Over You (5 page)

“You need this big.”

Max surveys her surroundings before lifting a poster of Olympian Lindsey Vonn from its spot. She pulls the cable from the television and attaches a device to the laptop, which shifts its projection, now life-sized, to the cleared wall. There is a picture of Bridget some time last spring, laughing with friends while the sun sets behind her shoulder. An arrow appears over one of the girls.

Bridget drops her head to the side, her voice wistful. “Shannon.”

“Shannon has provided my services to you. Just as one of her friends provided my services for her.”

“With Todd,” Bridget says, putting it together. “She got over him
so
fast.”

“Precisely.” Max beams.

“But why didn’t she tell me she worked, or whatever, with you?”

“I do not involve peripherals; I rely solely on past clients when at all possible. This is a program I designed when I discovered that girls who have been forcibly benched need way more than society has to offer to get back in the game. My associates and I will work with you over the next month as you go from this—” She clicks to a photo of a bald, post-divorce Britney taking an umbrella to a paparazzo’s car window. “To this.” The slide flips. “There she is, radiant and triumphant, headlining the number-one tour of the year.” She turns from the projection. “Have you ever kickboxed? Total rush.” She advances the screen to a photo of a glistening J. Lo. “We will not finish until Taylor fully comprehends the magnitude of what he has thrown away, until he is left with a last image of you as pure perfection in his mind.”

Bridget’s watery eyes light up over her red nose. “I’m in.”

“Welcome aboard. Okay, so a few logistical details. This morning I am walking you to the bus stop. From now on one of my assistants, Phoebe or Zachary, will meet you on your stoop to make sure you head left, stay left, and don’t even look right. Thank God you guys go to school on opposite sides of the city. This living-across-the-street thing is—sheesh.”

“I’ve known him since we were five.”

“Hm?” Max tilts herself down to hear her better.

“We played Power Rangers together. We used his mom’s shoes as beds for our Giga Pets. And then last year we both studied
Our Town
. We were gonna be like George and Emily. When he kissed me, he said it was like it was always meant to be. What did I do wrong? Why did he change his mind?”

Max gently takes Bridget’s chin and tilts her face up. “Guys say a lot of things. And that is right where we will pick up tomorrow after school. You have one job until then: NO CONTACT. You will stay away from that window. There are no answers out there. If I find out—and I will—that you’ve gone near that window, I will paint it black. Are we clear?”

Bridget twists her lips at the mandate. “Yes.”

“Good. Now, finally, Bridget, no matter what impulsive crazy overtakes you in the interim, get a tattoo, pierce something private, go goth, but do not, do not, do not cut your hair.” She flashes to a Photoshopped slide of how Bridget would look shorn like Victoria Beckham. “This will not make anyone regret anything.”

That night Max’s client Kelly sublimely bowls her program to completion and her ex, Rufus, into second-guessing himself. Kelly’s Moment went off without a hitch. By design The Moment showcases a client’s newfound mastery of something her previous disdain for or fear of, or just plain apathy toward, was one of her ex’s pathetic reasons why they just weren’t right for each other. A client’s stellar display and “whatever” attitude effectively destabilize her ex’s sense of certainty about his verdicts.

Rufus will no doubt be texting Kelly within the next twenty-four hours. And, as with all of Max’s graduates, Kelly will no longer care, finally understanding that assessing her entire self-worth based on how this one kid sees her is flat-out crazy. The Moment totally flips the script every time, and Max loves it.

As the cab turns away from Bowlmor, a triumphant Max looks eagerly out the window at the campus she hopes—no, she
needs
—to be next year. The car slows to a red light at the top of Washington Square Park, where a couple is making out by the fountain. Max notices that the girl has impeccably barrel-curled hair, the kind that takes the better part of an hour, and is wearing very high heels. Max looks down at her own suede booties, so glad she isn’t trying to dress for a boy anymore. Getting Ex, Inc. off the ground has been too consuming for her to let herself be distracted by dating, especially when she bears daily witness to the aftermath.

Max’s eye lingers on the guy’s arm circling round the girl’s waist, torquing her frame into his. Max indulges in a brief pang of nostalgia, same as when she catches a few seconds of
The Notebook
on cable, when she lets herself remember what it felt like to be kissed that hard. A trio of guys walks in front of the couple, obscuring Max’s perving. One steps closer to the curb, his blazer collar upturned against the breeze. Suddenly Max feels a cold drop beneath her ribs, like her plane just lost altitude. The stoplight changes, the cab sails forward, and Max twists to see that, yes—the blond hair, the confident grin—it can’t be, it
can’t
be.

But it is.

After so many months of trailing and defusing and humbling other girls’ exes, Max has just laid eyes on her own.

T
he next morning, Max squeezes into the F train’s rush-hour throngs and waits with everyone else for the doors to close. She’s supremely annoyed. Supremely.

Hugo Fucking Tillman.

In the aftermath of their breakup, it’d begun to feel like she’d made him—and the entire five-month relationship—up. Like, maybe she was just going about her business trying to conjugate verbs when she was hit out of nowhere with a fully loaded dart of “rejection toxin.” Or picked up a nasty “dumped” virus after forgetting to wear her flip-flops in the dormitory showers.

Another businessman pushes into the car, where there is no space.

Hugo Fucking Tillman the Billionth. She darts her hand to the inches of available railing as the train jerks into motion—uch! Ten freaking months since she’s seen him! She shouldn’t even care! But she wasn’t
supposed
to see him, that’s the point. The Tillman family considers Manhattan an upstart compared to their rarefied corner of Boston. The first—and only—time Hugo brought her home, his mother, Vivian, offered her a cup of tea from the family service and took her for a grand tour of the Tillman photo hall of their Massachusetts estate. Vivian knew the current location of every cousin and aunt, even those in cemetery plots, which, Vivian drily shared, were behind the family chapel, left of the stables. After living out of boxes her whole life, just the idea that Max might be invited to entwine with such deep roots was enough to seduce her.

It felt like the fulfillment of a promise whispered from St. Something’s brochure. A glossy catalog rife with photos that looked like Ralph Lauren’s latest campaign. Mossy stone walls squaring off a lush green in the center of campus. All that mahogany, and griffins carved into everything. The clusters of guys playing rugby, and the girls smiling with books on a plaid wool blanket shot at a hazy distance.

Hazy should have been her first clue.

There not being a mall should have been her second. Not even a mall equivalent. There was a tavern by the train station where parents took their kids out to dinner when they came for a visit. And there was a gas station where they filled up their tanks to drive back home. Except the Tillmans. The Tillmans were chauffeured by a man in full livery.

These St. Something’s kids had been together for-e-ver. Their ancestors had been together forever. Lido-deck-of-the-
Mayflower
forever. They summered together in Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. The girls wore their great-grandmothers’ pearl studs and flat ChapSticked smiles. And the worst part—they didn’t laugh. Not really. They were all knowing glances and mocking smirks. Max quickly realized she’d have to drop her bar way below pee-your-pants potential. After a week she would have settled for a giggle, especially one that wasn’t at her expense.

Okay, so looking back, maybe it was risky to wear over-the-knee cable-knit socks and the gold chain on the first day. But she was flying blind! And it was her homage to Chanel via Abercrombie! As Max beelined for the girls’ room, frantically unstringing the heavy strands from her neck, she thought,
This isn’t even L.L.Bean via Abercrombie
. This
is L.L.Bean via a casket
. Max had never been anywhere that disdained flair so intensely.

Over the following week, Max toned it down. All the way. No makeup. No quirk. No funny. Unable to make friends, she was desperately lonely. And then one humid August evening, on the last night of orientation, Hugo Tillman the Billionth, of the Concord Tillmans and the perfect blond hair, knocked on her door.

As the F train inches into Manhattan, Max indulges in the memory. The warm, fizzy rush of him. He was looking for Meredith Blah’s room, but stayed to chat, leaning against the door frame, his blue eyes flitting to the red patent leather boots she wore to cheer herself when alone. She stared up at him from her desk chair, the guy who was the most St. Something’s of them all. He was so at home there, so effortless.

She was shocked to discover that he secretly found everyone as tedious and boring as she did. She was drawn to his struggle to figure out who he was, apart from the Tillman legacy. Not to mention how he would soon come for her with out-of-season flowers and limo trips to four-star Boston restaurants. Fascinated with her independence, he loved her boots, her wit, her
her
. It thrilled him to hear her voice her opinions. After feeling so invisible on that campus, she was suddenly basking in a spotlight of adoration. The king bee wanted to make her his queen—what could be more validating than that?

And it all started with him leaning in her door, and her daring to remark that if
he
was lost at St. Something’s, then the Earth must be off its axis. He’d actually blushed, standing there with his rugby sleeves pushed up over his tanned forearms. Is it possible to be turned on by forearms?

Oh my God. Max grips the pole as the train brakes. Oh my God! So not doing this. Screw his forearms, which will prematurely freckle and wrinkle way sooner than, than—well, the rest of us. Screw his effortless everything! Let him get on the first bus back to Blahville.
This is my town,
she thinks.
Mine
.

Having gotten Bridget safely off to school, Max multitasks her way along Court Street with a photo of Taylor in one hand and her BlackBerry in the other. From nine to three p.m., when Zach and Phoebe are otherwise occupied, Max tackles her prep work uninterrupted. Her experience has shown that the majority of teenage breakups occur as the day wanes, predominantly from three p.m. onward—unless a guy tries to slip one in with a between-class text. There is a certain hot ring of hell reserved for such douches. But there are so many douches—so many rings—no.
Not
thinking about Hugo until Zach gets to the bottom of why he was in New York for the night.

Shaking her hair over her shoulder, she crosses the street to duck inside Stan’s Party Parthenon. “Miss Max!” Stan greets her from where he’s been flipping through his
Post
on a stool behind the counter.

“Hey, Stan!” Max smiles. It’s impossible not to in the Party Parthenon. Stan’s densely packed shelves conjure memories of planning birthdays as a kid when she would pore over packages of flower-festooned paper plates at the local party store while her mother fact-checked on her cell. Her favorite remains the
Dirty Dancing
–themed birthday she threw in sixth grade when her mom was at the
Reno Herald
. She chose white napkins with a musical-note pattern. Everyone came dressed as either Baby or Johnny, and she made a papier mâché watermelon to carry in for her grand entrance. Zach probably still has the picture she sent him from it.

She makes her way to Stan beneath the sea of piñatas dangling from the pipes snaking overhead. The figures all tilt ever so slightly due to a well-hidden fan. “Now, Miss Max, what can I do for you?”

Max hands Taylor’s snapshot to Stan. He peers through his bifocals to get a “read” on it.

“Donkey,” he pronounces.

“You sure?”

Stan studies the picture of Taylor sprawled cockily on his front stoop, a heavily stickered skateboard across his knees. “A real ass. Definitely.” Stan leans over the counter to direct Max’s attention to a donkey-as-devil piñata hovering over the recently unpacked Halloween masks. “Insincere or”—he points up to a donkey as Santa—“judgmental and withholding.”

Max squishes her lips to the side with her index finger, her gaze ping-ponging between the two. “Mmm … the prior.”

“Done. And I have something for you!” Stan pulls her previous order from under the counter—a pig in a tutu.

“Perfect.” She swivels the piñata around to check that the grinning face of Jen’s ex is lasered where the pig’s face should be.

Not long after three p.m. that afternoon, Max holds said pig under one arm while standing over Jen, who has, after two weeks on Max’s program, hit a minor stumbling block, leaving her sobbing uncontrollably on her bedroom floor while wildly gesticulating with a stained T-shirt and a vacuum cleaner attachment.

“Jen, you were doing so great. What happened?” Max drops the piñata onto Jen’s desk to grab a fresh pack of tissues from her handbag.