Elise put her seat belt on.
Iris turned up the stereo to deafening volumes as she peeled out of the alley. As they headed down Mission Boulevard, Elise noticed Megan checking herself out in the rearview mirror as she propped an elbow on the window’s edge.
“So, how was Max’s last night?” Iris yelled over the music.
“Great! Things are going awesome with him.”
“Really? Did you guys have sex?” Megan asked as she spun around.
Elise smiled.
“You did!”
“Hey,” Elise said. “Carly’s here.” She was so happy to recognize the black Jetta that she was tempted to ask them to drop her in front of Starbuck’s while they circled the parking spot for a space. She could not wait to share what had happened the night before.
As soon as they entered the coffee shop, Elise’s eyes scanned the place for Carly. She spotted her blonde bob in the corner. She didn’t see Elise, and Elise couldn’t tell over the crowd who Carly was sitting with. “Will you guys order me a café mocha?” she said as she handed them a five. “I want to go say hi to Carly real quick.”
As she headed closer it became evident that she was with a guy. She could see the back of a San Diego Padres baseball cap. Perhaps it was her gay neighbor that she sometimes went out with. She felt a surge of envy and confusion again as to why she wouldn’t include her. It was like she didn’t even care that she had moved back to San Diego. But maybe it was someone from work. They were going over stuff for her project. She quickly stopped when she noticed the way Carly was laughing, no, actually glowing when she giggled at something the guy had said. This was no gay guy, and if it was a colleague she apparently had the hots for him because she leaned across the table and kissed him quickly on the lips. Now she was really hurt. Why didn’t she know about this? She was the first person Elise had called this morning after her evening with Max. Was this guy married?
Her eyes left her lover’s face and the bright look of love quickly vanished when she saw Elise. Not only did it vanish, but sheer terror flashed across her eyes. Elise waved, and as she did so, Carly’s companion looked over his shoulder.
“Stan?” she said it so loud that the entire coffee shop shot her a look. “And Carly?” This was even louder. “What? How . . . Why? Oh my God!” It all made sense now. Everything. Her best friend had been shagging her brother. They had both been lying to her. There was no project. There was a secret love affair going on between two people that she considered family. She could feel the entire establishment watching them but hardly noticed when Megan came up behind her, holding her mocha. “Here is your coffee, Elise,” she said quietly before turning her gaze to Stan and Carly, who were just as speechless as Elise.
“Thank you,” she said without taking her gaze away from them. “This is . . . I can’t . . . I’ve gotta get out of here. Now!”
“Elise, wait,” her brother said. But she was already racing from the café. Megan and Iris trailed behind her. She quickly hopped in the backseat of the Saturn. “Wow,” Megan said as she slid behind the wheel. “Your brother is screwing Carly!”
Elise wanted to tell her to pay attention the road.
“Look!” she shouted as the car reversed from its space. “There they are. They’re looking for you.”
Elise watched as Stan and Carly searched the lot for them. From the corner of her eyes, she noticed a black pickup truck rounding the corner right next to them. “Megan, watch where you’re—”
The Saturn nailed the truck so quickly that it felt like a rubber band snapping. “Good going,” Iris said to her sister. “You’ve crashed the Saturn.”
23. Reckless Dialing
Lucky for Iris and Megan, there was little damage to the pickup truck. However, the Saturn was another story. The back bumper was crunched beyond recognition, and the trunk wouldn’t open. The accident was bad news for Elise, too, because when they slid back into the car after surveying the damage Iris moaned, “What are we going to do? Nicole is coming back in a month.”
That meant Elise had to move again soon, and she still didn’t have a roommate lined up. But she couldn’t even think about that. All she could think about was Stan and Carly—the liars.
Stan was waiting outside her front door for her when she returned to her apartment. “Can I please come in and talk to you?” he asked.
Iris and Megan watched the two of them with a flicker of glee in their eyes. She couldn’t blame them. This was far more interesting than any of their fights over the car. She wondered if she had watched the two of them with the same look in her eyes. For once, she was the one fighting with a sibling.
“Come in,” she said to Stan.
He followed her up the stairs, and when they reached the top they both stood staring at one another. It was the first time she had ever seen her brother look frightened. “Look,” he said, then stopped. “I . . .” He stopped again.
“Where is Carly?”
“I told her not to come with me.”
Elise folded her arms over her chest. “Why?”
“Because I just wanted to talk to you myself first.”
She sat on her bed and pulled Bella into her lap. Scrubbles hopped on the mattress and began to purr. He stepped on her purse as he climbed closer to Elise. She didn’t mind that his little feet were walking over her bag. She was too pissed to care. It was strange, listening to a purring cat when she felt like she could explode at any given moment.
“Why didn’t you guys tell me? I have felt like neither one of you have wanted to be around me all summer. I’ve felt like I’ve had no friends.”
“I am so sorry. Really, I am. I just . . . we just didn’t know what was going to happen with us. It started out as a drunken fling that night at Winston’s. And we figured, what was the point in telling you when it was just one of those things that would never happen again? But then it turned into something more, and by that time it had all snowballed. Every time I saw you I wanted to tell you, but it just became harder and harder.”
“Look, I’m really pissed. And I have to be honest with you. I don’t think I’ll get over it any time soon. So you guys are just going to have to leave me alone for a while.”
“You’re so ridiculous.” He became angry. “How is this any different from you hiding Max from our family?”
“It’s very different.”
“No. It’s worse, actually. Because you’re ashamed.”
“And what? You weren’t ashamed to tell me about Carly?”
“No. I wasn’t. I didn’t want to tell you because if things didn’t work out with us, I didn’t want it to put a strain on your friendship with her. But you . . . you won’t introduce Max to our parents because you’re ashamed that he isn’t some freaking CEO of some Fortune 500 company. You lied and said he was my friend the day they came over. You are afraid of what they’ll say about his tattoos.”
She didn’t know what bugged her more. The fact that he had a point—She had lied, and for the past two and half months she had been having the time of her life with Max and hadn’t once mentioned that she was dating him to her parents or sister. However, he was twisting this all around on her. This wasn’t about Max and her. This was about the fact that her brother had been sleeping with her best friend behind her back. It was weird, and she felt deceived. “You know what? Just go home. I don’t want you here anymore.”
“All right. Fine,” he said as he headed for the front door.
As soon as he was gone, she went to her cell phone. She wanted to call her sister to see if she had known anything about this. When she fished her phone from her bag, she felt the color drain from her face. When Scrubbles had stepped all over purse he had stepped on her cell phone and dialed someone. She picked up the receiver, praying her mother wasn’t waiting on the other end.
“Hello?” she said with a twinge of fear and emergency in her voice.
Dead air answered her, and she wondered if she was speaking into someone’s voice mail. Ho
w much of their conversation had this person heard? Would her parents come home from the country club and find out everything about their kids’ love lives? Frankly, she didn’t care at this point. It’s not as if they were porn stars. She had found someone she liked, and it was about time they found out.
She scrolled to her dialed calls box, praying the whole time it was one of her friends from Arizona that she’d called, or perhaps even Justine. She felt a surge of something worse than adrenaline when she looked at whom she had dialed. Her worst fear was confirmed when she realized who it was. It was not her mother. It was Max.
How her life had gone from pure bliss to utter hell in one morning was a total myth to her. Just a few hours earlier she had been sitting in her underwear eating eggs and bacon with the love of her life, and now she was trying to figure out if he would ever speak to her again. She prayed that by some miracle their voices had been muffled and he hadn’t heard, but she had a bad feeling. If his voice mail picked up, there was the slight possibility she could intercept him before he heard anything.
She could always call him and tell him to just disregard her previous message. But then what if that piqued his curiosity and drove him to listen to every single word they had spoken. She needed to see him remove the message in her presence. She grabbed her purse and headed for Maxes Axes.
She’d never felt more anguish in her life as she sped into North Park. She parked directly in front of his shop and could see him behind the counter inside. Maggie lay in a beam of sunlight in front of the door when she entered. “Hi,” she said. He took his eyes away from a mustard-colored Les Paul and looked up at her. It was hard to read him.
“I, uh. You said to just come on by, and so here I am. Um, I think I may have left you a message earlier that you can just disregard.”
“I got your message.” He stared at her. She felt her stomach turn, and she thought she might actually barf on his carpet.
“The one with Stan and I sorting out some—”
“The one about your parents and all that.”
“Look. I really wish you hadn’t heard any of that. Stan was angry, and he said a bunch of things that just aren’t—”
“You know, I’m probably not the right guy for you. Not that I could see you with that Yackrell dipshit, but I just want a girl who wants me back. Not someone who has a bunch of issues about my tattoos.” His voice was growing colder. “I have never in all my life had anyone be ashamed of me because of that, and I’m not going to start now.”
“You shouldn’t start now. I’m not ashamed of you. I swear. I’m in lo—”
The front door swung open, and a bald guy wearing makeup and a fedora came in holding a guitar case. Max acknowledged the rocker, then turned to Elise. “Look, I can’t talk right now. I’ve got work to do. These guys have a show tonight.”
She wanted to tell him to say they’d clear everything up later, that he’d call her. Instead he shook his friend’s hand. She turned and left, crying the whole way home.
24. Monster Situation
A week went by, and he didn’t call. She called him endlessly, apologizing, but he didn’t pick up or return her phone calls. She grew more miserable with each passing day and eventually quit hounding him. Stan and Carly had both called her relentlessly. They’d even tried to stop by a couple times, but she had made Megan and Iris lie and say she was walking Bella.
She had no desire to speak with Carly or Stan or even her agent, for that matter. Even if her agent called with a million-dollar film deal, her heart would still be broken. Iris and Megan played the Ryan Adams Heartbreaker CD when they had friends over one night, and she had to leave to take Bella for a walk. She ended up sitting on the boardwalk with her dog, watching the sunset and thinking of the last time she had woken up next to Max, the way his chin was dark with whiskers from not shaving. She didn’t think she’d ever be able to look at another guitar or even listen to the mention of horse races without feeling pain in her chest.
It was clear—he was over her. Who could blame him? She tried to put herself in his shoes and had realized that she would probably be just as hurt and angry. He’d been around the world and back, and he didn’t need this kind of crap in his life. At times she wanted to excommunicate her brother for the rest of her life for dragging Max into their argument. But it was her own stupid fault. If she hadn’t cared so much about what her parents thought, she wouldn’t be in this situation.
She only had a few weeks with Iris and Megan, and then she had to start looking for a roommate, depressed or not. She scoured the ads, called people, and typically reached the same frustrating conclusion she had come to every time she had searched for a roommate. She finally saw one ad that surprisingly took pets and had affordable rent in a desirable location.
Beachfront Property in upper Pacific Beach. Looking for a female roommate. 2 huge rooms, each with own bath. Two parking spaces and plenty of storage space. Pets ok.
When she’d talked to Delores on the phone she seemed to have a good sense of humor, which was good, because Elise hadn’t seen humor in anything ever since Max had written her out of his life. They scheduled a meeting for the following day.
She followed Delores’s directions the next day, and was torn between sadness and joy to see that Carly just lived a few blocks over. Seeing Carly’s neighborhood made her miss her best friend.
She pulled up to a little house with white stucco walls and a red roof. The lawn was overgrown by several inches, and a small pile of cat litter stood in the middle of the driveway. So it needed a little TLC, but it was better than any other living situation she’d had since she’d returned to San Diego.
She kept an open mind as she walked up the driveway. A few weeds brushed over her calves as she continued down a path to the front door.
She searched for a doorbell and found an older model one. The tip of it was stuck at an awkward angle inside a little hole, as if the last person to ring it had pressed too hard. She tried dislodging it with her finger but frustratingly came within a hair of touching it. She knocked. No response. She banged and felt the side of her hand sting the harder she pounded. Still, no response.
She rummaged through her purse for something small to stick in the hole—the tip of a pen, perhaps tweezers. Just a week ago she’d seen both of these items in her bag, but now they were gone. She decided to try to squeeze her car key into the doorbell hole. But instead of producing a ring, small shards of glass shattered from the cavity. She hadn’t realized the doorbell was made of glass. She stared at the opening of the hole, trying to figure out ways she could fix it so Delores wouldn’t notice. How was she going to explain this? She hadn’t even met Delores Ditson and had already broken something.
It occurred to her that doorbells had live electricity running through them. If she stuck her pinky too far in there, she could shock the hell out of herself and die on the doorstep before she even saw the inside of the house. Then she’d never be able to live in Pacific Beach.
She debated turning around, running to her car, and forgetting that she’d ever come across Delores’s listing. But then she remembered her only other option at the moment was staying with her parents, which could land her a permanent residence at a mental institution. She felt the cool caress of an ocean breeze and the sound of seagulls cawing overhead, and she decided explaining the doorbell would be worth it. She could always just say it was already broken when she got here, act as if she were doing Delores a favor by informing her.
She was about to yell for Delores when what sounded like a tank approached the driveway. Covering her ears, she spun around. Over the weeds she saw a black truck that looked as if it had driven directly from a monster truck rally. Each wheel alone was bigger than Elise’s Volkswagen. The frame of the truck rested atop the massive tires like a little matchbox car. She imagined it in a monster truck rally commercial, tossing up mud and squashing Cadillacs like they were ants.
She waited for a guy with a mullet and a muscle shirt to pop ou
t. Instead, a petite, muscular brunette with hair curlier than Little Orphan Annie jumped from the driver’s seat. She wore a miniskirt with a button-down pinstriped top and platform shoes with the thickest square heels Elise had ever seen. Even in her five-inch block shoes Elise was still taller.
“Are you Elise?” she said as she walked up the path.
“Yes. I am.”
“Right on. I’m Delores. Sorry I’m late. I’m selling Kirby vacuum cleaners, door to door. I just got the job, and man, does it suck! But you’ll never believe what just happened to me. Come check this out.”
Elise followed her back to the truck.
“Just now when I was on the freeway, this dry cleaning delivery van was passing me, and somethin’ must’ve been loose on his trailer because a small part of his bumper flew off and hit my truck.” Strangely, she sounded very excited when she explained this to Elise. “Look. Right here.” She was smiling as she pointed out the tiniest, faintest dent in the history of automobile collisions. It was smaller than a door ding, and Elise had to squint to see it.
“I can hardly see it,” Elise said.
“Uh, are you kidding me? I can!”
Elise shook her head. She wasn’t kidding. However, she was visibly aware of the gigantic lettering on the back window on the extra cab on her truck. “Move Over, Princess. The Queen Has Arrived.” was airbrushed on the glass. Not even a bumper sticker. Airbrushed. Each letter was painted in a sunset of pink, beginning from the top in hot pink and fading to light pink toward the bottom.
“Anyway,” Delores said. “I wrote down the number of the dry cleaners, called them right away on my cell phone, and told them I’d been hit by something off their tailgate. They told me to get an estimate and they’d cover it.” She grinned again. “And guess what?”
“What?”
“My boyfriend happens to work at an auto body repair shop, so we’re going to estimate the damage to be worth about three grand.” She shrugged. “Value Dry Cleaners will never check.”
Roommates Page 27
