by Tia Williams
“She’s not cautious, she’s Catfish. Cherry’s a brawny dude in Canarsie, eating Cheez-its and squeezing off a quick one while fantasizing about a Suit who’s actually a kid failing eighth grade health.”
“You’re just a hater,” Thuong said, unsure.
“No, E’s probably right,” agreed Tim. “But so? This is practice.
By the time you’re in high school you’ll be a pimp, like I was.”
“Don’t be like Tim was,” said Eric. “The only reason he never got expelled was because I got myself elected the head of the Disciplinary Action Committee.”
“For which I arranged for you to lose your virginity to the chesty call girl I pretended was my English Lit tutor.” Tim frantically clicked the “L” button on his joystick, making a winning Master Sword move and ending the round. He whooped, and then continued. “I met her in an AOL chat room. Catfishing wasn’t invented yet. Simpler times.”
Tim looked at his phone. He was expecting his on-and-off girlfriend of three years, Carlita, to bring them takeout from the Jamaican spot. She was a surly, ambitious exotic dancer from a rough neighborhood with a massive ass and a long black weave. “Yooo, where is Carlita?”
“Downstairs pushing the door that says pull,” muttered Eric.
Tim kicked his chair. “Why’re you all in your feelings tonight?”
Thuong looked concerned. “Did you and Madison get back together and break up again?”
“Word. You know he’s in the throes of some girl shit,” snickered Tim. “Emotional ass Eric.”
“Yeah! Drake ass Eric.”
“Taylor Swift ass mothafucka.”
Eric closed his eyes. Why did I come here?
“But real talk?” Thuong passed the vaporizer to Eric. “Tim, you only deal with hoes, and I might be DM-ing a fat dude right now. So maybe we’d get emotional, too if we had one of E’s girls. You know, ballerinas like Madison.”
“Hoes?” Tim was offended.
“You know you’re about that hoe life. Own it. It’s like E always says…” Thuong, who was totally high, drew a blank. “What do you always say, E?”
“The truth shall set you free,” said Eric.
“Do not upset me when I’m hungry! First of all, they’re not hoes. They’re charming young ladies with hoeish tendencies. Secondly, I don’t seek them out; it’s just that I have commitment issues and I’m not ready for women of substance. I banish you from this room,” said Tim, standing up. He punched Thuong in the ribs.
“This was my room when you were in college,” said Thuong, who also stood up. At six feet tall, the oversized eighth grader looked like the Jolly Green Giant next to Tim. When he punched him in the stomach, Tim toppled to the ground. They started rolling around on the floor. Eric, who’d witnessed this scene three zillion times, sat unmoved in his director’s chair, his thoughts drowning out their foolishness.
If Madison hadn’t stayed in L.A. to join the Cornerstone Theater Company, they’d still be together. She was just his type; a delicate beauty who believed herself to be sexually prissy until Eric helped her realize she was well past filthy. He was easily able to pierce through her shyness (on their first date, she broke down while rehashing middle school melodramas, greatly upsetting their Benihana’s server), but her complaint about Eric was that he was unreachable. He rarely lost his cool.
And yet, after knowing Jenna Jones for two seconds, he confessed to The Lisp. He’d said the Cadbury eggs thing. All his goofy came tumbling out. She was overwhelming! The way she’d looked at him, with that bare-naked, almost-intimidating lust—she was all want. Adult, full-bodied want, without a hint of the coyness of girls his age. No girl had ever told him to kiss her. And when he did, her reaction hit him like a body-slam. She went completely liquid under him, clutching him like she was drowning. Like she’d waited years for that kiss. She played the seductress, but was as vulnerable as a virgin.
And the combination was heady as hell.
Today, in Jenna’s office, he pretended that he’d been drunker than he was. He faked like it was a throwaway hookup. It wasn’t. In that moment, he would’ve done anything she wanted. No matter how pornographic or depraved. In public. And without even knowing her name.
But after experiencing her evil twin, he was seized with a barrage of questions: Why did Jenna have to be his mother’s old rival? And how was she almost twice his age? And why, why, did she have to be so nuts?
But Eric’s kryptonite had always been unreasonable, dramatic women. After all, he was raised by one.
When he was very little, Eric worshipped Darcy. She was like an enigmatic older sister who’d breeze in for a couple of days with age-inappropriate gifts (who gives a toddler a leather flask?) and heavily perfumed kisses, but then disappear for endless stretches. Weeks. Months. It was hard lesson for Eric, craving the mother’s milk that should’ve been his right as a human, but getting it purely at random. As an older kid, he turned it off for good.
At sixteen, Darcy Vale was a brilliant, sexually curious daughter of a policeman and his silent wife from Guyana. She lived with her conservative, fanatically Seventh Day Adventist family in a three-family brownstone in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, just two blocks from Gentry Houses—the housing project that was home to twenty-five-year-old Otis Combs and his mother. Everyone knew Otis; he was the kind-hearted, sleepy-eyed drummer who never made it, but should have (the “never made it” was due to a debilitating whiskey addiction, not lack of talent).
Sick of being a virgin, Darcy met the sweet lothario while smoking cigarettes outside of a bodega one night after student council. They shared a bottle of Jim Beam, tumbled into a pile of golden leaves in Stuyvesant Park, and fifteen minutes later, Bishop Loughlin High School’s debate team captain was pregnant.
Luther Vale immediately disowned his daughter. Humiliated by the scandal, he sold the brownstone and moved the family to Bayonne, New Jersey. They never spoke to Darcy again—or saw Eric. At sixteen, Darcy Vale was a single mother on her own. Lost. But Darcy was a hustler, a force of nature born with one raging hunger—to conquer the world. She wasn’t lost for long. She loved her little boy, but she had high school to finish, college scholarships to score, hyper-competitive magazine jobs to land, cocktail parties to attend, and rappers and/or Wall Streeters to squeeze rent money from. So, Darcy left the raising of Eric to Otis’s mom, and then went about the business of assuaging her seething ambition.
Eric barely remembered Darcy ever discussing his dad when he was little, except to drill the message into his head that he wasn’t allowed to grow up to be a loser like Otis Combs.
“Your last name is Combs,” said Darcy, a freezing morning after a rare night that Eric slept at her tiny studio instead of at Gentry Houses. In a rush, she was walking-dragging her seven-year-old son to school so she could make it to the Mademoiselle offices before the rest of the staff. She had to toast the accessories editor’s bagel perfectly—at 47 seconds—color-coordinate the bracelet drawer, and write the editor-in-chief’s “letter from the editor”—all before 9:00 am.
“I know my last name, Mommy,” he said, sighing up at her with half exasperation, half cautious pleasure. He hadn’t seen her in three weeks, but last night she’d picked her up from his grandma’s apartment bearing an assortment of random objects: Hawaiian bread rolls (his favorite), and an authentic ninja sword from his new uncle, a Saudi Arabian wrestler named The Sheik of Tears who was also, as he’d explained to Eric, a real-life genie.
“Your last name’s Combs,” continued Darcy, “but you’re all Vale, do you understand me?”
Darcy halted in the middle of the crowded sidewalk. She squatted down so she was face to face with Eric, a too-intense boy who inherited his father’s Trinidadian cheekbones and exotic, inky-black eyes. “You won’t grow up and bring shame to the Vale family, got it?”
Eric nodded. What Vale family?
“Otis can’t get off his mother’s couch to play a $40 gig. He’s nothing,” she whispered.
“You’re not him, baby. You’re me. We win.”
“I love my daddy,” Eric said, confused and horrified. But Darcy had already stood back up and grabbed his hand, rushing them down Nostrand. He kept chanting it, even though he knew she couldn’t hear. “I love my daddy,” he choked, tears burning down his icy cheeks.
Eric didn’t need to be lectured about Otis’ failures. He knew that his dad—with his dreamy, drunken impotence—wasn’t like the fantasy dads in Pixar movies. But he loved Otis, because he was there. He taught him how to make homemade curry sauce and draw perfect human toes. He drilled him on the history of 1930s blues. He hung out on the playground with him all weekend. He gave him remedial breakdancing lessons. He showed him the value in being kind to people when it didn’t benefit you in the slightest. He gave a damn.
But None of that mattered, because Otis was randomly shot and killed in a Halsey Street bodega when Eric was ten. And then Darcy hauled him off to live in Manhattan. She was due to relocate, anyway.
Like clockwork, Darcy moved every two years, committed to upgrading her life. First, she went to more gentrified blocks in Brooklyn, then she swept Eric off to Soho, then Meatpacking and then, once she married the world’s shadiest financier, Luca Belladonna, they landed in a Tribeca penthouse. Eric had felt schizophrenic when he first arrived at Dalton Lower School. Was he a project kid or a louche preppie? The first time a Dalton kid asked where he was from, he flinched and raised his little fists. Back in his section of Brooklyn, if someone asked you that, it’s because you’d wandered in the wrong neighborhood—and it was the last thing you heard before you were robbed or jumped.
But after awhile, Eric pushed the memory of his early years into some dark corner, a locked closet where he couldn’t feel the howling loss of Otis—and he ran toward becoming something new.
By high school, he knew who he was. He was class president of the High School of Art and Design. A sixteen-year-old who tore through his AP homework and edited his boy’s amateur rap video (“You Said There’d Be Sex (Tonight)”), before prowling the city with the kids of tabloid stars and media moguls. He was the kid of a media mogul. He was also, to his delight, the Homecoming date of Vanessa Williams’ cutest daughter.
Some things never changed, though. Darcy was still an erratic mirage of a mother, perpetually working, traveling or partying, leaving Eric alone with an empty refrigerator and a credit card. She only paid attention to him to trot him out to charity events or awkward, staged mother/son photo ops—or to berate him for putting chinks in her hard-won social armor (that bow-legged tramp’s dad works at a T-Mobile store, kill it immediately, how will she make me look? Wait, you’re applying to public high school, you ungrateful shit, after I’ve slaved to give you this life? If you knew what I did to get you into Dalton you’d wet your fucking bed).
Eric had no family. But he had that innate (yes, undeniably Vale) I-must-win thing that kept him focused when it would’ve been easier to take the route of every other rich, ignored Manhattan teen—and overdose on blow while balls-deep inside a call girl. And when he felt lost, he’d escape to the frenetic Milagro-Carroll house and stay for a week. The perfect escape from Darcy’s chilly, empty, penthouse of doom.
But now he was a grown man, and right back there. He was too broke to move out, and too proud to allow Darcy to buy him a place. Staying up all night packaging his movie to meet the submission guidelines for every film festival on Earth. Spending cash he didn’t have on insane entry fees. Praying that a festival would notice him, so that he could find investors to finance a full-length feature, or an agent to land him work in TV or docs or music videos or porn or anywhere. Wishing that he’d been good at something else, like math, so he could be a trader and live an artless-yet-secure life with bonuses and hooker-decorated parties.
And now he was stuck in an office with a woman who wanted to have him fired for being a good kisser. Obviously, he’d made things worse by teasing Jenna, but he couldn’t resist. Watching her squirm and blush behind that desk, knowing that it was because she was thinking of him? It was too sexy. He’d have to stop, though, because if CupcakeGate proved anything, he was driving an already twitchy woman out of her damned mind.
All Eric wanted to do was stay out of trouble, save every cent of his paycheck, and get out of StyleZine. He was desperate for his life to start.
Jenna Jones hates me because she wants me and it freaks her out, he thought to himself. He had to show her he was trustworthy.
Abruptly, Eric shot out of his chair.
“I’m out. I gotta go.” He was out the door before either brother had time to get up.
Thuong looked down at Tim, who he had pinned in a headlock.
“Yeah,” nodded Tim. “It’s definitely about a bitch.”
CHAPTER 6
I was a spaz, Jenna thought, for the zillionth time that morning. Eric made me look like a fool over that cupcake because I was a spaz, and now I have to face him in an hour. Shonda Rhimes couldn’t even write me out of this plot.
Jenna was barely awake. She’d had a total of three hours of sleep, obsessing over her StyleZine situation. Luckily, she’d taken the morning off to serve on the jury for the Fashion Institute of Technology’s senior collections prelims. It was being held in a massive white box of a loft space on 25th and 10th Avenue, which was filled with thirty rolling racks, each manned by an overwhelmed-looking design student—and peppered with jurors wandering around surveying the projects. The room was lined with floor-to-ceiling windows, allowing white-hot streams of sunlight to flood the space, so the poor kids were not only struggling to explain their prohibitively ethereal collections to their style industry elders, they were blinking blindly into the sun. Oddly, they almost all had Buddy Holly glasses and lavender hair.
Sighing, Jenna approached a rolling rack filled with extravagantly repurposed vintage white and cream nightgowns in silks, satins, and crushed velvets. The designer, a chubby strawberry blonde with hair styled like Rita Hayworth’s, bit her bottom lip.
“Hi, Ms. Jones,” she said in a fluttery voice.
“Hi! Well, these are lovely. I love how you combined ‘30s bias cut shapes with flouncy ‘60s silhouettes.”
“Thank you,” she whispered. “I guess I really like…the vulnerability and sensuality of undergarments…worn on the outside. You know, the duality of being a powerful woman, but…I don’t know, wearing these delicate, flimsy fabrics as armor. I guess?” Jenna smiled. She recognized her beloved students from Northern Virginia Community College in this girl. Bursting with ideas and compelled to express them, but at the same time, worried that their every thought was garbage. This was what she loved so much about mentoring, being able to lead them through the process, helping them refine their ideas and trust their instincts.
“I’d suggest that you push yourself, though. Play with shapes that might be a bit more unexpected. You know, because we’ve seen this look before. You were clearly influenced by the Riot Grrrls from the early 90’s.”
“Riot what?”
Jenna looked at her. “Courtney Love? Hole? Babes in Toyland? The whole ‘kinderwhore’ style movement, with the slips and Mary Janes?”
I am a thousand years old.
She tucked her clipboard under her arm. “Lesley, so much of fashion is understanding where the influences lie. You should watch Courtney Love’s videos for “Doll Parts” and “Violet.” Also, find Baby Doll on Netflix. It’s a 1962 film about a childlike seventeen-year-old who lives with this shady older man, who makes her sleep in a crib and wear these exquisite little girl nightgowns until she’s of age and he can marry her. It’s totally sick and genius, and you’ll be inspired by the costuming. After that, rethink your direction a bit, okay?”
“Yes…I will…I really will. Thank you.”
The grateful expression on the designer’s face made her morning. And then she remembered the situation awaiting her in the office.
So, she gave Lesley a hug and headed to the refreshments table�
��where she stalled like crazy, grazing on crudité and sipping Bellinis for the next forty-five minutes.
Jenna was standing in the tiny kitchenette by the cubicles, chugging her second cup of black coffee (she’d had one too many bellinis). Just back from FIT, she’d intended to get a quick shot of caffeine before getting back to work. It was Tuesday. She and Eric were supposed to have a rough cut of their first video to Darcy by end-of-day tomorrow and, due to brain-freezing stress, every idea she came up with was uninspired and unusable. She had to have something prepared in the next hour—plus, she needed to psyche herself up before seeing Eric again.
As she gulped down the second cup, Terry and the assistant market editor, Jinx, swept into the tiny enclave, all hectic energy. Terry was swiping away on her phone, while Jinx, a perpetually frantic Persian-American beauty, was pulling a rolling rack of outfits behind her.
They completely ignored Jenna’s presence.
“…and I’ve done the “where to buy” info for our five outfits of the day, but my headlines are so blah,” said Terry, a vision in designer sweatpants and Supra high-tops. Every morning Mitchell, the photo editor, sent her pics of cool-looking girls that he’d curated from all over the world, and she captioned them.
“Let me see,” said Jinx, dry-swallowing a diet pill. Her dark, voluptuous beauty was lost on her. She wanted to be a basic white girl. She longed for suburban blonde highlights, loved seasonally-flavored coffee and wore celebrity perfumes. She looked like a mysterious, dark-eyed enchantress—but on the inside, she was Lauren Conrad.
Terry shoved her phone in Jinx’s face. “Look at the pic. She has blood-red lips, cowboy boots and a white-collared black dress. I called it ‘Daytime Goth,’ but that sucks. Darcy said my captions sound like they were written by someone on the spectrum.”
“‘Bleak Chic?’ I don’t know, I can’t concentrate!” wailed Jinx. “I’m on deadline and these pills give me tremors. I have to lose five pounds by Thursday so I can wear a crop top to Le Bain without the gays shading me!”
