Just A Small Town Girl: A New Adult Romantic Comedy (5 page)

 We went back to the hotel and ordered a room-service midnight feast - shrimp and avocado, French bread and local artisan brie and three kinds of ice cream. Sex had always made me hungry; sex like
that
left me ravenous. I sat and stuffed my face while Courtney pecked at an avocado and went back and forth to the balcony to smoke. "You should eat something," I said, waving the ice cream spoon at her. "Come on - it's pistachio. Your favorite."

 She sat down and took a few perfunctory nibbles. Her make-up had stayed true and the sweeps of pink shadow over her lids made her eyes look as green as the ice cream. "I guess I can afford the calories just this once."

 I didn't say anything because everything I could think of to say sounded like a nag; one of the needly things Cassandra came out with when she was trying to push someone's buttons. But the more I looked at Courtney my gaze kept lingering on her skinny little wrists and her child-size hips. "Is it really that bad?" I said.

 "Is what that bad?"

 "The diets. The weight-watching."

 She dug deep into her ice cream. "God yes," she said, rolling her eyes in a way that was so much
my
Courtney that I relaxed. "It's insane. Worse than it ever was. You hear of girls eating tissue paper and passing out five times a day."

 "You're kidding."

 She shook her head. "I met this Russian girl the other week. Seems to be a lot of them lately; they're all scary beautiful. She had one of the most amazing looks I'd ever seen - cheekbones like razors, big dark Bambi eyes. Only they weren't using her and I couldn't understand why. Then someone said it was because of her legs."

 "What was wrong with her legs?" I asked, unable to imagine what could be the problem. I thought it was an entry requirement to modeling that you had to have legs that went all the way up to Canada.

 "Scabs," said Courtney.

 "Scabs?"

 "Scabs. Her knees looked like mine used to when I was in elementary school and learning to ride a bike. That was how often she fainted."

 "Oh my God, Courtney - that's horrible."

 "That's nothing. There's thin and then there's Paris-thin. Someone told me that the fit-models spend most of their free time in the hospital hooked up to IVs."

 "They what?" It all sounded like madness to me. Most of the clothes I saw coming down the catwalk were nothing I could ever imagine anyone wanting to wear. "That's insane."

 "It's nuts," agreed Courtney. "And nobody says a thing. They live in a world where a size four is considered 'curvy'. Sometimes it can be difficult not to let that stuff get into your head. You start looking in the mirror and thinking you look fat."

 "You're not fat," I said. "You're not even close to fat. Don't go down that road, please."

 "I'm not," she said, with a flash of defensiveness. "I know exactly what I'm doing."

 There was an uncomfortable silence. She buried the spoon in the ice cream and left it there. "I'm sorry," she said, with a sigh. "I didn't mean to snap. It's just I've heard it so many times from my mom - you have no idea."

 "Sure," I said, squeezing her hand. "It can't be easy."

 "It's not. It's like living on Mars for weeks at a time and coming back and people asking you why you don't just take your space suit off and frolic merrily on the fucking surface, you know? They have no conception of how it works up there, or how goddamn alien it all is." She rubbed her temples. "Oh God - I should never have had that fourth martini. I need some air."

 She went off to the balcony again and I thought about telling her about what I'd done. Once upon a time I would have hurried back to her side to tell her right away that I'd fucked a stranger in the parking lot, or at least that I'd found a guy selling weed, but I was beginning to learn that adulthood had a way of putting distance between you and the people who had once shared your secrets. Everyone had their own problems and anxieties, and to pass them on was no longer a confidence but a nuisance, heaping your own baggage on top of someone else's.

 On the morning of the Sunday when she was due to leave Burlington we acted like we had all the time in the world, drinking espresso in European style cafes, strolling around hipsterish little art galleries whose works had their tags written all in lowercase and the prices were conspicuously absent. Courtney made me join in an open-air yoga session on a park lawn and they tolerated our giggling for all of about five minutes before my attempt at the tree position nearly tipped over a whole row like dominos.

 "I would never have dared do that in Westerwick," I said, as we scurried off in disgrace. "I'd never hear the end of it. Maybe I should move somewhere like here. Somewhere big."

 Courtney laughed at that, as well she might. "Big? Are you kidding? This place is adorable. It's like a pretty little college town."

 "Size is relative," I said. "This is big for Vermont. Have you ever been to Montpelier? It's a village."

 "You should come on down to old New Amsterdam sometime. When you've lived in a city of nearly eight and half million people it tends to skew your sense of scale."

 I wanted to ask her if it was because New York made her feel tiny that she seemed to be trying to disappear, but I'd understood why she got mad at me for asking about her weight. We could always find a way to understand one another and it was this that kept yanking at my nerves - that one day we might grow into people who asked each other "How are you?" and we'd say "Oh, you know - I'm fine," even when we really weren't fine at all.

 She took a flight back to New York and I drove back home, where I was surprised to feel a whole lot better. Maybe I'd needed to get laid; it had been a while after all. I'd broken up with Jesse after two years because three weeks into senior year he'd started worrying about what we'd do after graduation and while it was a reasonable thing to worry about his timing was anything but reasonable. And senior year had left me with little to no time for guys.

 It was a good thing Courtney had kept me distracted, because every time I thought about what had happened in the parking lot I blushed. I was sure Aunt Cassandra would notice, but I didn't see her until the Tuesday and it was one of her better days. I don't know what she saw in the mirror or the bathroom scale that had pleased her especially that morning, but as soon as Dad saw the spring in her step he bolted into the workshop and left me to take the brunt of it.

 "I can smell fall in the air," she said. "Better get this place in order before the hordes descend."

 I said nothing and pretended to be busy writing up price tickets for the new stock. I was thinking of maybe doing them all in lowercase, like the gallery in Burlington; a great deal of the business of living in a tourist trap is about parting the rich and the hopelessly pretentious from their money. While I was lurking I saw Cassandra run her finger over the top of a roll-top desk that she had informed me on several occasions was actually an 'escritoire'.

 I typed it into my laptop.

escritoire. 18th century french influences. $700.

 Nice. The lowercase worked. I added a fifty to the price tag.

 "Lacie, are you even listening to a word I'm saying?" said Cassandra.

 "Um, yeah," I lied, and added a 'sort of' as her eyes bored into me. "I had maybe half an ear out," I confessed.

 "Then where's the polish?" she asked. "The wax. Not the spray can - the lavender beeswax. This place needs to smell of it. People smell that and they know that the furniture is being taken good care of. Anyone can squirt a can of Pledge, but the old-fashioned lavender wax smells like you put work into it - elbow grease. One of the first things I learned in real estate was that a show house should always smell of baking bread and fresh ground coffee; to smell it is to sell it. Did you know that smell is the sense most closely associated with memory?"

 While all this was going on I was rummaging under the counter for the wax. "Yeah," I said, surfacing. "I heard Marcel Proust said something about it."

 She snatched the wax from the counter and got to work. Cassandra had her faults but laziness wasn't one of them, or maybe it was simply because she didn't trust anyone to do things as well as she could do them herself.

 So naturally I knew something was up when I saw her stop stock still in front of the window, duster in hand, poised on the tips of her toes like a cat trying to make itself look larger. "What are you looking at?" I asked.

 She beckoned without speaking, as though she were stalking prey. When I reached the window I laughed, because I realized that's exactly what she was doing. Parked across the street was a shiny black Harley Davidson.

 "I never had you figured for a biker mama," I said.

 "Just wait," she said, in a breathless voice.

 She was looking directly at Rita's Bakery on the other side of the street. The door opened and out walked the object of Aunt Cassandra's desire. A handsome beast, no doubt. He was all in black motorcycle leathers, black to match his bike and his tousled hair. He couldn't have been more than thirty.

 "Nice," I said.

 "Nice? It's like Matt Bomer beamed down from heaven into the body of a hot biker."

 "And turned straight, you hope," I said.

 She blinked at me. "You're so cynical," she said. "Just because a man is shatteringly good-looking it doesn't mean he's gay."

 "I know that," I said. "But if he has a husband that's generally a good indication that he bats for the other team."

 "How do you know that?"

 "Wikipedia. At least, I think he's married."

 She frowned, looked at me and pointed out of the window. "Wait - he has a Wikipedia page?"

 "No, but Matt Bomer does."

 "Matt Bomer's gay?"

 "Like I said, the husband was a pretty big tip-off."

 Cassandra flushed and shook her head. "Must be nice to have time for celebrity gossip," she said, which was pretty rich considering she always knew who was hot, who was not and who had just had a thoroughly regrettable boob job. It was on the tip of my tongue to make some smart remark about having no time for celebrity gossip on the grounds that she spent most of her time on local gossip, but she was preoccupied, watching her leather-clad man-candy roar away on his bike.

 "I wonder where he came from?" she said, almost wistfully.

 "I don't know. You want me to go and ask Rita if she knows anything?"

 "Don't you dare," she said. "You need to be here in case that guy shows up."

 “What guy?"

 She splayed her hands in a kind of desperate gesture, her eyes wide. In certain lights and in her biggest drama-queen moods she looked all of about twenty years old. Or maybe she'd just discovered a new moisturizer - might account for the spring in her step. "The new seasonal guy," she said. "Didn't your Dad mention him? I'm sure I did."

 I shook my head.

 "There's no way," she said. "You can't have missed a thing like that."

 "Honestly - this is the first I've heard of it."

 She sighed. "Look," she said. "I didn't want to say anything but you have been all over the place since you came back from the weekend. Did something happen in Burlington?"

 "No," I said, sounding high and unconvincing to my own ears. I tried not to smile. I wanted to stop talking but for some reason my mouth/brain interface was on the fritz and my mouth wanted to dig me deeper into the hole that my tone of voice had opened up beneath me. "What could possibly have happened in Burlington?"

 Aunt Cassandra arched a well-waxed eyebrow. "You met a boy," she said. "Didn't you?"

 "No," I said, and it was the truth. He wasn't a boy. He was very much a man. And I didn't meet him. I fucked him. In a parking lot. Nope. Still didn't get any less weird saying that, even in my own head. Still weird and still thrilling. It was the kind of thing that happened in books and movies, not to me. I didn't even know his name.

 I went back to my laptop and feigned fascination in price-tickets. Maybe the font should be different. Was it Helvetica that drew hipsters like a fly on poop? And were rich hipsters really the kind to come storming north to stare at some leaves? Probably not, I decided. It was usually the over-forties, burned out workers desperate to make the most of that Labor Day last hurrah.

 Chopin was definitely too froofy, and Garamond done to death. That way led to death, destruction and Comic Sans, and nobody wanted that. I wondered what wild impulses possessed people whenever they settled on Comic Sans, or Papyrus. Presumably the same crazy bad-decision making that led others to think stirrup pants were due for a revival, or that banging total strangers in parking lots was a great idea.

 The worst part was that I didn't regret it nearly as much as I should. Secrets were a luxury in a town like this, and possessing one made me feel special. Besides, part of me wasn't even sure it had happened at all; it just wasn't the kind of thing I was supposed to do, getting drunk, getting high and hooking up in parked cars. But it had - I knew it had. It kept coming back to me in pieces - a frantic scramble of hands and thighs, the smoky taste of his mouth, the high-schoolish way he'd said 'It's okay - I'm clean', which was as deep a discussion of safe sex as we'd had. I knew it was stupid as hell but everyone else did it, didn't they? And they got away with it, so why shouldn't I?

 Like I said, Papyrus, Comic Sans, stirrup pants and parking lots; our lives are made up of these little wrong turns.

 I was preoccupied, trying to convince myself that Impact didn't make the tickets look like cat macros from about 2005 (I can haz anteek?) when a voice above me said "Whatcha doin?"

 It was such an uncustomerish thing to say that I didn't look up, or notice that Aunt Cassandra's voice had apparently broken since we'd last spoke about fifteen minutes ago. "I told you," I said. "Price tags."

 Then I noticed the hand on the edge of the counter, which definitely wasn't Cassandra's dainty little pink-tipped paw. It was long-fingered without being spidery, knotty without being gnarled, and it led to a graceful wrist lightly dusted with red-gold hair. As male hands went it was a beautiful hand, and as soon as I looked up it made a strange kind of sense that I should find it appealing. After all, I'd had it on me. In me. Oh shit.