Hot Mess (24 page)

“This cupcake is the best thing I’ve put in my mouth ever.” I could feel the frosting all over my face, but I didn’t really care. I kept eating. “Even if Colin sees the article and totally blows up and hates me, I think this cupcake is even better than being with him. It might just make up for it.”

Rachel was pretty intensely into her cupcake, too. “Definitely better than any JDate I’ve been on.”

I heard my cell ring in my bag and went over to get it. “It’s probably Kyle!” Rachel screamed. “I told him all about the article and to call you right after work.” She started singing “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow” loudly enough for Kyle to hear on the other side.

But when I flipped open my phone, Colin’s name was on the caller ID.

“Hello?” I answered, plugging a finger in my ear to drown out Rachel’s off-key homage to my success.

“Hey, it’s me,” Colin replied. “What’s going on? Are you walking by a cat in heat?”

I mouthed “It’s Colin” to Rachel and she quickly shut up.

“Ha, no. That’s just Rach. She’s making a big deal about celebrating my…” And I just stopped and gulped, trapped.

“Your new job, right?” he filled in my pause. I breathed a sigh of not-quite-relief—because I was still totally on edge—but maybe of less stress. “That’s why I’m calling, too. I want to take you out to dinner on Friday to celebrate your move to the competitor. And I promise, I won’t pump you for company secrets or anything.”

I agreed to the Friday date and hung up faster than I normally would. Maybe my next Sirlie article would be called “Beauty and the Bitch” and it would be a story about a perfectly lovely boy who falls for a girl who he thinks is just your average twentysomething but turns out to be an awful lying teenaged bitch.

I was starting to think I didn’t deserve my name in computer-screen print. Aren’t journalists bound by some sort of oath of truth? Or was that Pinocchio?

I spent the next three days procrastinating through the Rolodex “project” and crossing my fingers that neither Derek nor Colin had any sudden urges to research modern feminism.

By Friday I had only made it to the “B’s” of Derek’s business cards, but finally, finally,
finally,
the Internship from Hell was over! I decided to spend my last day looking through everyone in Bridgefield’s Facebook pictures from the past two months and packing up my personal belongings and some office supply mementos. The remaining un-entered twenty-four letters in the Rolodex would have to wait for the next soul unfortunate enough to be dubbed The Dorf’s intern.

Surprisingly though, I was ambivalent about the internship ending—completely filled with joy at no longer having to meter out creamer into Derek’s coffee, but also brimming with dread about leaving my connection to my…boyfriend? That was a talk we still hadn’t had. I guess when you’re older, you don’t need to have the going-steady convo. Things just kind of happen.

Colin had made reservations at Supper to celebrate the alleged new job. I’d told him that I would just meet him at the restaurant because I’d be oh-so-busy cleaning out my cube and “tying up loose ends,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. Basically, I wanted to avoid blowing my cover on my very last day. I was almost home free with the lie of the millennium. I spent the morning meandering around the office, looking over my shoulder for my perfectly perfect boy. By eleven-thirty I hadn’t seen Colin and figured that if Derek pulled his typical Friday one p.m. dash and I followed close behind, I’d be in the clear. But then, at 11:46, things took a turn for the worse.

I was checking out my article on Sirlie one more time. After all, it was my last day to see my name on the home page and I wanted to make the most of it. Why not bask in my fleeting fame for one more page load, right?

As my forty-eighth refresh of the page loaded, I realized that I wasn’t alone. Thinking it was Derek, I quickly alt-tabbed to another window, hiding the evidence of Internet exposure.

“Hey you,” said a surprisingly warm voice behind me. I turned to make sure that Derek hadn’t somehow morphed into a normal, nice, non-freak since I’d given him his coffee this morning. Instead of mutant Derek, Colin stood there with a good-luck bouquet of roses and a big smile. “I know you don’t need luck or anything else to carry home, but hey,” his voice dropped to a whisper, “no one said your boyfriend was the smartest guy.” He winked at me as my heart skipped a beat with his mention of the b-word.
Boyfriend!
“Hey, what were you just looking at?” Shit, shit, shit. I was so distracted by my “boyfriend” being a genuine sweetheart that I forgot that I was lying scum.

“Oh, that old thing about being an intern?” I quickly spun back around in my seat, trying to avoid eye contact. “Nothing. Just something I wrote a long time ago. Like, when I was an intern. A really
long
time ago. Even before the Internet existed, so I’m surprised it’s up here. I was just randomly Googling myself and I found it.”

And I would have kept babbling, probably telling Colin that I had coauthored the piece with a caveman it was so old, but Derek, never one to mind his own business, came out of his office and, in total doofus style, butted in.

“So, what are you two talking about?” he asked. Then, not waiting for a response, “I was thinking of having lunch at Smith and Wollensky. Christensen, you down?”

“Yeah, sure, Derek. Emma, do you—”

“Yep, make reservations. Two. Twelve-thirty.”

Colin opened his mouth to ask why I wasn’t coming to the power lunch, but Derek cut him off.

“Can you believe it’s this gal’s last day? Man, the summer just flew by. And hey, I’ve never seen an intern get flowers on her last day before.”

Colin did a double take at the word “intern.” I could almost hear the crash-and-splatter sound of my entire life tumbling down around me. The next thirty seconds unfolded in horrifying slow motion yet happened too fast for me to stop it. Before Colin had a chance to react, Derek pulled a plaque out of nowhere that said “World’s Best Employee.”

“I couldn’t find one that said ‘Best Intern Ever,’ but you are the best
intern
I’ve ever had. Really, ever. I mean out of all my summer
interns
.” Colin’s face morphed from confused to angry to angrier with each mention of the word “intern.” Derek labored on, sealing my fate as worst summer girlfriend ever. Wait, scratch that—worst
person
ever. “Usually I pick college kids, but you really impressed me, and not just for a high schooler.”

The last words landed like an atomic bomb as Colin—my boyfriend—turned white and then red with fury.

“High school?
HIGH SCHOOL
!” Colin shrieked. He was beyond simple anger—he was enraged. He looked like a tick about to pop

This. Was. A. Nightmare. A nightmare wrapped in my worst fears and then battered and deep-fried in a vat of my own disgusting lies. Colin stalked off as tears welled up in my eyes. I couldn’t even manage to stammer out an explanation. Probably because there really wasn’t one.

And as the cherry on top of this calamity sundae, Derek placed the plaque on my monitor and turned to leave. Right before he got to his office door, he turned around and called back, “And Emmarooski, don’t let that award go to your head, okay?”

Twenty-two

A
solid half hour crying in the handicapped stall later, I emerged from the bathroom, puffy-eyed and not much more emotionally stable than when I entered. But as I was practically crawling back to my desk, I stopped being upset and started getting angry…with myself.
I
shouldn’t be allowed to cry now.
I’m
the one who created this situation. It’s like when I eat sushi on a Sunday and then am shocked that my tummy hurts on Monday morning. I know that Sunday fish can’t be fresh, but I still eat it. I give myself that stomachache. Same thing here—I did this to myself. How many times over the past few weeks could I have prevented this explosion from ever happening?

At Plumm:
“No, I don’t know what a Caipirinha is because I’m in high school. And high schoolers only know what keg beer and schwag is.”

At the vending machine:
“Want a peanut M&M? They melt in your hand not in your…I’m in high school.”

At a weekend breakfast:
“Hey, you know what would taste good with these bagels? A high school diploma. Do you have one of those? I don’t…yet.”

I could have said something at any point over the past month, but no, I didn’t. Instead, I just let the lie simmer up to a boil, not expecting to get burned. And the worst part of this was that I did it to Colin. Colin, who had been nothing but sweet and…

“Em-money!”

I take that back. The
worst
part of it all was that Derek had witnessed the whole thing and now felt like he needed to get involved. He leaned himself against one of my half cubicle walls, letting the fiberboard cut into his stomach chub.

“Not that it’s really any of my business, but now that I’m pretty much not your bossinator anymore, I’ve gotta ask. Was something going on between you and Christensen?” He stuck his two index fingers out and then squished his fingertips together making kissy sucking noises with his mouth. There was no possible way I could be more shocked, disgusted, or humiliated.

“No, Derek.” I wanted to crawl under my desk and not come out until Derek and his perverted nosiness had left for the weekend, but Derek would probably crawl under my desk with me and assault me there, too.

“Listen, Em. I’m nearly forty, and I’m not talking dog years, here. So I’ve been around the block a few too many times to think that Colin’s little tantrum and your puffy eyes aren’t related. And I doubt he flipped out when he found out you were an intern because he thought you had full dental.” He glanced down at me with an almost paternal look. “So why don’t you tell me what’s wrong. It’ll make you feel better.”

I really did need to vent about it right now, and my best friends in the city were not accessible. Rachel wasn’t answering her cell and Jayla—well, on the off chance that she wasn’t on a conference call with Chloe reliving every gory detail of her most recent shack-up with Jake, she’d say something like “Just be grateful that you got more experience with guys this summer. Being with only one guy for so long can leave you kind of stale.” Totally not the kind of advice I needed right now. But talking to Derek?

“Plus,” Derek interrupted my thoughts, “this is going to add a nice twist to the recs I’m going to write you. Hey-yo!” He dribbled an imaginary basketball and shot, making a swish sound for added realism.

Yeah, talking to Derek would be a huge mistake.

“Derek, I’m fine. I’m just going to spend the rest of the day cleaning out my desk and packing up, okay?”

“Your call, Em. ’Kay, I’m heading out to lunch.” And while I knew that he almost never came back to the office after lunch on Fridays, I still half expected him to come back and give me a proper send-off. That couldn’t really be his big farewell for my summer of indentured servitude. But of course, he didn’t return to give me a hug or a thank-you more meaningful than a plaque from the dollar store. Whatever.

I poked around in my cube for a while, cleaning up and watching my in-box, hoping for an e-mail from Colin to pop up. I prayed for a subject line to the effect of “You say statutory rape, I say tomato,” with an e-mail containing his apology for getting so worked up over a number as silly as age. We’d laugh about the whole fiasco over our candlelit dinner at Supper. “The grandkids are never going to believe our how-we-met story,” he’d say, and then joke about carding me every time he poured more wine in my glass.

When I finally unspaced from my daydream of pitiful impossibility, I saw that it was 4:53. I shut off my computer and any chance of hearing from Colin. I made my rounds, saying my last goodbyes to the few people I’d met in the office—the guy who sat by the Xerox machine and helped with paper jams and the woman who had the candy bowl on her desk, with whom I became friendly for obvious reasons. Then I made my way to the elevator bank with my box of cleaned-up cubicle.

The elevator dumped me by the security gates and I swiped myself out of MediaInc for the last time. It reminded me of pushing through the thick metal doors on the last day of school. June could have been three years ago, it felt so distant.

As I was making my way across the lobby, struggling under the weight of my box, I heard
his
voice. “Emma!”

I considered dropping my box of pilfered Dr. Grips and bolting. Instead, I turned to face him. Before he could say a word, I started blubbering an apology.

“Colin, I’m so sorry. That first time in the club, I thought that—”

“That what? You’d never see me again? That you’d get away with all of this? That lying to me was a good idea?”

I searched for an answer, but had none.

“Look, Emma, I really liked you. And I might have still liked you if I’d known you were an intern. But I don’t like liars.”

Tears began to spill down my cheeks and I prayed for a fire drill. Or a natural disaster. One of those makeover shows where they swoop in, abduct you, and yell at you for wearing an improperly fitting bra on national TV. Anything but to hear Colin bitch me out, even though I totally deserved it.

“Colin, please. I swear I didn’t mean to hurt you. I wanted to tell you, but…” I dissolved into sobs and his steely gaze softened slightly at the sight of this pathetic adolescent snotting and weeping in the middle of five p.m. lobby traffic. God, I was making such a scene.

“Em, you are good enough just being yourself. You don’t need to lie or pretend, okay?” He sighed heavily. “And now, I’m…I guess I’m just…really hurt.”

I looked at his frustrated green eyes and miserably wished that I’d never met him, that I’d never dragged him into the mess that is Emma Freeman: Eighteen-Year-Old Intern Liar.

“Look, can’t we just start over?” I sniffled. “Can’t we just pretend that we’ve never met and call a do-over?” I realized how young I sounded and hated myself for it. So I did what I always did during tense situations, made a nervous joke. “You know, like calling a T.O.?” I looked up at him, trying to smile through my tears.

“T.O.?” he asked, and his eyes narrowed on me, coldly. “This isn’t fucking Little League.”

I jumped when he cursed. I wasn’t used to it. And it stung.

He looked into the distance bitterly. “T fucking O. Unbelievable. What, Emma—you wanna settle this with a nice game of tetherball, huh? How about I just give you a detention for dating without a hall pass?” Now he was just being mean, and I teared up again and whimpered miserably.

“Colin, stop,” I wailed, wishing I wasn’t holding a box so I could cover my wet, red face with my hands. “Stop saying things just to hurt me!”

“You?” he shouted, making the security guard inch a little closer and reach for his flashlight. “
I’m
hurting
you
? Do you have any idea how hard it is to date people in this city?”

I shook my head slightly, bracing for another onslaught.

“Well, let me break it down for you, Emma. The last chick I dated turned out to be married and the one before her left me for someone else. Someone named Melissa. So here I was, stupid me, thinking I’d actually met someone normal. Someone who I could just stand still with. But oh no. You took me for the biggest ride of all.” His face morphed into steely anger.

And with that horrifying, gut-wrenching statement, he stalked away. Now it was his turn to be the one who dashed and left me standing alone. I watched as he pushed through the revolving doors and turned toward Madison, never looking back.

I couldn’t bawl in the office lobby all evening. I shuffled my sad self through the revolving door, maneuvering carefully to avoid getting the box smushed. The New York–evening heat almost felt good against my air-conditioning-chilled tears. I pushed through the foot traffic and made my way underground, barely able to see through the puddles that had replaced my eyes. I moved slowly, partly because I felt like a slimy slug, but mostly because my box of personal effects and less-personal pinched office supplies was pretty heavy. And Derek’s commemorative plaque must have been made out of lead and Star Jones’s lipo fat, it weighed so much. Getting through the turnstile involved a lot of shifting, repositioning, and side shimmying. I knew I was holding up the line of Friday commuters, eager to get back to their couches and frozen dinners, but what could I do?

“Lady, let’s get a move on,” an angry voice said from behind me.

I whipped my head around. “Listen, I’ve been yelled at enough today when I deserved it. I don’t need any shit from your fat ass! I’m in high school!” As if admitting that to this rando meant anything now. I rolled my eyes and shoved through the turnstile, losing a packet of neon Post-its along the way.

“Crap!” I shrieked, kicking them toward a homeless man slumped by the trash can. “Goddamn Post-its!”

What was wrong with me? Just because I had ruined my life and Colin’s summer didn’t give me the right to kill every New Yorker’s evening. Mercifully, I got a seat on the subway and could mope myself home in relative comfort.

I opened the door to the apartment, half closing my eyes because I didn’t think I could stand seeing Jake and Jayla canoodling on the couch. I’d probably puke all over their age-appropriate relationship. But instead of the cuddle bunnies, just Rachel sat scanning through HBO On Demand for sex scenes from
Entourage
. She jumped up when I opened the door.

“Jay, she’s back! Let’s get started on our…Oh no, omigod, what’s wrong with you, babe?” Rachel’s bombastic voice melted into concern. Did I really look that bad?

Jayla galloped out of her room wearing an I
NY shirt that she’d cut at the neck and sleeves so it almost looked cool. “Okay, I’m ready! Holy shit, Emma. Did you get hit by a cab or something?” I definitely looked that bad.

I set my office stuff down on the floor and kerplunked onto the couch. As painful as it was to relive it, I went through the day’s events in so much horrifying detail that the story was pretty much told in real time. I winced as I verbatim acted out Colin’s final diatribe. “I just want to melt into a greasy puddle of self-loathing and marinate for a few days, hating myself,” I managed to squeak out before the hard-core tears started.

“Well, look at the bright side. At least you got to make out with someone who wasn’t Brian. Being with the same person for—” Of course Jayla went there.

“Jay, she doesn’t want to hear shit like that now,” Rachel cut her off, mercifully. “I’m so sorry, hon. Are you just going to let this be or try and talk to him again?”

I collected myself a bit and looked at Rachel. “I don’t know. I mean, I want to talk to him. But, like, what do I have to say to him? No way an apology alone is going to make this okay.”

I wanted Rachel to come up with a plan, a way to explain away the summer of psycho to Colin. But instead she just nodded, agreeing that there was no way to mend what I’d done. My stomach knotted and I sank my head into Rachel’s lap and began crying all over again.

“Well, you’ve heard me say it before, Em, I don’t like crying in this apartment,” Jayla said with levity in her voice. She bolted back into her room and out again. In her hands were two more hand-cut I
NY T-shirts, which she threw to Rachel and me. Mine was cut into a belly-baring tank and Rachel’s neckline was so low that there was barely any
left.