Frenemies

  “Okay,” I said, fake smile in place. “Well, you know, it’s kind of cold out here and I really—”

  “I have the journal right here,” Irwin said, whipping out a black-and-white notebook and flipping it open. From where I stood, I could see incredibly small, shockingly tiny letters stretched to fill the entire page.

  He had to be kidding.

  “June 25. Laughter in hallway at 11:56 p.m. June 26. Coughing in bedroom at 2:33 a.m. June 29—”

  He wasn’t kidding.

  I turned my attention back to my window, rattling the damned thing with increased desperation. Irwin had one of those nasal voices that was really more like a whine, and for the love of all that was holy, he was still droning on about the first week of July.

  I gave the stubborn window one last, mighty shove and—thank the heavens!—it fell open.

  “Freezing cold!” I singsonged at Irwin. “Hypothermia, must run!”

  I heaved the window open and hurled myself through it, more or less belly flopping on my pile of clothes and bodysurfing my way to an undignified heap on my bedroom floor.

  Moments after this, my ace watchdog, Linus, skittered into the room and barked a combined alarm and greeting.

  Behind me, I could hear Irwin’s nasal whine. I had the horrifying thought that he might just stand there at the window all night, regaling the entire building with a minute-by-minute re-creation of my every movement during the past few months.

  Out in the living room, I heard my old-school answering machine click on.

  “Hi, you’ve reached Gus. Please leave a message.” My disembodied, oddly robotic voice floated through the room, sounding far more cheerful than I felt. I shoved Linus off of me and began struggling to my feet.

  “Hi, Gus,” came Helen’s sad, sad voice. “It’s me again. I guess . . . I guess I’m going to give up now. Um. I still think we should, you know, talk.”

  Click.

  What does she mean, “again”? I wondered.

  I staggered over to the machine as it blinked and reset, and had to take a moment to believe what I was seeing.

  Ten new messages.

  Ten.

  I stood there for a moment, feeling almost dizzy. I wasn’t Miss Popular, but neither was I a troll beneath a bridge. Telemarketers didn’t leave messages, of course. But even if Georgia, Amy Lee, my mother, and my sister all called me in the same evening (which was highly unlikely) that still left six. Six messages that would be quite enough to frighten me, and that was without the personal appearance at the front door.

  It was official. Helen was stalking me.

  chapter six

  When Georgia sauntered into the glitzy, primarily gold lobby of the Park Plaza Hotel two weeks later, she was looking particularly fabulous. We had an engagement party to attend and she had her glorious hair swept up into one of those impossible hair creations that I was eternally baffled by. She was showcasing the entire length of her ridiculously long legs beneath the simple and elegant shift dress she wore, which looked to rival the cost of the shoes on her feet. Christian Louboutin, if I wasn’t mistaken. (And I was never mistaken about shoes.)

  Why was I so interested in Georgia’s outfit? A valid question.

  While she was dressed for an elegant affair, I was dressed for the prom. The prom circa 1985, that was. I was sporting a royal blue taffeta gown complete with puffy cap sleeves and matching royal blue pumps—which, attention shoe manufacturers, was there an uglier word?—as well as a matching royal blue clutch. It was one of the least attractive ensembles I owned. In it, I looked like a royal blueberry.

  The engagement party invitation had specified formalwear. And what, Georgia and I had asked each other, was more formal than an old bridemaid’s dress?

  “You know perfectly well that you’re supposed to be in this dress,” I snapped at Georgia when she came to a stop in front of me. “I don’t think I’m speaking to you. Maybe not ever again.”

  “This is the thing,” Georgia said, settling herself beside me on the plush settee. If she was impressed by my threat, she failed to show it. “When I wear that dress, people flip out and start calling me a giant Smurfette—”

  “Exactly one person called you a giant Smurfette, and he was wasted the single time you ever wore this dress,” I interrupted. “And how is that any worse than rolling around looking like a royal blueberry?”

  “I feel bad,” Georgia confessed, meeting my eyes. “But not bad enough to change.”

  “This was your idea!” I shrieked at her, completely forgetting where we were.

  My own voice, in a screech like a fishwife (as my mother used to say, not that she had ever explained—to my satisfaction—what a fishwife was, other than loud) at top volume, reminded me.

  Georgia and I assumed meek smiles and fell quiet, as, all around us, the opulence of the Park Plaza registered its disapproval. The Park Plaza Hotel was not the sort of place where screeching was tolerated. It was swanky, historic, and filled with impressive flower arrangements. Tourists clumped together and gazed about in awe, while businessmen oozed expense-account nonchalance and headed for the bar.

  “Did you just make that noise?” Amy Lee demanded, striding up to stand in front of us. “My ears are still ringing.”

  “It was some girl,” Georgia lied vaguely, waving her hand in the approximate direction of the elevators.

  Amy Lee glanced over and then looked back at me. She frowned. She was suitably attired in the same black dress she trotted out to every single semiformal and/or formal occasion she’d attended since sophomore year in college. The only things she ever changed were her accessories. She claimed she’d learned this trick from Coco Chanel, and when she made that claim she liked to make it sound as if she’d learned it from Coco personally, instead of reading the same selection of quotations in fashion magazines everyone else had.

  “What the hell are you wearing, Gus?” she asked. “Is that taffeta?”

  “Oh,” I said blandly. “Why? You don’t like it?”

  Next to me, I saw Georgia hide a smile behind her hand.

  “It’s hideous,” Amy Lee said flatly.

  “You always claimed we could wear them again,” I told her sweetly, “and check it out, you were right!”

  There was an extended silence, as Amy Lee took a long, hard look at the atrocity she’d foisted upon her closest friends, all in the name of her Day of Love.

  “Doesn’t look so good outside the wedding madness, does it?” Georgia asked in an arch tone.

  “Once again,” Amy Lee said, “I saved you from the chartreuse chiffon my mother fell in love with. How come no one remembers that?”

  “You have a picture of your special day on your wall, Amy Lee, in which you and Oscar seem to be beaming amid a sea of blueberries,” I pointed out. “A sea of puffy, taffeta blueberries. I have to spend eternity as one of those blueberries.”

  “What sucks for you,” Amy Lee retorted, “is that you are just a lone blueberry tonight. Bet this was a whole lot funnier when you were getting dressed, wasn’t it?”

  I glared at Georgia, who had the grace to look slightly ashamed. In truth, it was difficult to maintain my righteous indignation when I knew I looked like a righteously indignant blueberry.

  Then I looked back at Amy Lee and shrugged. “That’s pretty much the story of my life,” I told her.

  “If it helps,” she said then, “I never liked those dresses as much as I pretended to.”

  Some hours later, I was taking a break from the blueberry fun at the table we’d been assigned with a selection of other BU graduates who were also friends with the Happy Couple. Everyone I knew was off dancing, while I took the opportunity to wonder why, exactly, I always found it necessary to take things just that extra bit too far. It was amusing to stand in one’s own apartment, imagining the reaction a best friend might have when one turned up to a formal event kitted out in the dress she’d foisted upon her bridesmaids. So amusing, in fact, that I’d told myself I did
n’t care at all that Nate and Helen would be present to see me in said bridesmaid dress, and that my wearing it knowing they would see me looking absurd was a power move. It was proving far less amusing, and not at all empowering, however, to parade around a party all decked out as a blueberry. Because all of my friends might have known why I was dressed up like a refugee from an eighties movie, but the rest of Chloe and Sam’s extended family thought I was just a pathetic creature with an unusual and/or alarming fondness for royal blue taffeta.

  I stared across the crowded banquet room toward the main table and located Georgia easily enough. She was right where I’d left her: flirting shamelessly with a very hot consultant who worked with the groom-to-be. His name was Justin or Jordan or something like that, and he had ambitious corporate shark tattooed all over his excellently maintained body.

  “That’s an accident waiting to happen,” Amy Lee said with a sigh, sitting next to me and also looking at Georgia.

  “I’ll collect the chocolate and the Aimee Mann CDs,” I agreed. “You work on the speech.”

  “I’ve been telling her to look for a different type of guy for the past ten years!” Amy Lee protested.

  “Which is why the speech needs work.”

  We sat there for a moment. I tried to send positive thoughts Georgia’s way, on the off chance Jonah or Jesse (or whoever) was just a lamb in shark’s clothing. But it was unlikely. As a rule of thumb, if Georgia was attracted to him, the guy had to be a jackass. Witness Henry, the ultimate case in point.

  “I have to say, I was looking for a little more excitement,” Amy Lee said. “If I have to put on formalwear, there should at least be something to gossip about.” She shook her head when I nodded over at Georgia. “I can’t bring myself to gossip about something we both know we’ll end up dealing with when it all goes horribly wrong.”

  “I agree. I expected someone to be swinging from a chandelier, or falling down drunk on the dance floor,” I complained, looking around at the sedate gathering. People laughed and sipped drinks on all sides, looking as perfectly well-behaved and about as likely to throw down and get rowdy as a Junior League convention.

  “Henry was panting all over some stick figure with boobs,” Amy Lee threw out there. “But I guess that’s not exactly interesting or new, is it?”

  “He is Satan, after all,” I agreed, without the slightest pang of guilt. The other pang, I ignored. Fostering my friends’ dislike of my enemies was a responsibility I took seriously. There was no time for inconvenient pangs. I sighed. “This party is way too . . . civilized.”

  Usually when a group of such size was convened by a member of our wider group, you could count on scandal and intrigue. Someone was always kissing drastically above or below their station, and at a different engagement party last winter someone had actually spiked the punch.

  “The night is young,” Amy Lee said, sounding hopeful. She looked around. “I have to get some mandatory mingling in. Oscar thinks we need to expand our practice.” She grinned at me. “I’m assuming you’re not that interested in trolling for patients with me?”

  “You’re assuming right,” I agreed. I made a shooing motion with my hand. “Go schmooze.”

  “Oscar’s much better at it than I am,” Amy Lee said, getting to her feet and smoothing her dress. “He makes people want to come get a root canal. But strangely, he thinks we both have a responsibility to our livelihood.”

  “Men are so crazy!” I commiserated, shaking my head. We grinned at each other.

  “What are you going to do? Sit here, feeling blue?” She cracked herself up with that one. I ignored it.

  “I’m avoiding my stalker,” I told her primly.

  “Which we need to talk about.”

  “After you drum up business,” I said, and shooed her away again, for good this time.

  So far, I’d been doing a pretty good job of avoiding both Nate and Helen, both of whom I could see from across the room. (Helen, as it happened, was not wearing a gown that made her look like a gargantuan blueberry. She’d opted for a somewhat more flattering silver dress.) The fact that Nate’s eyes lit up when he saw me as if he’d never ripped my heart from my chest led me to conclude that he had no idea his girlfriend had called me not just eight times that night (yes, eight—and the other two were hang-ups, so draw your own conclusions), but a number of other times throughout the past two weeks.

  Here’s what I’d pieced together from various answering machine messages and a few cell phone voice mails: Helen wanted to talk. She wanted to talk to me so badly, in fact, that she didn’t mind coming over all Fatal Attraction to do it. I knew Helen well enough to know that normally, her self-absorption prevented her from wanting to talk to anyone else. Much less needing to talk, as she’d repeatedly claimed. She could sit for hours and just sort of stare off into space, doing nothing. Not reading a book. Not daydreaming. Not thinking about anything. Just sitting there. It used to drive me up the wall when I would look up from my reading to find her just sitting, like an android someone turned off and left propped up on the cot across the room.

  This was not someone who needed to talk to anyone, about anything. Which meant she had to have a reason.

  I’d had some time to wonder what that reason might be, and I’d narrowed it down to two possible motivations. Either a) she was plain old batshit crazy or b) she felt guilty for her behavior. And the phrase “her behavior” could, in this case, encompass anything and everything, from flirting shamelessly with Nate at the Labor Day party with her boobs pressed up against his arm, to the actual theft of Nate to her intervention-speak at Henry’s house. She was guilty of so many sins, really, that it was impossible to pick just one she might feel guilty about.

  If our interaction at Henry’s house had been a preview, however, I was planning to miss the show, thanks. I didn’t want to talk to Helen—I wanted to scream at her, and possibly resort to fisticuffs. Being all delicate and waifish wouldn’t help her if I went all Courtney Love on her ass.

  The previous weekend there had been an unexpected gap in my social calendar, which had meant I got to spend the entirety of the weekend lounging around my apartment, catching up on my TiVo and meaning to clean. It had been nice to spend some time not contending with my failed relationships and the problem of Henry. It had been even nicer not making an ass of myself all around Boston. It was like a deep breath of a weekend.

  And now that it was November, the holiday season was in full swing. I had one party or another to attend every single weekend for the remainder of the year, up to and including a huge New Year’s eve bash a friend of ours was throwing out on the Cape.

  On the one hand, it was exciting to have a vital and energetic social schedule. On the other hand, I was going to have to deal with the post-traumatic stress of my breakup with Nate at almost every single one of those parties, and by post-traumatic stress I meant not just my emotions but Helen.

  I was exhausted just thinking about it. I certainly didn’t need to discuss it with the person who caused it all.

  Across the room, Helen let out one of her donkey laughs and then looked up. Our eyes met. Hers narrowed, and I felt a flush of panic.

  Realizing that sitting still made me a big royal blue target, I jumped to my feet and headed out of the banquet room. I was looking around at the grandeur, should anyone ask—which meant, obviously, that I was hiding. I had exhausted the lobby after a few turns around the perimeter, had eyed every piece of Boston and/or Red Sox paraphernalia in the gift shop, and was resigning myself to reentering the party when the elevator directly in front of me opened.

  Inside, Henry pushed a skinny brunette away from his body and looked up. Our eyes met.

  The fact that he was evil made him hotter than the sum of his actual body parts, I thought in that brief, searing moment, like Sark on Alias. And maybe he wouldn’t even be quite so evil if he weren’t quite so delectable.

  I would have to think about that. Later.

  “Hello, Gus,” He
nry said. It was the way he said my name that I objected to, I thought. As if it meant something else entirely in his language.

  He stepped from the elevator, tugging the leggy brunette in his wake. She looked lazy and postcoital, not that you could tell that anything had gone on from the state of her sleek blowout, which remained perfect. Henry looked the way he always did: gorgeous. And, when looking at me, also secretly amused.

  “My God,” he said, his eyes raking me from head to royal blue toe. “You dressed as Violet Beauregarde. I didn’t realize this was a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory costume party.”

  The worst part was that I was, in fact, dressed like a blueberry. This meant I had to stand there and take it.

  “This is Ashley,” Henry told me, continuing on happily. “Ash, this is my friend Gus.”

  My automatic fake smile made my cheeks ache. I didn’t know why I bothered with it. Except something about Henry made me feel that I had to at least pretend to be polite.

  “So nice to meet you,” I murmured at his . . . whatever she was. For her part, Ashley kept running her skinny, manicured fingers up and down Henry’s arm instead of answering me.

  “I need a drink,” she whined at him.

  “There’s a bar inside,” he told her in an indulgent and yet dismissive tone that set my teeth on edge. He launched her on her way with a light smack on the ass.

  “What a terrific way to treat your girlfriend,” I said, sniffing.

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” he responded. Henry, I knew very well, preferred a constant stream of interchangeable bimbos to anything resembling a relationship. While Oscar felt this ought to be celebrated as a valid lifestyle choice—a man who can date empty-headed yet gorgeous twenty-three-year-olds is unlikely not to date them just because they annoy you, folks—the rest of us felt it was evidence of a deeper personality flaw. Namely:

  “You’re disgusting,” I told him, as the girl tottered a few steps down the hall.