booksBnimble Publishing
New Orleans, La.
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Phone Kitten
Copyright 2010 by Marika Christian
All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoevfer without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Cover by Nevada Barr
Enhanced ePub ISBN: 978-1-6175051-5-7
ePub ISBN: 978-1-6175051-4-0
Mobi ISBN: 978-0-9829997-3-8
First booksBnimble Publishing electronic publication: October 2010
Digital Editions produced by: booknook.biz.and eBooks by Barb
Interior design by Rickhardt Capidamonte for BookNook.biz.
For Julie Smith and Mom and Dad
Thank you for always giving me the guidance and the freedom I needed to pursue a dream, for your patience—especially when I didn't deserve it, your kindness, love and most of all for your faith. You believed in me and my writing when I wasn't so sure… I will always be grateful.
Phone Kitten
by
Marika Christian
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Movie
Acknowledgements
Chapter One
I’m invisible, even though I’m as big as a car. Not an Explorer, or a Tahoe, more of a cute little Mini Cooper, maybe a Miata even, but a car just the same.
I know it seems impossible, but it’s true. When no one wants to see you and when you don’t want to be seen, being invisible is an easy thing to be. I’ve made a career out of being unseen. Before I got my job as a copy clerk at the St. Pete Times, I made a career of working for a temp agency. No one ever sees a temp. If you combined my temporary job with a forgettable wardrobe and a very forgettable face, invisibility was guaranteed.
My name is Emily Winters and never has there been a more invisible name. Winter is the bleakest time of year, even in Florida. No one likes hanging out on the beach on a fifty degree day. Let’s not forget Emily Dickinson, who penned ‘I’m nobody! Who are you?’ That line could serve as the opening sentence of the story of my life. Emily D. started the trend in what I believe is probably a long line of invisible Emilys. No one calls me by my real name. Most people call me Em at my insistence. Why do I insist? Because most people think my name is Emma and I get tired of correcting them, only to have them call me Emma, again. And again, and again.
I blame that snotty looking twig Gwynnie Paltrow and that movie. Emma put Gwynnie on the map and ensured that no one would ever remember my name again. Don’t get me wrong, I love Jane Austen, but I’ve always been more of a Sense and Sensibility / Kate Winslet sorta gal. After all, Kate Winslet is the chubby girl’s best friend, all soft and curvy with no bones sticking out anywhere. I can always identify with Kate. I know that Kate is nothing like Gwynnie, just by looking at her. Kate could snap bony little Gwynnie in two, and I like that. I don’t hate Gwynnie just because of the movie or because she is a snotty-looking twig. I have a real reason to hate Gwynnie. She got me fired, although she did have a little help from one of my friends.
Michael Girard is the managing editor of the St. Petersburg Times, and walking into his office made me quake. I was tired of being invisible. I was actually doing something about my dreary, boring life, and I wanted to be seen. Why not start at the top? I wore a pair of khaki pants and a flowered gypsy blouse that made me feel pretty. I’d curled my hair and worn it down, forgoing the ponytail I usually wore. I carried a manila folder and inside I had things I’d written. Today was going to be my day.
I sat down in front of him and cleared my throat, trying to find my voice. The last thing I wanted was to sound like a mouse. “Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Girard.”
He closed the day planner in front of him and gave me a half smile. “No problem, Emma. What’s on your mind?”
I swallowed hard. Correcting the boss is never a good way to start a conversation, especially when you want something, but it had to be done. “Emily, sir.”
“What?”
“My name is Emily, not Emma.” I cringed when I said it. I sounded so squeaky.
“Emily. Of course.” Then he smiled at me again.
“Mr. Girard, I’ve worked at the paper for ten months now. I’ve wanted to work at the St. Pete Times since I was a little girl, so getting my foot in the door is like a dream come true. I love it here.”
Oh GOD! I was babbling, and I couldn’t shut up!
“Anyway sir, I’ve been writing, because that’s what I always wanted to do. I’ve been making changes in my life. I know you never see me, but I’ve lost thirty pounds, and I thought that maybe, well, maybe in the Lifestyle section, I could write a few things about my diet and the things I’m doing. I’d do a good job and maybe give a fresh perspective as someone who’s been…”
Oh great, how do I say it? How do I call myself FAT in front of my boss?
I caught my breath. “Chubby. Someone who has been chubby all her life. I wrote a few things.” I slid the folder across the desk. “I thought maybe you could look at them. The piece on the top is about my first day with my personal trainer, Dennis.”
He picked up the paper and my heart began pounding. I knew it was good. One of my best friends, Dani, a columnist at the paper, had read it and loved it. She advised me to get a few more things written, so I had more to show Mike, but this one about my first training experience with Dennis was the best.
I was pleased with myself until I noticed that I was the only one smiling. In fact, Mike Girard was staring at me, and he was not smiling at all. He was frowning in a very big way.
“Emma, what is this?”
“It’s a little essay I wrote, like a column. I wrote it about training with my friend Dennis. You see…”
Before I finished, he cut me off. “I’ve already read this, Emma. Daniella Pierce wrote this; she turned it in last week. It’s running in tomorrow’s edition.”
What? Dani? I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. She couldn’t have! She wouldn’t do this to me.
“No sir, that can’t be. I wrote that. It’s about me.”
He held up his hand, waving at me to stop. He punched the buttons on his office phone and asked Dani to join us.
She appeared a few moments later, smiling at Mike and me with perfectly glossed lips. Everything about Dani was perfect. She was wearing a black skirt with a purple shirt. Her hair was freshl
y highlighted and flipped in slow motion just like in a shampoo commercial when she tossed her head to the side. Next to her, I was positively frumpy in my flowered peasant shirt.
Mike gestured at the chair beside me. When Dani sat down, her skirt rose a bit to expose even more of her perfectly tanned legs, and when she smiled and asked what was going on, I felt myself begin to fade.
He dropped the papers in front of her. “Emma is telling me that she wrote this.”
Dani scanned the pages, looked at me, and for a moment I thought she was going to tell the truth, that she was going to apologize. She smiled and my stomach sank further, right down to my shoes.
Her smile told me everything that was going to happen next.
“I’m sure Em did write this. I let her read my piece before I submitted it. Obviously she mirrored a lot of what I wrote. I know she’s been dieting and had just started going to the gym. I thought she’d get a kick out of it.” She looked at me, feigning shock. “Em, why would you do this? I said I’d help you with your writing. Why did you steal from me? So much of what you wrote is word for word from my piece.” She looked at Mike as if to apologize. “Em and I are friends. I’ve been encouraging her to find her own voice. I never dreamed she’d do something like this.”
Mike’s eyes were cutting into me. “Emma, I really don’t know what you’re up to, but plagiarism is not something we hold in high regard here.”
I felt like there was steam coming off my cheeks, and I screamed like one of those Pterodactyls in dinosaur movies. I was louder than I’d planned to be. “No! I didn’t plagiarize anything! I wrote this! I showed it to her to see if she liked it! She stole it! I wrote this, I swear!”
When he stood up, his voice matched mine, only it was more menacing. “Emma, I’m going to give you a second chance. Go back to your desk, get back to work, and don’t ever use that tone in this office again.”
I could feel the tears in my eyes. “But…”
Before I could finish, Dani looked at me and sighed. “Really, Em, what were you trying to do? I mean who looks like they work out with a trainer, me…—” I could feel her eyes scanning every inch of my chubby body—“or you?”
Mike sighed. “Emma…”
And then somewhere deep inside, something snapped. I could actually feel it when it happened. I knew that no good was going to come from what happened next, but I was powerless to stop it.
“MY NAME IS NOT EMMA! I TOLD YOU MY NAME IS EMILY! I’ve been sitting outside your office for ten months! I sort your mail! I file your reports! I pass out your memos and my name is EMILY!”
I watched as he dialed yet another extension on the phone, but it didn’t stop me. I was on a roll, and apparently I had a lot to say. I wasn’t going to shut up, no matter how much I wanted to. Dani was staring at me slack-jawed, and that just seemed to encourage me. “I wrote this! I wrote every word of this! ME! EMILY! EMILY wrote this, and SHE took it from me! She read it and then she stole it!” People on the newsroom floor were staring at the three of us. Dani was slowly sinking into the chair.
Mike looked as angry as I felt, and, even as the security guard grabbed my arm, I still screamed, “MY NAME IS EMILY!”
For the first time in the ten months I’d been working there, Mike Girard, the man who held the keys to my future, noticed me. For the first time, he really saw me, and I was being dragged from his office kicking and screaming by not one, but two security guards. In fact, everyone was staring, and I knew that “how that girl Emily freaked out and got fired” was going to be the topic of debate and conjecture for days to come. Of course, they’d get my name right then.
It occurred to me that maybe just one more day of invisibility wouldn’t have been such a bad thing.
“Dragged out by security guards?” Dennis shook his head, chuckling with approval. “That is so cool. Although I never expected something like that from you. A full throttle freak-out from my Emmie. I’m proud.” I’d called Dennis immediately after the “incident” and he was more than willing to meet me for lunch.
“‘Cool’ is not how I would describe it.”
“I don’t know why you ever trusted that bitch.” Dennis shoved another bite of hamburger into his mouth.
“I can’t believe she did it. Dennis, we were friends.”
He rolled his eyes. “You weren’t friends. She ripped you off! Friends don’t do that. In fact, she did a lot of things to convince me that you weren’t friends. You just didn’t want to see them.” He pointed his burger at me. “Come on, Daniella Pierce? What kind of name is that? She’s got a puppy skin coat in her closet. I know she does.”
Dennis Barron moved to Florida from Alabama when he was twelve. The first memory I have of him is watching him punch Timothy Driscoll so hard it made Timothy cry. Apparently, Timothy, who was an ass even at twelve, especially at twelve, had made fun of Dennis’s deep southern accent. Having been on the receiving end of the Driscoll treatment on countless occasions, I was delighted to see him get his lights punched out. The day Timothy got a black eye, Dennis got suspended for three days, and I got a best friend.
In a word, Dennis is menacing. His hair is dark and shaved short like a Marine’s; he’s well muscled and I don’t think that anyone would think he was gay, except for the pink triangle tattoo that is displayed proudly on his biceps. Dennis barks rather than talks and would rather read than deal with his fellow human beings. I happen to be one of the few people he likes. Most people think Dennis can be a bit of an asshole, but not me. Dennis has never been anything but good to me. Whenever my mother says the dreaded words “You’d be such a pretty girl if only you would lose weight,” Dennis tells me I am already beautiful. He’s a personal trainer but never nags me about my weight or how I eat. He lets me be me and I love him for that. So when I started dieting and was actually successful, it seemed only natural to turn to the one man who loved me and my chub. I needed to be trained and he was the man to do it. I thought it was going to be a good thing. I expected Yanni to be playing in the background, candles dancing serenely, and lots of positive reinforcement. It was nothing like that. The Dennis I knew turned into the Dennis everyone else knew: a snarling, screaming, and, yes, sometimes spitting, drill sergeant. With every sit-up, I found myself hating him. Well, not hating him, but I did want to puke in his shoes. I’d gone home after that first day and written about his transformation, and how, inside, an obviously very disturbed part of me was looking forward to our next workout.
She didn’t just steal something I’d written; she’d stolen a slice of my life. One that I was proud of. I was trying to figure out why Dani would do that to me, because I did think we were friends. I knew something about Dani that no one else knew. I knew her dirty little secret. Dani, who bought her clothes at American Eagle and Abercrombie and Fitch, whose bras came only from Victoria’s Secret, who got all her make-up from Sephora, was once fat just like me.
Daniella Pierce was “the new girl” in the office when we first met. She seemed perfect to me. Dani was slim, athletic, and, while she wasn’t beautiful in that jaw-dropping Hollywood way, she was pretty, with brown hair and honey highlights that cost her a hundred dollars every four weeks. She was always dressed casually but never failed to look classy. Dani even had my dream job. She was a columnist, published twice weekly. She drove a cute little car and I imagined that she parked it in the driveway of her cute little house.
Her life was nothing like mine, with my blah hair, my clothes from Walmart, and my dumpy little studio apartment. Daniella Pierce lived the life I craved. When I was assigned to assist her with some research on a feature she was writing in addition to her column, I was more than a little nervous. We were quiet most of the day, right up until lunch, when I mentioned that I was eating another salad on another diet that was destined to fail. Dani told me that it didn’t have to be that way. She had been overweight once and had lost over fifty pounds. She said she’d help me any way she could, and the strange thing was that it seemed like she
meant it.
Dani kept her word. She gave me recipes and tips. She would bring lunch for the two of us, and, somewhere along the way, we became friends. We went shopping, commiserated over men. Well, okay, she talked, I listened, and we watched Sex and the City, all the things real girlfriends do. When I told her I wanted to be a writer, a columnist like her, she told me that I needed to go back to school. With the tuition program at the Times, there was no reason not to. I started losing weight. I did well in my classes, and, other than Dennis, no one was happier for me than Dani.
“I just don’t get it. She was my friend.”
“Emmie, she was never your friend.” He stated it matter-of-factly.
I couldn’t believe it. Dennis was actually going to make me defend her. “I started losing weight because of her. I went to school because of her. She was my friend.”
He groaned, obviously exasperated with me. “You were her project; you were never her friend. If you’re going to give her credit for all those good things, then you need to give her credit for the shitty things she did too. She did more shitty things than good things. Remember The Colombian? Are you going to make me go there? Because I will. I don’t want to, but I will go there.”
The Colombian was the reason Dennis hated Dani.
The Colombian has a real name, Antonio Rivas, we just don’t use it. Tall, dark, and handsome, complete with an accent, Antonio was the embodiment of all the things a Latin Lover should be. He’d worked as a waiter at the very café where we were eating. He had moved on in more ways than one.
Dennis and I had been sitting at this very table when I met The Colombian, who was charming. My diet was in full gear and I’d lost thirty pounds and was feeling a little more confident. Dennis insisted that The Colombian was flirting with me, and I tried my hand at flirting back.
On the way home, Dennis told me that, while I went to the bathroom, The Columbian had all but ordered Dennis to tell me he was a “good” man. “Emmie, he looked at me and said, ‘You tell her I am a good man.’ and I said, ‘I ain’t telling her shit.’ Then he said, ‘Look into my eyes. I am a good man. I would be good for her!’” Dennis imitated his accent perfectly. He told me that he thought The Colombian was right; he would be good for me. He ordered me to go back alone. I did, and, after the café closed, The Colombian and I took a walk on the beach. Our short, sweet romance began.
Phone Kitten: A Cozy, Romantic, and Highly Humorous Mystery Page 1
