Over You (6 page)

“I was deep cleaning my room like you said to. Just like you said, I was making room for the new. And then I went to vacuum the floor of my closet and remembered that he broke this—” She holds out the attachment. “When he tried to suck up spilled cereal. It was soggy. I never told my mom. So I went to get the dustpan, and that’s where I found this.” She holds up her thumb with a Chiquita banana sticker. “They’re everywhere.” She fans her fingers, revealing stickers on each tip. “Every time he ate a banana. He never threw them out. So, I wanted to clean them off and found this—” She holds out a shoe polish–stained cloth. “In the rag bin.”

“A Minnie Mouse T-shirt. Okay …”

“I’ve had it since I was seven. He must’ve used it to polish his shoes when he came over before the forensics tournament.”

“And …”

“So!” Jen is desperate to make her point. “So he was trying to help me with my chores. He was trying to dress better. He was
trying
. If only I’d given him more credit, any credit. I should have baked him cupcakes or, or I don’t know, given him a hand job before he competed. I didn’t make it an occasion. I should have made it an occasion! Why didn’t I make it an occasion?!
Why?!
”

Max grabs her by her shoulders. “Did
he
make it an occasion when you cooked snacks every time his friends crashed your dates, wore a new outfit every time you saw him, did his physics homework? And yes, gave him a hand job? Was there a grand marshal parade for that?” Max wrests the tee and the attachment and unpeels each sticker from Jen’s fingertips. “Cold shower! Let’s go! While you’re in there, meditate on this: soggy cereal with the vacuum? Really, Jen?
Really?
” Max pushes a Chiquita sticker onto the center of Jen’s forehead and, with a quick look to make sure the route is clear of siblings, turns her to the hallway.

Waiting to hear the water running in the bathroom, Max commences searching for and scraping off Chiquita stickers with one deft move of a razor. Jen was right—they’re everywhere: stuck to book covers, picture frames, electronics. Max dials Phoebe, gripping the phone with her shoulder as she climbs on Jen’s desk to hang the piñata from the ceiling fan.

“Phoebe here.”

“Hiya. Can you meet me at Jen’s in twenty with an extra razor and a bottle of Goo Gone?”

“Can
you
fill me in on Hugo Tillman?” Phoebe retorts.

Max feels a cold heat pass through her and darts a steadying hand to the ceiling. “Phoebe.”

“I’m serious. Since when do I not get clearance on a case? It sucks balls.”

“Charming.”

“Come on, who did this blond hottie dump? I Googled him, but all I got was a pic of him on some red carpet in
New York
magazine.”

“
He’s in
New York
magazine?!
” Max screeches.

“Just tell me. I get it’s someone big. A debutante? Celebrity? The mayor’s daughter?”

“Me,” Max says simply, the floor a million miles away. “He dumped me.”

Stunned silence. She can just see Phoebe’s bottom jaw hanging wide, the purple rubber bands of her lingual braces stretched to their limit.
New York
magazine? Why?!

“AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!” Jen screams from the bathroom.

“I have to go. This conversation is permanently over. Eighteen minutes, Phoebe. Razor and Goo, got it?”

“Sorry, yes, got it.”

The bedroom door swings open and Jen flies in, water droplets spraying the rug. Max tugs the billy club from her bag, and spins Jen toward the dangling face of her ex.

That evening Max knows what she needs. Her drug of choice, if you will. So a pinkie-nail-sized picture of Hugo’s head at some stupid party made a magazine’s social roundup. What Max has going for her is so much cooler.

Her mom is working late—again. But Max doesn’t mind. After meeting Anne for a burger around the corner from 4 Times Square, her gleaming high-rise office building, Max escorts her mom back to her desk, showing the appropriate filial concern for her disgustingly pregnant state. But really this gives Max the advantage of gliding past lobby security without arousing attention. Once Max has kissed her mom good-bye at the
New Yorker
offices on twenty, she gets back in the elevator and heads up two floors—on her way to her happy place, the flagship of
Teen Vogue
.

The first time she came to have dinner at Condé Nast with her mom, looked up at the elevator directory, and saw
Teen Vogue
listed, she almost fainted. So much glamour, so much potential, just two floors above Anne’s army of the cerebral unadorned. Anne always has so many articles swimming behind her eyes, she would forget to change clothes if Max didn’t remind her to hang today’s suit at the back of her closet and pull from the front tomorrow.

That first night, Max waited until her mother was lost in work before putting down her practice AP and casually saying she was going to get a soda. Max’s palms were sweaty before the elevator doors even opened, revealing a wall-sized replica of that month’s cover and—even better—no glass barriers, no key card required for access. While the building is usually empty late at night, Max pulled herself up a little straighter and flipped her hair just in case she had to pass someone. She tried to carry herself like an intern and walked briskly, as if she knew where she was going, as if she belonged.

Max told herself, as she moved hungrily along the charcoal carpeting among the slick white cubicles, fingering fabric swatches and look books, that she just wanted to see where this vision came together. But she knew there was one siren song calling her.

The closet.

She spotted it at the end of the hallway. Its gleaming double doors beckoning. She promised herself she’d just peek. But as she pressed the silver handle and the smell of fresh cloth—the scent of department stores, of transformation and hope—hit her, she knew she was lost.
Closet
was an epic understatement of a noun. This was a huge room filled with racks of brand-new clothes. So new they had never been worn by anyone; so new, the idea of these clothes—the colors, the cuts, the style—didn’t even exist yet—just for those few people who had made them and anyone who had been behind this door. The care, thought, and debate that had gone into every single stitch was just so inspiring. And the endless possibility for self-invention that surrounded her took her breath away. Before she knew what she was doing, she had dropped her romper to the floor and was wearing an LF dress with a Vivienne Tam chunky sweater. She was in heaven.

Careful to leave the racks of clothes yet to be photographed untouched, she pilfered freely from the one labeled
TO BE RETURNED
. What would it matter if Vince didn’t get this cashmere wrap dress back this week? He could wait. Rogan could live without this T-shirt. Max turned the closet into her own personal couture lending library, always returning the items within seven days and always immaculate.

Tonight as Max fingers the garments, planning next week’s wardrobe, she thinks about her current roster of clients and their programs. She grabs a puffed-sleeved Lululemon jacket in a kind of funky scuba-suit material for boxing with Bridget, a Marni faux-fur vest for taking Jen out to Coney Island to ride the roller coasters, and a Burberry trench for tailing Trish Silverberg’s ex to make sure he’s playing this election straight.

Then she spots it—a red silk column caught somewhere between a dress and a slip, so perfectly cut that it makes Max look naked and perfectly clothed at the same time. Max spins in the mirror, taking in her reflection. Unlike the jacket or the vest or the trench, this is not armor designed to help her look like the in-control person her clients need her to be. This is, to put it simply, a date dress. A dream-date dress. This is the dress you wear to get the guy.

She feels her eyes water as her phone glows to life on the floor.

“Zach?” she answers. “What do we know?”

“Yeah, why don’t you meet me downstairs?”

“You’re here?”

“By the revolving doors.”

She quickly hangs the dress back up, packs her massive tote, and hustles to the elevator bank, riding down to the first floor with her booty over her shoulder. She nods at the guard as she spins through the security turnstile to see Zach looking uncharacteristically small under the two-story granite ceiling.

“Zachary! What’re you doing? You could have just given me the report over the phone.” She follows him out through the revolving door onto 42nd Street.

“I wanted to be here.” He unpeels his green scarf and drapes it around her as she lowers the bag between her ankles. “Hello, Father Christmas.”

“I got a Marni vest you will want to rip off my corpse. Okay, don’t be so dramatic—just tell me. Hugo’s here for a whole week?”

Zach presses his thin lips together.

“Spill it.” She wraps her arms around herself. “You found his hotel. I’ll just avoid the neighborhood. He’ll get back on a plane and head off to wherever he’s going to college—Harvard—he’s, like, twelfth-generation Harvard—his family went there
and
built it during breaks between classes. I can deal with a few days of lying low—”

“Or months?”

“Months?”

“Years?”

“Years!”

Zach splays his fingers. “Okay. I recognized the jacket he’s wearing in that picture is
this
season’s John Varvatos.”

“You have freakish skills.”

“
Gracias
. So I called
New York
mag pretending to be from John Varvatos saying we wanted to contact him about spokesperson stuff, blah, blah, blah, and they gave me the number of his publicist—”

“Publicist?!” Max finds herself screeching for the second time in not just her life but in one day. “Hugo Tillman—Waspiest of the Wasps, the guy who not only has the same monogrammed velvet slippers as his seventy-two-year-old grandfather, he has the matching belt buckle—he has a
publicist
?”

“So I called the publicist pretending to be from
New York
mag—saying we got traffic off the pic on the site and were interested in doing a profile.”

“And?”

“Well, she was running for an appointment and wanted to schedule a lunch. Can you imagine? But she did tell me one thing. The family has a new building downtown. Tillman Development’s first venture in Manhattan, a superdeluxe high-rise. Hugo’s learning the ropes.”

Max makes a sound of loathing like something a snake might say if it could clear its throat.

“Since it’s downtown, the company wants to project a younger, hipper image and will be—and I quote—
positioning
Hugo to be the new face of Tillman, Inc. Like Ivanka Trump. With testicles.”

If Max opens her eyes any wider, her eyeballs will fall out of her head and roll across the street to the Gap. “So he’ll be coming to the city all the time?”

Zach nods. “I can take her up on that lunch. Get the whole story.”

For a second, Max is tempted. “No. Too high risk.” Max’s teeth start to chatter but it isn’t that cold out.

“Look.” Zach puts his hand on her arm. “We’re going to the Plaza, chocolate milk-shaking up, and you’re
finally
going to talk me through this. Seriously, it’s cray-cray that I know nothing about what went down with you and this guy. I want every detail,” Zach continues with forced flamboyance. “How you met, was it torrid, did he like you on top?”

Max looks at him. As much as she wants to, she can’t—still can’t bear laying the whole thing out for his unflinching analysis. “Thanks, but I’m totally fine.”

A flicker of hurt creases Zach’s face like the time he stepped on sea glass. They were chatting up hot surfers, and Max didn’t find out he was bleeding until well after the guys paddled off. Zach deflates, his voice quiet. “Seriously, Max?”

“Totally. I’m not giving it another thought.”

Instead she’s thinking about this new information so hard, by the time her train pulls into the Bergen Street station she suspects it may be powering the entire MTA grid. Can they hack the PR firm’s computer, get Hugo’s schedule of events—and put Max on a bus to New Jersey for each one? Max bangs through the turnstile and drags her bag up the stairs like it’s full of cats who’ve done something to piss her off.

While not up for rehashing Hugo with Zach—chocolate does sound right. She stops into the deli to scour the rows of Ritter Sport, thinking this is probably a six-bar level of shock. She’s getting ready to pay when someone behind her asks, “Expecting a shortage?”

She whips around, prepared to deliver an icy glare to the lame-ass—“Cooper Baby,” she says, relieved to see him instead, despite how badly she wants to be in a self-indulgently foul mood.

“Ben,” he reminds her. “Whatcha up to?” he asks. “Having a magnesium party?”

“Huh?” she asks, spotting the empty can in his hand, the remaining five dangling from their plastic chokers.

“Sorry,” Ben says, “AP bio exam tomorrow. Chocolate’s high in magnesium. Why women crave it when they have their …” He trails off, turning the same strawberry color as the sticky corners of his mouth. He burps. “Excuse me.”

“Did you just pound that?” she has to ask.

“I can
not
go to sleep tonight. I am four days behind on homework because of all the college stuff.” Ben takes her chocolate from her and puts it on the counter. “All together,” he tells the Korean guy.