Psychos: A White Girl Problems Book (25 page)

“Yeah, I know,” said Gen. “I didn’t end up having AIDS, but I was terrified for, like, three days. But I couldn’t even tell you because you’d just gotten home and you seemed so fragile. There’s always something with you, Babe. One-way street.”

“She’s right,” Roman whispered under his breath.

“Oh, please, Roman. Throw me under the bus much? My life has been way too fucked up over the past few months for me to be emotionally raped by my two former best friends while my ex-therapist films it and posts it on YouTube.”

“You’re doing it right now, Babe,” said Susan, making a note on her notepad.

“I’m doing
what
right now, Susan?”

“You’re doing exactly what Genevieve is accusing you of. You’re making everything about you. We’ve dealt with this stuff in our therapy for years: Narcissistic Personality Disorder. This shouldn’t really come as a surprise.”

“I’m not sure it’s so ethical for you to be bringing my personal stuff from therapy into a group session with my friends.”

“I’m not sure it’s that ethical of you to call your therapist, who’s just trying to help you, a disloyal backstabbing bitch, but who’s really keeping track of ethics at this point?” Susan quipped.

“Susan’s right. You aren’t hearing what we’re saying to you. I was feeling super abandoned by you at a time of need when I thought I had AIDS and needed to break up with Josh.”

“Gen, you never had AIDS. Stop talking about AIDS.”

“Well, I really felt like I did, and feelings are real. I was so distraught from all of it that I had to break up with him. But when you first got home from Utah you were so consumed with your own shit that I felt like I couldn’t talk to you about it.”

“But I remember you telling me about Josh. You said he was nineteen. See? I was listening.”

“Me casually mentioning that I was dating this guy but I didn’t think it was going to work is completely different than me telling you that my heart had been ripped out and I didn’t know if I’d ever recover. I just downplayed it because you are always super judgmental about me dating young guys—for the record, he was twenty—and I just didn’t want to get into it with you. But I was torn apart when I broke up with Josh. I ate a pizza.”

“She really did. It was dark,” added Roman.

Both Gen and Roman looked super serious as they were recalling the Josh situation. I felt bad for Gen.

“When Robert and I hooked up at Chateau after you guys left, I went crazy and ate, like, forty thousand calories’ worth of food in one night,” I admitted. “I didn’t realize how hurt you were over this guy.”

“Can you remember Gen ever being hurt over a guy?” asked Susan.

“Um . . .”

“No. She definitely can’t.” Gen was actually almost in tears, but she continued. “I really needed my friends at that time and you weren’t there for me. Roman, you were pretty nice to me, but you totally forgot to thank me during your acceptance speech at the Gay Grammys.”

“You won a Gay Grammy?” I interjected.

“Yeah, I did. Three of them. Best Single, Best New Artist, and Best Pop Vocal—Male.”

“Congrats, that’s really incredible.”

“Thanks, Babe. It was a big night for me. And yes, I thanked you, but I just forgot to thank Gen and she’s clearly still mad about it.”

“It was just rude.”

“Well, maybe I didn’t feel like thanking you?”

“Why didn’t you want to thank Gen?” Susan asked.

“Yeah, Roman,” I prodded, “why didn’t you want to thank Genevieve?”

“Because Gen tried to fuck my boyfriend the night she dumped Josh.”

“I did not.”

“But, like, you did.”

“Genevieve, Uri? Really? What the fuck?”

“Whatever,” muttered Gen. “I was drunk as shit, lonely, and who doesn’t want to fuck Uri? I don’t remember this at all, so why are we even talking about it?”

“Well, trust me. It happened.”

“I’m sorry, Roman. I’m really fucking sorry, okay? You’ve seen me try to fuck lots of people’s boyfriends in the past, and you never seemed to care that much.”

“Other people’s boyfriends are different from my boyfriend!” Roman shouted.

“I get that you guys have had some personal issues, and I hate to keep bringing it back to me, but I’m the one who has a stalker and a minor multiple personality disorder. Also, you flew my therapist here to help me. So can we deal with me or what?” I asked.

I could tell from Susan’s expression that she was starting to get a bit annoyed by our bickering.

“This is like an endless tennis match—it could go back and forth forever and there won’t be any resolution. From what I can gather, you’re all mad at each other, and you have a right to be. But you’re never going to get anything resolved in this way. I think we need to take a step back. So I want to do an exercise with the three of you.”

Roman and Gen looked terrified. Neither of them had ever really been in therapy, so they had no idea what to expect.

“You’re all having a hard time being sympathetic toward one another. I want you to each write down one negative belief that you have about yourself on a piece of paper.”

Susan pulled a few small sheets of printer paper and some pens out of her bag and handed them to us.

“Do we have to do this?” asked Roman.

“Yeah. I don’t want to fucking do anything like this. That sounds retarded,” said Gen.

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. This is your time,” Susan calmly explained.

Gen, Roman, and I looked at one another and smiled. I started to giggle because I knew they were as over this whole therapy session as I was.

“Late lunch?” Gen said quietly.

“Thank God. I’m fucking starving,” added Roman.

“So you guys don’t want me to continue with the exercise?”

“No, Susan. We’re fine now. You fixed us. You’re brilliant. Go back to LA.”

“I’m over it,” said Roman.

“Obviously,” Gen agreed.

“Love you. Love you.”

“Love you. Love you.”

“Love you. Love you.”

And with that, we finally went to lunch. I wasn’t totally over my shit, but I would be with some time. My two besties had put in the time and effort to come to my emotional rescue and for that I was grateful. It was already 5:30 and none of us had eaten all day, so we went downstairs to the Gallery, which was the only restaurant that was serving food at that time. I ordered an Assam tea and the chilled poached salmon, Gen ordered a Cobb with no bacon, no blue cheese crumbles, and no dressing, and Roman got the steak tartar.

I was missing Robert. We’d gone to lunch at the Gallery years earlier when we were first dating. I looked across the empty restaurant and saw the table where we’d eaten. It was all a bit overwhelming for me, so I excused myself to go to the bathroom.

As soon as I was in a stall, I burst into tears. Maybe it was the hunger, maybe it was the therapy, but I was pretty sure it was the fact that I was going to end up alone. I cried for a while. Then I pulled my shit together, reached in my purse to grab my powder, and noticed the following words written in lipstick on the little mirror of my compact:

Soon.

TTYL

I
threw my compact against the floor and proceeded to stomp on it, smashing it into a million shards of plastic and glass. Not only was Thalia still at large, but she had gotten close enough to me to get inside my bag.

I felt violated. I felt scared. I felt like I’d been molested.

I stood there for a minute, just staring at the broken compact strewn across the tiled floor, and then I let out a sound that no human being has ever produced. The noise that came out of my mouth in that bathroom was like the battle cry of a prehistoric animal with hairy wings and a forty-foot penis. I went primal. Full on modus brute.

A cocktail waitress with wide eyes came barging in.

“Are you okay?! What’s going on?” She was frantically searching the room for any sign of a fight, I guess.

I didn’t exactly respond to her so much as stand there, rocking and breathing heavily.

“Excuse me? Miss? Are you okay?”

I tilted my head up, revealing my maniac eyes and trembling lip.

“Miss?”

“Thhhaaallliiiaaaa,” I groaned.

“Are you . . . okay?”

“NO! I’m not okay. Where the fuck is that fucking bitch?”

Her gaze found the mess on the floor. She looked at me like she thought I might attack her, which was a strong possibility.

“You know something, don’t you?”

“What? I just work here.”

“I don’t give a shit. I’m gonna end this motherfucker once and for all.”

“Excuse me?”

“Excuse you is right,” I spat at her. “Excuse ME!” I pushed past the bewildered girl and toward the door. Before leaving the bathroom, I grabbed one of those self-standing toilet paper holders to use as a weapon if things got out of hand.

Thalia was in New York. I knew she had to be close. I could feel her watching me, laughing at me.

I stormed directly over to Gen and Roman, who were sitting across from each other in silence, scrolling on their phones and sipping their vodka sodas.

“She’s fucking here!” I told them, waving the toilet paper holder around and letting the room know that I was not to be dealt with lightly.

“What le fuck, Babe?” Gen said without looking up from her phone.

“You guys. Thalia is back.”

“Wait, what?” asked Roman.

Gen looked up at me. “Prove it.”

“Jesus, Genevieve, I’m not kidding! And I can’t prove it because I broke the evidence. But it’s her. She’s fucking here, she has to be!”

“Thalia?”

“Yes, I fucking told you guys.”

“How do I know you’re not just being annoying?”

I slammed the table with my free hand. “Being annoying?!”

I scream-whispered right in her face; she didn’t even flinch. “There was another death threat. It was on my compact, which was in my bag, which means she must’ve gotten close enough to me to get in there.”

“When was the last time you opened that compact?” Roman asked.

“I don’t know, yesterday? This morning? I don’t KNOW.”

“Babe, sit down, people are leaving,” he pleaded.

I pounded the table again. “Roman, don’t.”

“Okay, okay. Fine. So, the person who wrote that note could’ve gotten into your bag yesterday potentially?”

“But I can feel her presence!”

“Wait,” said Gen dryly. “Show me the note.”

“I destroyed it when I smashed the compact on the fucking floor, which I just told you.”

“Babe, I can’t.”

“No, I can’t.”

Roman stood up and looked past me toward the bathroom, from which the terrified waitress had just emerged and begun to
alert the rest of the waitstaff that a crazy customer was walking around the restaurant with a TP holder, threatening people’s lives.

“So you’re sure Thalia is the same person from Chateau?”

“Yes, Roman, Thalia! My stalkerrrrr. Why is this so hard for you to understand?!”

“I’m just saying it looks like Thalia is in jail,” said Gen, looking down at her phone.

“What?” I was truly dumbfounded. “Gimme.” I grabbed Gen’s iPhone from her hand. It was open to the
Daily Mail,
to an article with the headline
RUSSIAN SOCIALITE ARRESTED FOR THEFT, ARMS DEALER FATHER REFUSES TO COMMENT.
And there under the bold type was a photo of Thalia and her family at the front of a yacht. I’d recognize that face anywhere now.

“Wait . . .” I speed-read through the post, searching for anything that would mean something to me. A clue, anything.

About three paragraphs in I saw it. “New York City . . .”

“Oh my God, you guys.”

“. . . in a MAC Cosmetics . . .”

I looked up from the screen. “She was arrested at a MAC store.”

“Not chic,” Gen said, shaking her head in disapproval.

“No, not fucking chic. And I told you it was her! New York?! The lipstick?!”

Gen took her phone back. “She probably got bailed out immediately and came to finish what she started with you.”

“Genevieve, please,” Roman said.

That hadn’t even occurred to me.

“Are you serious?” I demanded. “What the fuck? Is that
possible?” My body temperature in that moment was embarrassingly warm. “Roman? Is she still out there?” I was losing it all over again.

“Okay, okay, calm down,” he said, putting an arm out to grab my weapon.

“No!” I ran across the room swinging the metal stand, creating a streamer of toilet paper behind me. The whole thing was very Olympics opening ceremonies, and everyone in the restaurant was staring at me.

The room’s blue and gold wallpaper was swirling and I forgot where I was. I had one simple thought in my head:
Find this loser pervert psycho bitch who’s been following me and kill her . . . to death.

I began screaming with my arms open wide to the sky. “Come and get me! I’m right where you want me!”

End this now, I kept telling myself. I’d come too far on my life’s journey and the stakes were too high to let this psycho fuck with my progress. I was a warrior. It was Thalia’s blood or mine. I hadn’t felt a surge of anger like this since they rebranded Yves Saint Laurent as Saint Laurent Paris.