part of me that wanted nothing more than to be able to go back to how things used to be. Disappear into my room with a case of Tastykakes and eat until I felt nothing and then put on my baggy clothes and go through life invisible. At least when you were invisible you didn’t have to take risks. You didn’t have to be seen and connect with people and let yourself get excited about possibilities. When you were invisible, you had a pretty good idea what each day was going to bring—in most cases, exactly the same as the day before. Boring, sure, but it took away any opportunity to get disappointed.

  In my head, I knew that I hadn’t done anything wrong with Jason, that he was just a jerk and a guy and I probably wasn’t the first or the last girl he was going to treat that way. But everything below my head—i.e., my heart—was a different story. Because even though I had gone out with Jason only twice, and even though I had a sense from the Bieber and Adele thing that, at the end of the day, he wasn’t going to end up being my guy, I felt dumb. Dumb for getting excited. Dumb for trusting him. And dumb for ever thinking that someone so cute and popular would ever like someone like me.

  By Sunday, the second evening of my moping, when not only had the pimples begun to migrate from my hairline over to my chin and nose, but I was actually starting to smell a little funky, my roommates got involved.

  “What’s going on?” I asked when, after my brother texted me to come downstairs while I was holed up under the covers in my room watching The Notebook, I found all of them except for Blush waiting for me in the living room.

  “An invention,” Noob replied.

  “What did you invent now?” I asked suspiciously. The last thing Noob had “invented” was this remote control that, when you aimed it at a garage door, it opened. (“I hate to tell you, Noob, but they already sell those,” I told him after he took about a half hour to explain it to me one afternoon. “They’re called garage door openers.”)

  “He means an intervention,” corrected Max.

  “But I haven’t had any sugar,” I replied. “Only veggies. I swear.” I looked down at my bloated stomach. I really needed to ease up on them.

  “We’re not talking about food,” Doc said.

  “We want to know why you’ve been so bummed out the last two days,” said Narc.

  Uh-oh. I had been afraid this would happen. Why did I have to live with guys who were so nice and actually noticed my moods and cared about me? Why couldn’t they be more clueless? Because I was not telling them about what had happened the other night in the car. It was one thing to admit to them I had a crush, but it was a whole other thing to talk about that stuff.

  Wheezer coughed. “Is it that hormone thing again?”

  “’Cause remember how you were all jacked up that he hadn’t gotten in touch and you were all bummed out and then he did and you were all happy?” asked Noob.

  I shook my head. “No. It’s not the oxytocin thing.” I wondered if there was some sort of pill you could take to stop the oxytocin altogether. Like an antibiotic or something. Because I was already way over it. I walked over to the TV and turned on the DVD player. “Hey, you guys want to watch Sorority Girl Slasher Part Twelve?” I asked brightly as I held up the case. As gory as it was, the nightmares from that wouldn’t be as bad as the ones I’d have if I ended up telling them what had happened.

  Max took it away from me and dragged me over to the couch, where he plopped me down between Noob and Narc. “No. We want to talk about you.”

  Noob sniffed. “Is that new perfume? It smells really good.”

  I looked out at the group of guys, all of whom were focused on me. Including Narc, who was wide awake. In fact, he hadn’t yawned once. I may have said I wanted to go back to being invisible, but the truth was, I didn’t. The truth was, I felt incredibly lucky to have such awesome friends. And the truth was, I was incredibly lucky Blush wasn’t there to witness all of this because, if he had been, I would have been even more mortified than I was at the moment. I sniffled a little. Just as the door opened and Blush walked in.

  “Hey. What’s going on?” he asked. I’d been avoiding Blush since the opening, to the point where I had gone grocery shopping by myself the day before. Which, while a good workout for my arms, hadn’t been much fun.

  “Nothing. We were just—” I began to say.

  “—waiting for Simone to tell us why she hasn’t showered since before her last date with Jason,” finished Thor.

  “And why she’s been so mopey,” added Wheezer.

  “And why she’s been posting links to YouTube videos of depressing Smiths songs on her Facebook page,” said my brother.

  Obviously, I was very much not invisible.

  I sighed. I already knew they weren’t going to let me out of there without telling them what happened. I took a deep breath. “Okay, well, see the other night, there was sort of an incident,” I began.

  “Did it involve an illegal firearm?” asked Noob. “’Cause that’s what it says in the paper all the time. ‘At nine oh-seven P.M., there was an incident with an illegal firearm at—”

  “No,” I cut him off. “There were no firearms involved. This incident had to do with—”

  The door opened again and a mousy-looking woman with frizzy blonde hair, no makeup, and bad skin, wearing sweats and a ratty Toy Story 3 T-shirt peeked her head in. Did nobody knock anymore? Venice had a high percentage of homeless people, and I had gotten to know a lot of them very well, but they’d never barge into a house. And I had never seen this woman before.

  “Can I help you?” Max asked.

  She stepped inside, and I gasped. It wasn’t a homeless woman.

  “Hillary,” I said. “What—”

  She smiled sadly. “I apologize that I’m not as put together as I usually am. I’ve just been so distraught over what happened between us at the gallery the other night that I haven’t been able to do anything.”

  “Ohhh . . . so that’s the incident you were referring to, Simone,” Max said softly. “What went down with Hillary.”

  “Um, right. Exactly,” I whispered back. Okay, so it was a lie. If I wasn’t going to eat cake, I was allowed to act out some way.

  He put his hand on my arm. “I hadn’t realized how much that had affected you,” he said. “As your older brother, I should have been more sensitive about that.”

  “Oh, it’s okay. No one’s perfect.”

  Hillary held up something round covered in aluminum foil. “All I could do was bake you this cake, as a peace offering. I thought maybe we could eat some as we talked things over. That is, if you could find it in your heart to give me a chance to apologize.”

  I looked at my brother, who shrugged. “You should hear her out,” he whispered. “Maybe she’s had some huge spiritual awakening and become a totally different person. Or Dad got her on meds.”

  Of course Max would default back to looking on the bright side again. But even though she sounded sincere, something in me didn’t trust Hillary. I could just see the Zumba Brigade shaking their heads at me. That being said, there was something to the fact that she would actually go out in public looking the way she did. Maybe Max was right—maybe she had become a totally different person in two days . . . because she had a lobotomy.

  “Sure,” I sighed. “We can talk.”

  She came over and hugged me. “Thank you so much. This means a lot to me.”

  She may have looked horrible, but unl
ike me, she had definitely showered. And slathered that expensive vanilla body lotion that she liked so much all over her.

  “But I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to have the cake,” I said.

  Her face fell. “Oh. Okay. I understand. It’s fine. I mean, it’s just my great-grandmother’s recipe for her everything cake, which has been handed down from generation to generation,” she said. “It’s very complicated and therefore took me four hours and thirty-five minutes to make.”

  Hillary had made it? She never cooked. Other than that time she turned the stove on and forgot to turn it off. But that wasn’t exactly “cooking.”

  “It’s just something that we used to have on special occasions, or would make as a peace offering,” she continued. “But it’s fine. I thought it could be a nice bonding thing for us, but I completely understand if you don’t want any. I know in the past I’ve been a little aggressive about trying to get you to eat. And I was wrong. I should have been more supportive of your weight loss.”

  I studied her face. She sure looked sincere. Could it be possible that something had happened where she had had a change of heart? Like, say, maybe my father threatening to call off the wedding or change the pre-nup so that the amount of money she would have gotten in case of a divorce was greatly reduced?

  “Okay, I’ll have a little piece,” I finally caved. “But seriously, just a sliver.”

  She smiled. “Great.”

  Max looked at the guys. “Hey, guys, let’s head out and give them some privacy.”

  “But dude, we can’t miss this. This is going to be awesome!” cried Noob. “I bet it’s like a hundred times better than those Real Housewives shows.” He turned to us. “Not to say you’re all cheesy like they are.”

  “Out,” Max said as he pushed him toward the door and the rest of them followed.

  After they were gone, I cut us two slices, and we settled on the couch. “So what did you want to talk about?” I asked.

  “Oh, let’s eat first,” she replied. “It’s not exactly the kind of conversation to have on an empty stomach.”

  I looked at the cake warily. “What’s in it?”

  “A little bit of everything—that’s where the ‘everything’ name came from. Coconut, raisins, peanut butter, chocolate chips.”

  Huh. That sounded awesome. I speared a piece with my fork and examined it. “There’s not any apple in this, is there?”

  “Of course not! You’re allergic to apples.” she replied. “I would never forget something as important as that.”

  “Hillary, you always forget that.”

  “Yes, but that was before.” She took my hand. “Simone, I know we haven’t had the best relationship in the past. But I really want to change that. I really want to be the mother figure you’ve never had. Like I keep saying, because I’m so young, I’m really more of an older sister type, but you know what I mean. And part of being in a family is remembering important things like severe allergic reactions that can lead to anaphylactic shock and possibly death.”

  “Wow. Hillary. I . . . I don’t know what to say. I’m really touched.”

  As I went to hug her, she patted me on the back then pushed me away. “Oh, I’m so glad. Now eat up.”

  I took a big forkful of cake. It was good . . . until a few seconds later I started to get dizzy. “Whoa.”

  “Is everything okay?” Hillary asked innocently.

  I began to clutch at my throat. “I don’t . . . I feel . . .” I wheezed. “My throat . . .”

  “Huh. Maybe it went down the wrong pipe.” She speared another piece and shoved it toward my mouth. “Here. Why don’t you have some more?”

  As I pushed it away, I clutched at my throat and began to slump down. “Hillary! Something’s happening!” I managed to get out. “You need to call an ambulance!”

  She stood up. After fluffing her hair, she took a red lipstick out of her bag and began to put it on. “You know, sweetie, I would love to help you out here, but I’m late for a waxing appointment. I’m sure you’ll be fine. Or not. Anyways, ta!” she trilled as she sailed toward the door.

  I coughed and coughed again. I rolled off the couch onto the floor, and saw the chunk of cake lying next to me with a piece of apple in the middle of it.

  The Zumba Brigade was right—she had been trying to kill me all along.

  A few hours later, I was in the middle of watching yet another episode of Teen Mom and thinking of how grateful I was that I had put the kibosh on Jason’s hands, because never in a million years would I want to end up like one of those girls, when Blush walked in the door.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hey,” I said. I hadn’t meant it to come out so frosty. The truth was, I couldn’t understand why I was so upset that he had brought Aleka to the gallery. It wasn’t like I liked him liked him.

  He walked over. “Why is there cake on the floor?” he asked, confused.

  I looked down. “Oh. I thought I had gotten all of it,” I said as I got up and went into the kitchen for a broom and dustpan so I could sweep it up. “It was part of my anaphylactic shock performance.”

  “Your what?”

  He sat down, and I explained everything to him. About how after the guys left, I had asked Hillary if there were apples in the cake and she said no. About how I didn’t trust her and had pretended to take a bite. About how I pretended to have a severe allergic reaction, and she ditched me for a bikini wax.

  “Oh, and there’s also the part how when we sat down, before any of that happened, I pushed the voice recorder app on my iPhone, so I’ve got the whole thing on tape for my dad. And the police,” I said.

  “But you’re okay? You’re not hurt?”

  “Nope, I’m fine. Never better.”

  “You sure? I mean, how’d you even think to do all that?” Blush asked.

  I shrugged. “I guess I’ve seen too many Law & Order episodes. I need to call my dad and tell him, but I’ve been putting it off.” I sighed. “He’s going to be bummed to know he’s engaged to an almost-murderer.”

  “I’m glad you’re all right,” he said. “And you should really call your dad and the police. She really is a lot to deal with. But Simone, I know that fight with Hillary is not the incident you were talking about earlier.”

  I began to study the cuticle of my left thumb as if it held the answers to all the secrets in the universe. “Yes, it was.”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  I looked up at him. “How do you know?”

  “Because you did that thing you do when you’re lying, where you flip your right foot back and forth on the floor and pull at the top of your left ear.” Blush blushed and looked at his sneaker, as if the secrets of the universe were actually kept there rather than in my cuticle. “Not like I spend all this time studying you or anything like that. It’s just something I noticed once. Or maybe a few times.”

  “You’re right. It wasn’t. It was something that happened with Jason.”

  He joined me on the couch. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  I shook my head and stared at the TV. “No.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  We watched TV for a bit without talking.

  “Okay, fine. I’ll talk about it. Just for a little bit. Then I have to call my dad.” But because it was Blush, a little bit turned into a lot, which turned into the whole story.

  As I told him how Jason kept trying to grope me, Blush got progressively madder and madder. Like to the point where he so did not look like the sweet puppeteer I knew and liked a lot, but more like the killer in one of the Sorority Girl slasher films. “Simone. You swear nothing happened?” he asked when I was done.

  I nodded.

  “He didn’t force you to do anything?”

  I shook my head.

&
nbsp; “Because if he did, that boy is dead.”

  “Hey, give me some credit,” I said. “I’ve been all proud that I stood up for myself!”

  He took my hand. “You should be proud! Big-time. It’s just that if I think of anyone hurting you—him, Hillary, whoever—I get so mad I can’t see straight. Simone, you know that you can wait as long as you want to do that stuff, right?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I know.”

  “’Cause any guy worthy of you is going to wait for you.” He cleared his throat and said something, but it came out so softly, I couldn’t hear him.

  “What?”

  He cleared his throat again. “I said—”

  But his voice dropped so I still couldn’t hear him.

  “Blush, I’m sorry, but I still can’t hear you.”

  “I said, ‘I know I would!” he shouted.

  I flinched. Boy did he have a set of lungs when he needed them. “You would what?”

  He sighed. “Man, you are not making this easy. I would wait for you. Until you’re ready. Because . . . well, because you’re the most beautiful, coolest, funniest, strongest girl I’ve ever met.”

  Wait. What? Was he saying what I thought he was saying? “But what about Aleka?” I blurted.

  “Huh?”

  “Aleka. From the place on Abbot Kinney. You’re seeing her now, right? I mean, you brought her to the gallery.”

  He shook his head. “No. It was just that one date. She’s not my type.”

  “So what is your type?”

  He laughed. “Like I said, you are not making this easy. “You, Simone. You are my type.”

  I was someone’s type. How about that? I looked at Blush. Sweet, tall, mumbling Blush, who, instead of earning millions of dollars a year playing basketball, wanted to use puppets to help the kids in the neighborhood in which he grew up. Blush, who knew when I was lying by looking at my feet, who listened to what I was saying, who made me feel more me when I was around him than when I was with anyone else. Blush, who would’ve liked me even back in my Tastykake days.