What To Read After FSOG: The Gemstone Collection Part Two (173 page)

Even though I had lived within commuting distance of WSU, I lived in the dorms my freshman year. I had suffered a horrible bout of depression the summer prior to starting college. My mother had thought it was very important for me to experience living with students my own age. She had been worried that by not doing so, I would isolate myself again. She was very grateful for my roommate Amy. Amy was five feet seven with gorgeous, curly, black hair and beautiful, creamy white skin. Not only was she breathtakingly beautiful, she was the happiest and the most positive person I had ever met. She put up with my depression and my mood swings and would tell me in a goofy voice to “Turn my frown upside down.”

Amy did her best to encourage me to get out of our room. She forced me to attend functions and parties that were held on campus or in our dorm. She was the only reason I made it through my entire freshman year. As our freshman year came to an end, I begged Danny to let me rent the apartment above the bar. Amy tried her hardest to convince me to live on campus for our sophomore year, but as grateful as I was to her, I couldn’t. I needed my own space.

As I glanced over at my cat, Molly, she was staring at me waiting for me to get my ass out of bed to feed her. She was my trusty old friend that I’d owned since high school. I was struggling to get out of bed. My head just wasn’t in the game to photograph this wedding today.

I finally rolled out of bed and as soon as my feet touched the ground, I shivered. Man it’s already starting to get cold, almost time to turn the heat on.

I made my way through my small apartment, which consisted of a kitchen/living room combo, a bedroom and tiny bathroom. The majority of my living room furniture was purchased at yard sales. I had a mismatched couch and love seat, an old cedar chest I turned into a coffee table, an end table and two cheap floor lamps that I had bought at Wal-Mart.

The walls were an ugly dark wood paneling. I tried to spruce them up with hanging pictures on them. The majority of the pictures were black and white landscapes I had taken during high school and college. I took the pictures at Wales Park, a local park that I had hung out at when I was in high school. There was also a photo collage of my best friend, Nicole and me throughout the years. We first met in middle school in sixth grade. With our last names beginning with C and D, we sat right next to each other. We instantly became friends and have been that way ever since. Even though we may not talk to each other every day, anytime something is going on in one of our lives, we know the other will be there. I laugh every time I look at the pictures on the wall. We have changed so much in the last ten years.

As I shuffled into my tiny kitchen, I looked around in disgust. It was in need of a major update. The mismatched appliances from the 1970’s were an eye sore to look at. The refrigerator was avocado green, and my stove was the ugly yellow that my mother called goldenrod. To me, they looked like baby shit green and baby shit yellow. The cabinets matched the ugly wood paneling on my walls. Everything in my kitchen was so outdated, but they were in working order, so who was I to complain. This place wasn’t the “Ritz”, but it was perfect for Molly and me. To us, this was home.

Molly was following me around meowing at me to feed her. I opened the fridge and found a can of cat food and a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke. “Shit,” I muttered. I really needed to go grocery shopping, which I despised doing. I took Molly’s and my breakfast out of the fridge. A glass of Diet Coke for me and tuna fish flavored cat food for her. I’ve never been a coffee person. I’ve never liked it. All my classmates at school would walk around with their coffees, lattes or teas and then there I’d be, with a Diet Coke in my hand.

The caffeine was finally kicking in, and I could feel the drunken haze lifting. I headed to my closet and pulled out my signature wedding outfit, which consisted of black dress pants and a simple black blouse. Wearing all black was our way of staying out of everyone’s way. We needed to blend into the background, and I wasn’t a dress-up kind of girl, anyway. With my clothes in hand, I made my way to the bathroom.

Just like my kitchen, my bathroom has been in desperate need of a facelift. My entire bathroom was pink. The tiles on the walls, the floor, the bathtub and even the toilet looked like a bottle of Pepto-Bismol exploded. I liked pink, but this was a little too much. I hung my outfit on the door to the shower to steam out any minor wrinkles and turned to the mirror to take a look at myself. “Jesus, you look like shit,” I said aloud. I hadn’t realized how tired I looked.

Even though I was not working late nights at Danny’s anymore, the insomnia I had been suffering from, for quite some time, mixed with the music pumping through the floor from the bar below only allowed me a few hours of sleep at night. My shoulder length, wavy, auburn hair was a complete wreck. I moved my face closer to the mirror to see that my pale blue eyes were bloodshot, and my mascara was smudged. I shook my head and jumped into the shower.

I dried my hair with my blow dryer and applied some light makeup trying to conceal the dark, purplish circles under my eyes from the lack of sleep. I grabbed my outfit and headed back into my room in only my bra and underwear. I glanced quickly at myself in my full length mirror. I was average looking. I definitely wasn’t drop dead gorgeous but I wasn’t ugly either. I was average height five feet six inches tall and pretty trim. I pulled on my dress pants and did a quick twirl in front of the mirror and stopped to stare at my ass. For some reason, men really enjoyed slapping or grabbing it at Danny’s. I’d been told on several occasions that I was
bootylicious.
I’m still unsure if that was a compliment or not.

I glanced up to my shoulder before I pulled my blouse over it, glimpsing at my scorpion tattoo, and I remembered the drunken weekend my friend Anna and I had shared. We had gone up to the beach, and as we were walking down the boardwalk, we passed a tattoo parlor. I stopped in front of the window and stared in. There was a big burly guy covered in tattoos working on a girl my age. I turned to Anna and told her how I had always wanted a tattoo. A huge Cheshire cat grin spread across her face and she yelled, “Let’s do it!”

At the end of the weekend we both ended up with tattoos on our backs. Boy, my mother was pissed when she saw it. “You’ve ruined your body!” She’d yelled at me.

I’d just roll my eyes at her. “Oh, Mom, give me a break everyone has a tattoo nowadays.”

I spun back around to face the mirror head on. Before I buttoned my blouse, I let out a big sigh and Molly jumped up on the bed. “You know Molly. You would think a twenty two year old woman would have eventually grown out of the bra size that she has been wearing since the eighth grade,” I said to her as I looked at her reflection in the mirror.

Molly looked at me and meowed like she knew exactly what I was saying. Although my boobs weren’t huge, they were proportionate to my frame, but I still got jealous when I’d turned on the TV or looked in a magazine to see all those women with much more cleavage. Let me just say a padded bra from Victoria Secret works wonders.

I contemplated getting a boob job, but I was too much of a chicken shit to ever go through with it. I’d seen a show on MTV that was dedicated to girls who were getting breast implants. These girls were crying on the way home from their surgery because of the bumpy car ride and how much it hurt to go over speed bumps. They had to tape themselves up with Ace bandages to keep them from moving. The final straw was the tube inserted inside their boobs to drain any infection. I remember thinking, “
Oh my . . . Why would anyone put themselves through that?
” I thought I was going to vomit when I saw that.

As I gazed into the mirror, with the disgusting vision of the boob job drain still in my head, I buttoned my blouse and my cell phone began to ring. It was Katie calling. She always called me the morning of a wedding to make sure I was all set. Katie was pretty neurotic about her photography business. Being like an older sister to me, she always wanted to make sure I was ready.

“Hey, Katie. How are you?”

“Hi Leila, are you ready for your next Bridezilla?”

“You know it,” I said confidently.

Katie went over the specifics of the wedding with me. This was actually the first out of town wedding that I would be photographing on my own. The bride was getting ready at the venue where both the ceremony and reception were being held. I was extremely happy to hear that. It made things so much easier when everything was held at the same location.

A
s I headed out the door, I double-checked to make sure I had my cell phone, my camera and extra batteries. Bridezilla was getting married at a beautiful apple orchard about an hour and a half away from my apartment. Katie and I had photographed a wedding there about six months before, so I was familiar with the grounds.

As I began walking down the stairs, thoughts of last night crept back into my head. I cringed, and my stomach began to ache. I rushed down the rest of the stairs to the parking lot taking a deep breath in. The air outside was brisk. Fall was definitely upon us. I hopped into my beat up old Honda Civic. Even though it was old, I loved my car. The seats were a bit beaten up and worn, but I didn’t care. We’d been through a lot together, and it had never let me down. I popped my new
P!nk
CD into the player and hiked up the volume and off, I went.

I arrived at the orchard in record time. I am known to have a lead foot, especially when I listen to music. I tend to get in a zone and lose myself in it. It was a miracle I had never been pulled over for speeding. I pulled into the parking lot with my stereo blaring
P!nk.
She was singing about the weekend as I parked my car. I couldn’t wait to get this wedding over with and start my weekend.

As I made my way from the parking lot into the venue, I noticed the leaves on the trees were beginning to change colors. The orchard was absolutely breathtaking. There were acres and acres of land covered in beautiful fall colors of reds, oranges and yellows. Fall was my absolute favorite season of the year. I entered the lobby of the reception hall and headed directly to the wedding coordinator’s office to introduce myself and find out where the bridal party was located.

Upon arriving at the bridal suite, I could hear a commotion from behind the door. I knocked and a moment later heard a loud abrupt, “Who is it?”

“Leila, your wedding photographer,” I replied.

The door flew open and there she was, Bridezilla in the flesh. She looked like a cast member of
Jersey Shore
. She had jet black hair, fake eyelashes, and huge fake boobs with overly tanned skin. All she was missing was a big poof on the back of her head.

“Oh, who are you?” She huffed.

I tried to introduce myself to her, but she put her hand up in my face, demanding to know where Katie was. I explained that Katie was photographing another wedding today, and that I’d been working for Katie for four years. Bridezilla cut me off mid-sentence and insisted that I get Katie on the phone immediately. I sighed, got out my cell phone and started dialing Katie’s number. No sooner had I hit the last digit, Bridezilla ripped the phone out of my hand. She instantly began yelling at Katie, saying that it was unacceptable, and she demanded that Katie gets here right away. Her voice sounded like she smoked three packs of cigarettes a day which gave me the chills.

I could only imagine what Katie was saying to her on the other end. She was a fantastic photographer and a great boss, but if you crossed her, she turned into what I liked to call a
Chihuahua.
Bridezilla became very quiet and handed the phone back to me without saying a word. I raised the phone to my ear. I could hear Katie explaining to Bridezilla, as she told her at her initial consultation, there was a possibility that she would not be photographing the wedding herself and an employee might be her replacement. Katie went on to say that it even stated as much in the contract that she had signed.

I couldn’t help smiling. Eventually, I had to interrupt Katie, letting her know that it was now me on the phone. Katie started to laugh and said, “Kill Bridezilla with kindness today, and I will give you an extra fifty bucks for putting up with that bitch.”

I started laughing. “Will do.”

After I hung up with Katie, I turned to Bridezilla, held out my hand and officially introduced myself. “Hi, I’m Leila your wedding photographer,” with a smug little smirk on my face.

Bridezilla just looked at me and said sulkily, “I’m Susan.”

I quickly went through the process with Susan, explaining what I was going to do and then let her get back to her makeup. Which, in my opinion, no matter how much she put on, it wasn’t going to be enough to make her a beautiful bride. Not unless she hired a plastic surgeon to give her a nose job and face lift in the next twenty minutes.

Just as I finished explaining things to her, in walked this gorgeous brunette with the longest legs I had ever seen. I felt a bit self-conscious about myself with her in the same room as me. She was definitely model material, perfect body, beautiful deep brown eyes with super long eyelashes and huge boobs. She was wearing a satin red dress that was barely there and her cleavage was hanging over the top of the dress. I thought to myself
Jesus is the entire cast of Jersey Shore here? All we need is Pauly D and Vinnie.