Over You (2 page)

“One bar.” Max places both hands on her hips.

Bridget raises an eyebrow, but does as told. Max has never been met by resistance on an Hour One house call. Girls are too desperate for relief to put up a fight.

“You’ll see Shannon tomorrow. Right now you just need to focus on what I’m telling you.” Max watches Bridget bite into the dark chocolate intended to fill her dry mouth with sweetness. Bridget chews with hollow eyes as Max sweeps the room, stealthily dropping framed photos of the couple into her bag along with the obvious “Taylor and Bridget” mementos. She picks up Bridget’s cell and reprograms Taylor’s number to direct dial Max’s cell. She unplugs Bridget’s laptop and—

“Hey!” Bridget coughs, crumbs spurting from her mouth. “What the hell?”

“It’s not safe staying here tonight. No contact with the outside world.” Max slides the machine into her bag and withdraws a bottle of water just as Bridget finishes off the last bit. Max takes the wrapper and hands off the bottle. She then pulls a Limoges box from her bag. “Valerian. All natural megadose.” Bridget takes the pill and slugs it down with a sip from the bottle. “Okay.” Max picks up Bridget by her elbows and gently steers her along the carpet. “Into bed.”

Max can tell the pill is taking effect, dulling Bridget from the shock of the stimulants and, Max hopes, flatlining her from a high that skirts the prior excruciating low. Helping her to lie down, Max puts a hand maternally on Bridget’s forehead. Bridget mumbles something.

“Yes?” Max encourages.

“It feels like … like …”

Max turns out the lamp. “It feels like everything they say.... Like he reached into your ribs and ripped your heart out with his bare hands. Like a giant boulder has been dropped there in its place. I know.”

“It, it physically hurts.” Bridget sounds surprised as she rubs the skin just to the left of the zipper on her sweatshirt. “It feels worse than a boulder. It’s like, like … there’s an …
elephant
standing on my chest.”

Max nods acknowledgment as Bridget turns on her side, tucking into a ball as tears trace the vine pattern on her pillowcase. “My head is getting thick,” she murmurs, and Max prays that Taylor’s flaying words are also getting harder to rerun. Max lowers the volume on the iPod dock until it’s off. The lulling sounds of traffic return to the darkened room.

Max stays with Bridget until her breathing is slow and rhythmic, until she is asleep. Max knows it’s what the body wants in moments of such devastation, to shut down and recharge the adrenals. The tiny hit of fermentation, the magnesium in the chocolate, the homeopathic tranquilizer are just enough to signal permission to the brain to step back from what is far too painful to make sense of just now, in the immediate aftermath of impact.

Max stands, covers Bridget with the blanket, relatches the window, and secures a red card on a red cord over Bridget’s wrist.
CALL
IMMEDIATELY
UPON WAKING
. Max flips the card right side up.
EX
,
INC
.

A
twenty-minute subway ride from the Stetsons finds Max returning to her bedroom office in Brooklyn, ready to wrap up the day. Stepping down under the stone stoop to what was once, a hundred years ago, the servants’ entrance, Max spots a tin of cookies left for her by a grateful client who has just completed the Ex, Inc. program. Max bumps the door shut behind her and kicks off her high heels.

Ex, Inc. headquarters are located in the garden-floor apartment of her stepfather’s brownstone. After bouncing around the country for the better part of Max’s life, her mother, Anne, fell for a native New Yorker, Peter Flannery, who she met while writing an article for her most recent gig with the
New Yorker
. While Max was at boarding school crashing head-over-heels-over-head in love, Anne was getting engaged and moving into a house—two things she neglected to do at twenty-two, when she had Max.

Max’s parents met in grad school. But other than an affectionate friendship, Max is the only lasting outcome of their fling. Anderson Scott lives in Tampa, and the one constant in Max’s life has been summers and holidays spent camped by the condo pool with a box of novels, playing gin rummy with the leathery tenants and hearing firsthand highlights of the twentieth century.

What she lived for was when her trips to Tampa overlapped with Zachary Plimpton’s visits to his grandparents. She met Zach the summer after fourth grade at the pool when he complimented her toenail polish. She complimented his in turn and they’ve been best friends ever since, a friendship nurtured over emails and boosted by care packages and shared MP3s.

When Max put together that her mom’s new house was literally just blocks from Zach—she couldn’t get to Brooklyn fast enough. Sorry, Tampa.

Peter inherited the building with the long-held intention of turning the ground-floor studio over to renters, but since they haven’t even found time to unpack her mom’s books or hang pictures, they certainly haven’t had the energy to fix up the unit and become landlords.

With a hundred bucks of babysitting money and a lot of hours of HGTV under her belt, Max went to work on the long, open space. The front of the room she designated the “office” and the back she made her bedroom. She found a couple of banged-up desks people had put out on the street, which she dragged home and painted disco-ball silver. The chaise was a thrift-shop find she updated with more paint and a velvet throw to hide the cat-shredded upholstery. The chandelier she rescued from the Dumpster outside a gut renovation two blocks over. And the screen shielding her bed had been in Peter’s bachelor pad. But the pièce de résistance is the wallpaper. Black velvet flocked on a cranberry-red background. It is high design. It is stunning. It is, in fact, wrapping paper. Lovingly and meticulously Blu-tacked to the walls one rainy weekend by Max and her staff.

“Please hold.” Phoebe, Max’s second assistant, mutes her headset. A sophomore at St. Mary’s Academy, she has been skate-sliding the hardwood in her striped knee socks, as she is wont to do when fielding incoming calls. Phoebe loves working for Ex, Inc. because at school she feels like just one of the kilted masses, and at home, where she is one of identical triplets, she has had it with being called Claudia or Elizabeth. Ex, Inc. is her only place to be wholly herself and contribute to something she believes might be unique in all the world.

“Hi!”

“Hiya.” Max hands off the cookies to Phoebe. Even though Max requests that her satisfied clients repay her only by helping out with future cases—Max never knows where one girl’s family business might come in handy with another’s recovery—many still insist on sending
something
. In fact, the cookies have been coming more frequently these days, and the whole floor is starting to smell like a bakery. Max pulls off her coat and heads over to the refrigerator.

“Trish Silverberg’s ex joined the film club
and
is challenging her position as film club president,” Phoebe says, bringing Max up to speed on her caller’s predicament.

“He is? What’s it been—two weeks?”

“Three since he ‘just wants to be friends’ at her grandmother’s memorial service. Total tool.” Phoebe clicks back on. “Hey, Trish, thanks for holding.”

“I’m on it,” Max says. “Just need to refuel.” She tugs open the mini-fridge in what remains of the kitchenette. She has decoupaged it with tear sheets from fashion magazines, the door a kaleidoscope of kick-ass and fabulous.

Phoebe nods sympathetically as she listens. “Max is so on it, Trish. And remember, he’s entitled not to love you anymore.” Phoebe pulls the chewed pencil from atop her head, two black braids flopping to her shoulders. “But he’s not entitled to mess with your happy place.”

“That’s it! That’s our company Christmas card.” Zachary, now also known as Max’s first assistant, appears in the garden doorway, working an iPhone, its protective case perfectly matching his new green contacts.

Max scrounges in the fridge. “Zach, where’re the thank-you snickerdoodles?”

“I took them on my picnic date with Tom. I didn’t want them to go to waste.”

“I’m going to start telling clients: please, in lieu of gifts, just feed Zachary and his boyfriend.”

“Don’t get testy. We left you the brownies.”

Max snags one and deposits her handbag on the chipped Formica counter (
that
she just has to live with). Phoebe replenishes the handbag from the kitchen cabinet, which contains, maintained at a military level of organization: bars of chocolate, bottles of Vitamin Water Zero, boxes of Kleenex Pocket Packs, packets of valerian imported from Switzerland, binoculars, telephoto lenses, Flip cams, night vision goggles, and camouflage gear. All funded, along with Zach’s and Phoebe’s salaries, when Ex, Inc. received a sizable donation from one of Max’s early clients. Number four out of their current alumnae roster of thirty-two. A deeply appreciative girl with deeply plunging family pockets, grateful to be deeply over the guy who dumped her via voice mail from his parents’ private jet. Phoebe extracts the seized laptop and hands it off to Zach.

“Bridget Stetson’s laptop,” Max explains.

“Thoughts on Silverberg’s ex?” Zachary asks while appraising the faded Kings of Leon stickers haphazardly plastered across the stainless-steel top.

“Silverberg’s ex,” Max repeats absently as she goes to slide the entire cookie tin from the fridge and carry it back to her chaise.

Phoebe follows, helping herself to a brownie as she jogs Max’s memory. “The freak who’s obsessed with his own feet. The one who takes his shoes off in the cafeteria to show how he pronates, and eats with his hands, and is always touching everyone. Such a disgusting combo—”

“Thank you, Feebs. All of which she will totally be seeing clearly by the time she completes the program. She’s so close to graduation, but this election thing is no joke. A booster is definitely in order,” Max reflects, dropping down onto the stunning, if smelling slightly of cat, chaise.

Zach sits on the front of his desk and picks up his notebook. “Public competition can reheat hormones faster than a microwave. We don’t want this going into Angie Riverdale territory.” Zach invokes the name of one of Max’s early cases: the one who didn’t follow Max’s advice and ended up getting dumped—twice. Ex, Inc. legend has it that there was no coming back from that.

“No, we don’t,” Max agrees. “I’ll be your best friend if you go grab me some milk,” she entreats.

“I already hold that honor. Phoebe?” Zach looks to her, invoking his status. Phoebe goes to get a glass for Max with a dramatic sigh.

“Thanks, man,” Max says appreciatively. “My feet are killing me. I had two Hour Ones back-to-back.”

“So,” Zach prompts, bending forward to pick through the brownie debris. “For Trish—which booster? The ‘Oh, right, he sucks’? The ‘I can’t be bothered’? Or the ‘Screw him and the horse he rode in on’?”

Max gives it consideration until Phoebe returns with the milk. “First half: ‘Screw him and the horse.’ Second half: ‘Can’t be bothered.’”

“And how about the ‘Drive it home’?”

“Ummmm, book her on the hot-air balloon ride.”

“Fabulous.” Zachary scribbles.

Checking the time, Phoebe throws up her hands. “
Crap!
Thursday night. Josh’s chess tournament.” She reaches for her backpack, not wanting to be late to cheer on her boyfriend.

“Tell him I said to rock it.” Max lifts a victory fist.

“And I’m meeting you downtown for recon,” Zach reminds Max, scrolling her schedule on his phone as he hops down to leave.

“Right. You’ll scrub Bridget Stetson’s laptop? I want this Taylor downloaded to a memory stick as tiny as his you-know-what.”

“Done.”

“Thanks, guys!” Max makes a prayer position with her hands, and Phoebe curtsies.

A half hour later, Max is labeling a new folder
Bridget Stetson
when her mother calls down the stairs from the family kitchen. “Max! Can you come up?”

“Sure!”

Max takes the folder and slides it under the pile of college guides she keeps prominently on her desk in case her mother does wander down. After several rounds of screaming matches that made passing dogs cower, Anne let Max drop out of St. Something’s on the condition that she got her GED, aced the SATs, and applied to nine colleges. Max is hoping that just meeting the first two conditions will suffice.

Last winter Max walked out of the Met the day of her epiphany with a clear sense that whatever was next for her academically had to be about her mission. Her mission turned into Ex, Inc., a business that was built from the ground up, relying on referrals from one friend to the next. Max needs to saturate a community to effect change, and she’s not about to move away just as her work is gaining momentum.

The answer came to her at the nail salon while reading an interview with Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen about their fashion label’s new fall line. They credited their program at NYU with giving them the freedom to grow their business while they got their education. Bingo! She could keep her local client base—and design her program around the thing she was most passionate about. Even better, when her mother got itchy to move on like she always does, Max would have roots of her own already established. Nothing would jeopardize her work. Of course she hasn’t told her mother about Ex, Inc. yet. Or that she’s only applying to NYU. She’s waiting until she has the letter of acceptance in hand.