Socially Awkward (4 page)

“Yeah, sure. It’s all ready to go,” she said, still a bit distracted. I let it go, thinking she was just scrolling through her mental rolodex to place
whomever
Olivia’s photo
had reminded her of
.
It pleased me to see this, since t
hat’s exactly what I’d wanted: t
o give people t
he feeling that this woman was someone everyone knew or recognized from somewhere. Someone just on the edge of memory.

Of course, it didn’t take long for my genius plan to start back-firing. Because Claire was already in my apartment, working at my desk,
she
discover
ed
my secret stash of diet brochures from Dr. Brinkley
while I was updating my fake Facebook profile
.

She was “straightening up” my make-shift office and I had my back to her,
clicking away on my laptop
,
looking for people to send friend requests to and get this project off the ground.
To make it look like I was legit, I posted a bogus status update: “Off to another rehearsal for…” What would Olivia be rehearsing on a random week night? Shakespeare? Simon? Ah, I got it. “Off to another rehearsal for Noises Off!”

Olivia would play the underwear-clad Brooke, a young undiscovered actress with virtually no acting instincts. It struck me that Olivia was perfect for this role and I wondered if that’s where I got the idea for her in the first place. After all,
Noises Off
was one of my favorite movies. Whatever happened to my copy of that DVD? It had to be around here somewhere.

Anyway, with my status updated, I moved on to my recent notifications and learned that three random people had accepted my friend request, bringing my friend total to a respectable 18
in record time
. The new friends included Tom Payone, Duncan Montieff, and some guy named Brent Deeper, who might actually be a porn star with a name like that. His location was listed as Hollywood, CA, so I guess anything’s possible.

“Hey Jen, what the heck is all this?” she asked
,
flipping through the disheveled stack
.

“What the heck is
what
?” I tossed the question over my shoulder,
my eyes locked on a long list of possible friends for Olivia to have.

“All these brochures and stuff. Yoga for Plus Size Women?
Your
Slow Metabolism and You? Come on, Jen, where did these come from?”

I groaned, dropping my head into my hands. I should have hidden it better. It had
only been a few days
since my trip to see Dr. Brinkley, but my new commitment to fitness had ended almost as soon as it had begun.
Hence, my cupcake lunch. It was just l
ike every other time I’d committed myself to fitness in the past.  If Claire knew about it, there was only one thing that could happen.

“If you’re trying to lose weight, why
w
on’t you let me help you?” she asked, sounding a bit hurt.  I turned to her then, almost feeling bad
about all the times I’d refused her help
.
And not just earlier that day in my kitchen.
 

“I’m
not
trying, I already told you. My doctor gave me those last week, okay? Just leave it alone.” My voice sounded strained, but I stayed defiant under her pressuring gaze. “Put them back please.”

For a few moments, Claire complied. She stacked the pamphlets back up, positioning the pile carefully on the corner of my desk, without saying a word. I watched her suspiciously as she finished clearing off the desk, dropping pens into the pen holder and dropping all of my unopened mail into its designated basket. She kept her back to me, but even so, I knew she wasn’t going to stop.

Mentally, I counted down from ten. Right on cue, just as my brain thought the word
one
, she cleared her throat.

“You know,” she said, with as much nonchalance as she is capable of. “
I was really hoping you could finally help me tackle that quilting project I’ve been putting off…”

“What quilting project?”

“Remember when you were going to show me how to turn all those old t-shirts from high school into a quilt? I have a whole tote full of them in my closet and I need to get rid of them. So I was thinking, maybe if you helped me, since you were always so much better at that crafty stuff than I am…”

“Okay,” I said, stretching out the last syllable. I knew that second shoe was going to drop at any moment.

“But I know you’re really busy, so I wouldn’t want to impose. Or, at least, I wouldn’t want to feel like you were helping me for nothing, you know?”

“Uh huh…” I turned my eyes back to my laptop under the guise of working. In reality, I just kept clicking back and forth between two open windows on my screen, waiting for her to finish her belabored point.

“So maybe we could do some sort of… I don’t know…
talent
exchange?”

I snapped my laptop shut quietly, raising my eyes to her once again. Claire was leaning against my clean desk, arms crossed, and apparently lost in her thoughts. As transparent as her efforts were, I really loved her right then for how hard she was trying.

“Fine, Claire. You can help me.”

“
Help you what?
”
She blinked, playing dumb.

I narrowed my eyes at her.

“Okay,
okay,” she caved, looking relieved and truly pleased. “You won’t regret this, I promise.
Just be
ready to go
at 6 am tomorrow. I’m picking you up and we’re getting started right away.”

“Tomorrow? It’s Saturday,” I protested.

Claire was already halfway out the front door. She turned to me, hands on her hips.
“Calories don’t take the weekends off, Jen
.
And neither do we.”

CHAPTER FOUR

So in the morning, I found myself held prisoner by
my sister
.

“You’re going to love this place,” Claire said, for the fourth time, as she pulled into a parking spot in front of a local gym.

“Tom’s Workou
t World?” I was a bit skeptical
, unable to stop myself from mocking the chosen title of this hole-in-the-wall facility. Located in a rundown strip mall, where his only neighbors were a dry cleaning service and a pet grooming salon—neither of which had any customers at that particular moment
, or possibly in the last five years
—Tom’s place was more like
a workout hut and less like a
world
.

The sign was cracked, for starters, and the storefront window appeared never to have been introduced to a squeegee. I was less worried about getting a good workout during my visit than I was about the risk of contracting a foreign illness from the place.

“You seriously workout here?” I asked my sister. I couldn’t quite bring myself to get out of the car. Claire, on the other hand, had already parked, turned off the engine, tied her hair into a neat ponytail, and fished our gym bags out of the back seat. She thrust mine into my lap with deliberate force.

“Come on, Complainy Pants. Let’s get your sweat on.”

“I hope that’s all I get on me…” I muttered the words under my breath as we both popped out of Claire’s little Civic, but she heard me. I wish my sister didn’t have super-human ears sometimes. Lord knows,
I wouldn’t have heard
her
, not with my
damaged
hearing nerves
.  And because life is so unfair, I got a punch in the arm. “Oww!”

I scowled, reluctantly falling into step beside her as we neared the building. My instincts told me to stop moving, but my arm was already sore. Why challenge Claire when it was obviously so pointless?

“No more whining. I will
giv
e Tom permission to torture you for every complaint you utter.”

“And why would he listen to you?” I snapped at her.

“No reason.”

I caught Claire’s shifty look and raised my eyebrows. She looked away, somewhere off into the distance. Interesting.

The inside of Tom’s Workout World couldn’t have been any more different from what
I expected
. From the parking lot, you’d never believe there were flat panel televisions, state-of-the-art exercise machines, and a staff of at least five super-hot trainers in here. Maybe they left the windows grimy on purpos
e, to keep petty criminals and P
eeping Toms at bay. Ha! Toms.
Well, i
t’s a theory, I guess.

Anyway, staring around the gym, I could barely take it all in. Let’s just say I felt more than a little bit out of my element at that moment

Tom himself greeted us at the front desk and I had to do a double-take. He was the most gorgeous man I had ever seen in my entire life. And I’m including the time I met George Clooney in a grocery store during his days on
ER.
That was pretty hot, but Tom is the kind of guy that makes you want to take a sculpting class.  Hard, well-toned muscles from head to toe—that kind of guy. I mean, looking at him, I could see muscles that I didn’t have names for. Granted, I’m not a Master’s candidate for anatomy, but still. Even through a thin Tom’s Workout World t-shirt, his body was visibly defined. I kind of wanted to try squeezing oranges on his pectoral muscles.

Would that even work?

I bet Tom knows. And judging from the way my sister was looking at him right then, she may know too. Ohhh, lucky Claire!

With this new information, I risked one last greedy look at Tom and promised it would be my last. He was clearly my sister’s turf, and I was not the kind of girl to go violating her trust or stepping on her toes.  Like Tom would ever be interested in someone like me over Claire.

Still, something kept my eyes lingering on the chiseled jaw line, the high cheekbones,
and the
jet black hair. I felt like I’d seen Tom somewhere before, but the memory was too distant for me to grasp. If my suppositions about him and Claire were true, then maybe I’d bumped into him at a party with her somewhere. You’d think I would have instant recall for a guy like Tom if I’d met him in public before, wouldn’t you? But for some reason, I just couldn’t make the connection.

While my sister and her hot trainer talked—or rather, flirted—with each other, I spotted the three of us reflected in a mirror across the room. Really, beyond any sisterly loyalty I might have felt, the view of us standing together was enough to confirm that I was not the one who would be getting anywhere past the gym with this trainer. Claire and Tom leaned in toward one another as they spoke, each one shapely and toned in all the right ways. Off to the side, there was lonely me—the slow member of the herd, left behind to find food and shelter on her own. Or maybe get picked off by a predator. All alone and vulnerable. Possibly limping.

Claire has always been the kind of big sister who casts a big shadow. I guess maybe that’s why I’ve been eating my feelings for all these years. Such a huge shadow meant that I had to grow even bigger, just to be seen around it.  I have a bad habit of taking metaphors too literally, even on a subconscious level from time to time. 

Anyway, Claire is always neat, orderly,
and totally
put-together. She has a great job as a graphic designer for this upstart marketing company. She basically helped the owner build it up from the gr
ound and earned her way up to
Vice President in
less than
ten years. Claire has
a
show-stopping
resume, a k
iller head of luscious
hair, and a
dynamite
pair of long legs. Honestly, her legs would make
a giraffe
jealous. She was a cheerleader in high school, an honor-roll student, and
one of the best soloist sopranos in
the
choir. I couldn’t even get
in
to the choir.

Still, I was much happier to have a job on the high school newspaper, where I wrote an anonymous column about bullying in the school for two years. Beyond that, I just kept my head down and tried not to get shoved into any lockers. Where Claire Smith stood out and got noticed, her little sister was working on being invisible, as much as one girl can be.

Years later, standing in a gym next to the two fittest people I’d ever seen, I was still trying to blend with the crowd, just in a whole different way. Why was I trying to lose this weight again?  Was it really because I wanted to get healthy?  Because I wanted to get noticed and stand out from the crowd for the right reasons?  Or because being overweight was now the thing that was drawing the attention to me and I was still desperate to blend right in?

It was a good thing I decided against that Master’s in Psychology my mom wanted me to get.

“So, Jen, it’s nice to meet you,” Tom said suddenly, seizing my hand and shaking it. “Or do you prefer Jennifer?”

I gazed into his eyes, fighting the urge to bat my eyelashes and considered his question. Hell, he could call me Fat Chick and I would be okay with it, as long as he said it in that smooth, velvety voice of his.

“Jen’s fine.” I managed to squeak out the words, and Claire nudged me in the ribs.

Tom, who seemed oblivious to my blatant lust, just smiled. He probably gets that all the time from
his
clients anyway. “Let’s get you ladies worked out.”

Within a
n hour, I
had
changed my mind about this gym, this trainer, and
my
horrible sister, whose bad ideas just kept getting worse and worse.
Seriously, how guilty would she feel when I dropped dead from Tom’s impossible workout routines? Huh?

“I am going to freaking kill you, Claire.”  I said the words slowly, painfully, around my gasping breaths. I was not allowed to take a break to smack her, so I had to keep lifting the stupid medicine ball over my head and then down again into a squat while I cursed out my evil sister. “Why? Why am I here?”

“Shh!” Claire shook her head at me, timing her squats with mine. It was hard not to notice how much less she was sweating, how much easier this seemed to be for her. How much easier everything we’d done that day, from the two-mile treadmill run to the 50 push-ups, had been for her. “Do. Your. Squats.”

Tom leaned in toward me, his face practically touching mine, and yelled. “There’s no time for chit-chat in my gym!”

Since we’d begun working out together—or rather, since he’d started screaming in my face while I worked out—Tom looked gradually less appealing to me. I noticed a vein that popped out of his forehead when he got angry. Very distracting. And also, he spit on me a little whenever he screamed. Also unattractive.

Claire could keep him.

“Ten more, ladies! Move, move!” Tom paced back and forth in front of us, counting us down from ten, spitting to emphasize all the hard consonants. I sort of wanted to throw my medicine ball at his back, just to see if I could knock him over. Probably not. The man is a pure wall of muscle.

Reaching the end of the set, I dropped the medicine ball onto the mat, enjoying the satisfying thud it made against the vinyl padding. That would have left a nice welt on my trainer. Maybe next time. Tom handed us each a towel and our water bottles, let us take a few moments to recover, and then sent us down to the mats for our cool down stretches. I faced my sister as we stretched out our legs, scowling at her the whole time.  It was her fault that my body hurt in places
I couldn’t discuss in public
, that my legs felt like jelly, that I was hungry enough to eat an entire live animal. Possibly Tom himself if you left me in here long enough.

After we were finally finished with the ritualistic torture, Tom switched back to his old self a
lmost instantly. No more scary Drill S
ergeant Tom, just regular old
F
riendly Tom. Claire didn’t seem to be even the tiniest bit fazed by this weird on/off thing he had going. Having never spent much time with a personal trainer before that day, I had to assume it was just a regular thing that happened in gyms.  What happened in the gym, stayed there? Just like Vegas. That made sense to me.

Hmmm… gym culture. Maybe that should have been my sociologically topic.

I le
f
t the would-be love birds
to
spend some time flirting together, mostly so I could find a nice, comfy chair and sit down.  My body ached from my pinky toenail all the way up to my hair follicles. I
unwound
my hair elastic and shook my sweaty, sticky mane loose, combing my fingers through the tangles. I didn’t know my hair could feel pain, but apparently it needed to stretch out and cool down just as much as my calf muscles.

“Hey there.”

I straightened up instantly, strands of sweaty hair hanging over my face like I was some sort of swamp creature.  There was a male figure standing in front of me, one that could have easily been Tom, given his shape and size.  As I brushed the hair from my face, I got a better look at him and his
stunning smile
.  He was tall and muscular, which seemed to be the norm inside the Workout World, but he had kind eyes and the sort of
grin
you might keep running on a treadmill to reach. He must have been another trainer, given his apparel and the overall condition of his amazingly toned body. I had to wonder if these guys were all part-time Chippendales by night, and if so, where I could see them perform. Of course, I’d bring Claire along with me. What else are sisters for?

“Nice job today,” he said, offering his hand.  “I’m Noah, one of the other trainers.  I saw you working with Tom over there.”

“Yeah, he’s pretty tough,” I shrugged it off, because I am just that cool. “Decent workout though.”

That statement was only true if almos
t dying three times counted as
decent
inside the gym.  I wouldn’t know, because I’d never been inside of a gym before.  Still, Noah smiled knowingly and nodded his approval. Look how quickly I adapted to
that tricky
gym culture, huh? That must’ve been my impending sociology
degree hard at work
.