The Baddest Girl on the Planet

by Heather Frese

  “Whatever,” I say, but then I realize this is an angry response to what I see as a personal attack on my inability to purchase a new set of luggage. I remind myself that getting angry will not fix anything, and may in fact make the situation worse. “It’s all the rage in Paris,” I say.

  “I’ll show you the Paris casino,” Eamon says. He takes off for the door again. He walks fast, but maybe it’s just that I have short legs. “It’s right next door to our hotel.”

  I can’t tell if he says our hotel in a way that’s creepy or exciting, since I don’t yet know if I want to sleep with him. I settle on exciting. I can’t wait to see someplace new. Eamon and I make our way to the shuttle, out of the air-conditioning, through a slap of dark night heat, and then into the iciness of the bus. He doesn’t help me pull my luggage up the steps, but he does lift it onto the shelf-thing. We sit together and our legs touch.

  A few more people sit down, and the bus starts moving. I swear, this airport is bigger than eight of my hometowns. I say this to Eamon. He nods and looks out the window. “I didn’t realize Vegas would be this spread out,” I say. “It looked so big and flat from the plane.”

  “You’re going to love it,” Eamon says. He looks out the window again, but I don’t see anything but more airport.

  The bus rolls along. I jiggle my leg to see how it feels against Eamon’s. I wonder why he’s being so quiet, then think that maybe he has jet lag. “How was your flight?” I ask. Eamon had a nonstop flight from Toronto.

  “Yeah, it was fine,” he says. He gives me a half smile and looks away.

  I wait to see if he’ll ask about my flight. Flights, I should say, since I had to get up at six in the morning, drive three hours to Norfolk, and then change planes twice. But I did get to see the George Michael episode of Behind the Music on the last plane. I love airplanes, but I hardly ever get to fly. Eamon is quiet. I have a seven-year-old son. I’m not used to quiet. “Did they feed you anything good?”

  “I ate,” Eamon says. He crosses his arms.

  I give up. I text my family to let them know I arrived, and then I look out the window, too. We’re finally pulling out of the airport, and the tall buildings and flashing neon of the Strip twinkle brightly in the distance. I jiggle a little, in excitement this time.

  Eamon points out the window. “ The Welcome to Las Vegas sign is coming up,” he says. He grins like a little boy.

  I crane my neck out and up, way up where I think all the flashy signs will be. The bus rolls on, and almost too late I see the sign, much lower than where I was looking, a sparkly alien-shaped thing with a crowd of people out front taking pictures. “It’s so little,” I say.

  Eamon looks personally affronted, his lips a straight line. “Well, it’s old,” he says.

  I make a note to never refer to anything a man is excited about as being little. “I didn’t mean it wasn’t nice,” I say. “It’s a lovely sign.”

  I stare up at the flashing hotels and casinos and the steady march of people going up and down the street, some with big plastic bong-looking drinks hung around their necks. I want to walk around with a bong-looking drink around my neck. I don’t see any wedding chapels yet, but I don’t ask Eamon about them because I’m afraid I’ll make a joke about getting married, and that was one big Don’t on the Travel Channel’s Top Ten Vegas Do’s and Dont’s show. One should never joke about getting married in Vegas because it’s too easy to make it happen. We get to the Flamingo, I pull my duct-taped bag from the rack, and we roll off the bus and into the hotel.

  The Flamingo smells musty, and then, as we roll our bags down to check-in, like cigarette smoke. There’s pink everywhere, flamingo pink, stuck-on-the-inside-of-a-Pepto-Bismol-bottle pink, Barbie pink. I think that Mattel should’ve made a Flamingo Vegas stripper-showgirl Barbie with a headdress and lots of bling. There’s a small line of people at the desk even though it’s nearly one in the morning, and Eamon and I wait and wait and wait, and then, because we had to wait and wait and wait, we get upgraded to a Go Room. It has stripy walls, a big flat-screen TV that Austin would kill for, and white patent leather headboards. At least Eamon was honest about getting two beds. At least maybe he doesn’t just want to get in my pants. “I’m taking this one,” Eamon says, throwing his stuff on the bed closest to the big window, where you can look down and see the fountain show at the Bellagio. “Do you mind?”

  I’m annoyed with this, and I’m also annoyed that the room smells like the inside of an ashtray after a long party full of swingers, or mobsters, or hipsters, or some other chain-smoking “er”-ending group. I can feel the cells in my lungs turning black. I cough a little, but I make sure to reframe the situation, because logic defeats anger. My lungs will pink up again after this weekend, and it’ll be worth it to look out at the dancing fountains every half hour. “Not a bit,” I say in a tone that I hope is nonchalant, even-keeled, and serene.

  Eamon wakes me up the next morning by banging shut the sliding bathroom door. He stays in there for forty-five minutes, and when he comes out, he brings with him a billowing waft of AXE body spray. He smells like a pack of prepubescent boys. I pull the covers over my head, not ready to be awake after my fifteen-hour trip.

  “Evie,” Eamon says, and I get a kick out of the way he says my name. “It’s time to get up.” He pushes a button and the curtains slide open.

  “Says who?” I ask. But I sit up, a little dance of excitement in my stomach.

  “We’ve got a lot to see,” Eamon says. He bangs around the room a little more.

  I get up and pee, and when I come back, Eamon is standing in front of the closet in just his boxer shorts. They aren’t even cute boxer shorts; they’re plain yellow and kind of dirty-looking, and if these are the boxers Eamon O’Shea plans to seduce me in, he’s got the wrong plan. I pull some clothes out of my amoeba bag and head back to the bathroom, sliding the frosted-glass door shut.

  From the other room, Eamon clears his throat. “Evie,” he says, “You woke me up in the night.”

  I look at myself in the mirror and pull at the bags under my eyes. “Oh?”

  “You woke me up when you went to the bathroom.”

  I paste up my toothbrush and run water in the round, raised sink. “I’m sorry,” I say through a mouth of foam. I spit and get dressed and come back into the room.

  “It’s just that you woke me up and I couldn’t get back to sleep,” Eamon says. This irritates me, it really does. What does he want me to do? Go back in time and not pee? I apologized, right? Eamon’s sitting in a chair looking out the window. I remember my therapist Judy’s advice about feelings of rising anger. I breathe deeply, from my diaphragm; breathing from your chest won’t relax you. I picture my breath coming up from my gut. Then I picture my lung cells gasping from the smoke smell. In my mind, they look like amoebas. Little, death-black amoebas.

  Eamon turns in his chair. He smiles a little. “Maybe next time, if you get up in the night, you could not flush.” He says flush like floosh.

  “Sure thing,” I say, making a mental note to restrict fluids near bedtime.

  Eamon informs me that we should go to McDonald’s for breakfast, which is fine with me because it’s cheap. Then he informs me the McDonald’s is at the other end of the Strip, and that I probably shouldn’t have worn the shoes I’m wearing, which are pink flip-flops with a little heel. He informs me of this after we’ve wound our way out of the labyrinth of the hotel and stepped out into the 101-degree morning and started walking.

  Eamon throws his arm around my shoulder, and we cross the street in the jumble of a crowd. “You’re here!” he says, jubilant. This is rather adorable. “What do you think so far?”

  What I think is that when people say, It’s a dry heat, they neglect to mention that convection ovens also emit a dry heat, and so do hair-dryers, and so do broilers. I think I can feel the dying cells in my lungs basting. It’s nothing like the heat at home, which is thick and damp and salty and alive. But I look around and point at
a big fake hot-air balloon beside a fake Eiffel Tower. “That’s pretty,” I say. “And I love the fountains.”

  Even at nine in the morning the Strip bustles with crowds of people. We jostle and shuffle and walk and walk and walk. Eamon walks fast. He steps off the curbs ahead of me and scans for traffic, then guides me across the streets, his hand on my back. By the time we hit fake New York, I feel like I’m going to throw up from the heat. We reach McDonald’s, and the air-conditioning stings it’s so cold. I get an Egg McMuffin, but I’m too queasy to eat.

  “What’s the matter?” Eamon asks through a mouthful of hash-brown.

  I push my McMuffin away. “I feel sick,” I say.

  Eamon snaps his fingers. “Right,” he says. “I meant to tell you to drink lots of water before we left the room. You’re probably dehydrated from the flight.”

  “Dehydrated sucks.” I put my head down. My stomach hasn’t felt like this since I was pregnant. I have a moment of panic before I realize I haven’t had sex in three years and two months.

  “I’ll get you some water,” Eamon says. He goes to the counter and comes back with an ice-cream-sundae cup. “We’ll just have to refill it,” he says.

  I drink and drink. Eamon refills my cup four times. He pats my back each time he returns to the table and tells me about the time he got dehydrated in Death Valley. “It’s the worst I’ve ever felt,” Eamon says. I forgive him for forgetting to tell me to drink before we left the hotel. I drink and drink until I can go up and refill the clear plastic cup on my own, then I drink and drink some more. Finally, I smash down some McMuffin.

  It’s during the smashing-down portion of breakfast that Eamon looks at me and says, “You used to be really thin ten years ago, didn’t you?”

  I stop chewing. I don’t have to do any anger management techniques because I’m too stunned to be angry. I swallow my bite. “I guess so.”

  “I mean, like, really thin,” Eamon says. He takes a drink of coffee. He raises his eyebrows, questioning.

  I want to throw my cold McMuffin in his face, but instead I say, “I was sixteen.” I don’t know what he’s getting at—I’m not big now, and I wasn’t unusually skinny then—but if I try to find out I’m afraid I won’t stay calm. I’ve already forgotten to breathe from my diaphragm. I put down my McMuffin. “Let’s go,” I say. He walks out the door in front of me. I think, Ten years ago you had the sense not to wear stonewashed carpenter jeans, but I don’t think my therapist would like it if I said that out loud.

  We walk around the Strip, and I see fake Camelot, fake New York, fake Egypt, fake Paris, fake Venice, and some real lions at MGM, which doesn’t have a fake theme except for the movies. It’s hot, and it gets hotter. I tell Eamon about Walter, my inherited dog. I tell him how I’m worried Walter’s going blind, and Eamon says you can get cataract surgery for dogs. He says he’s sorry about Aunt Fay and tells me how much he enjoyed the painting lesson she gave him that time he visited.

  We go to In-N-Out Burger for dinner, and Eamon hands me the ketchup before I ask for it. He points out a kid in a powder-blue leisure suit, and we make up stories about him. Eamon asks me how I’m doing financially, and if Stephen pays alimony and child support or just child support, and if I have any investments, and if my parents have any investments. Then he asks me if I’m seeing anyone, and how long it’s been since my last boyfriend. I start to feel like I’m getting interviewed by a reporter from Us Weekly, or at least Star.

  Then Eamon asks me how much my Aunt Fay suffered before she died a year ago, and if I blame her because she used to smoke. It’s at this point that I start making a list of all the things Eamon does to piss me off. I figure this is a way of replacing my overly dramatic, angering thoughts with rational ones, in simple list format. Throughout the rest of the evening he:

  • snaps at me to turn my cell phone off, then gets pissed when his rings a moment later, before he realizes it’s his own

  • tells me that I can’t play penny slots because it’s pointless and I’ll never win

  • asks me again if I get alimony

  I figure he’s done at least six things by the time we get back to the hotel room, so I start at seven when he asks me if my bed is comfortable and can he try it. I mean, really, get a more creative line than that. But still, I let him lie down beside me. I’m curious about what will happen next. When I compare him to Stephen, Eamon’s offenses seem less awful. Seven isn’t such a high number. Maybe I’m just being critical. I’m just being critical.

  “Come here,” Eamon says, and he kisses me.

  It’s been a while. I kiss him, and all my old Easy Evie instincts come flying in and I’m back in the baseball dugout with Zack Gray letting him feel me up. Eamon and I make out hard-core for a while, and then he starts to unzip his jeans, and I realize he thinks I’m going to have sex with him, and in that same instant, I realize I don’t want to.

  “Wait,” I say. I sit up and pull down my shirt. “You haven’t passed my entrance exam.”

  Eamon doesn’t play along. He’s supposed to say, “Is it an oral exam?”

  I say it for him. “It’s an oral exam.” I raise an eyebrow. My oral exam is fun. It’s administered before any guy is allowed in my pants and involves such questions as: Do any of your self-descriptors involve the words drug-dealing fiend? and Are you currently on parole? and Have you ever just bluntly asked to stick your finger up a woman’s ass, just for a second, just to see how it feels? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then I reconsider letting the guy in my pants.

  “What do you want to know?” Eamon asks.

  I think for a second. The Facebook ad pops up in my head. “Do you have any STDs?”

  Eamon’s mouth crinkles like I’ve asked him if he’d like a bite of rancid sweetbreads. “Of course not,” he says.

  I sigh. “It’s just that I don’t know you well enough to have sex with you,” I say. Because I’m not Easy Evie anymore, dammit.

  Eamon looks puzzled. “We only have the weekend,” he says.

  “I’m not the kind of girl who comes to Vegas just to get laid,” I say. Anymore, I think.

  “Then why bother coming to Vegas?” He shifts in the bed, tugging at his jeans. “Come on, Evie,” he says. “I’m uncomfortable enough as it is.” And Eamon starts to kiss me again.

  And this is where things get complicated. Because even though Eamon O’Shea has been a jackass all day and is currently coercing me into sex, he’s a good kisser. I don’t feel threatened. I think that if I tell Eamon to stop, he probably will. And it does feel good to kiss someone; it feels good to be wanted. I kiss him back, and I let him take my shirt off, and all the while I’m arguing with myself, debating whether being in Sin City and sex-deprived is reason enough to get it on with a jackass or whether I should obey my newfound, grown-up, no-indiscriminate-sex-with-jackasses rule.

  I’m about to give in when Eamon pulls off his stonewashed jeans, and suddenly, out of nowhere, I see an image of George Michael’s butt in the “Faith” video. I hear the lines, “Well, I need someone to hold me, but I’ll wait for something more.” That does it. I know for sure I can’t have sex with Eamon O’Shea. I’m not sure what to do. I feel like I’ve led Eamon on, mostly because I’ve led Eamon on. Then I have a zing of inspiration. “I have to go to the bathroom,” I say into Eamon’s mouth. “I’ll be right back.”

  The bathroom still smells vaguely of AXE. I sit down on the toilet, hoping that Eamon will think I’m putting in a diaphragm. Do people still use diaphragms? I take a deep breath, then start to curse. “Shit,” I say, quietly at first. Then, louder, “Shit!” I walk back into the room and put my hands on my hips. “My period started,” I say. “And I didn’t pack anything.” I push my hair behind my ears.

  Eamon looks disappointed and a little confused.

  I pull on my shirt. “I’m going down to get some tampons,” I say. I hope that saying tampons out loud will make him realize that this is the only thing going into my vagina. I
grab my flip-flops and my room key and walk out into the hall.

  Things a man can do to make sure he does not get into my pants:

  • always use the bathroom first, and always leave the toilet seat up (I know I should refrain from thinking that someone always does something that makes me angry, but it’s true; he does it every single time.)

  • ask me if I’m serious when I joke that we should order an $1800 bottle of wine from room service

  • tell me I need to marry rich

  • continually wear the same pair of stonewashed carpenter jeans in 112-degree heat

  Eamon does all these things today, and finally I escape to the pool and he goes to the spa. I don’t know why anyone would pay twenty dollars to sit in a sauna when all you have to do is step outside, but that’s beside the point.

  I vulture around until a recliner in the shade opens up, and then I order fruity drinks and charge them to Eamon’s account. I’ll pay him back later, but it feels good to drink on his tab. I call home and tell Austin about the MGM lions and the fountains at the Bellagio. I imagine Judy, my therapist, saying in her soothing voice, Use imagery; visualize a relaxing experience, from either your memory or your imagination. I try to picture myself on the beach on a nice sunny day, but that doesn’t work, so I move to my imagination and visualize myself riding along on a horse behind Legolas the Elf as we go off to shoot Orcs. It’s not exactly my own imagination, but it works.

  By the time Eamon comes back from the spa and joins me at the pool, either the drinks or the anger management exercises have made me much more forgiving because I start to think about the nice things he did earlier today. He:

  • held doors for me

  • helped a child in a wheelchair get unstuck from a sidewalk ramp

  • took my picture in front of a flamingo

  • said hello to a little lizard we saw