The Muse (28 page)

Oh, this hurt. My stomach twisted and my heart mangled from the trampling. My broken heart with all its chards flew around like shrapnel, jabbing me, stabbing me, cutting me open. This pain rolled over me, flattening everything. 

How else could I respond? With envy? Then she’d challenge me. If she challenged me, I’d have to challenge back, and we'd be right back where we were before, struggling to find a footing that made sense. I’d never be that girl for her, the balanced girl, the unscarred girl, the brave girl not afraid of being bullied into submission.

Fuck myself and everything I’d become. I hated myself. Why couldn’t I be normal? Why couldn’t I face the world with one confident foot in front of the other like everyone else?

I balled up on my bed clinging to my bed sheets and cried.

A few hours later, I rose and faced my computer with a determined fierce intensity to be the kind of girl Eva loved. The kind of girl I created in CarefreeJanie. The kind of girl I wished existed in the real me. I wrote her a message and said, “I’m happy for you, babe. I think she’s very lucky.”

The rest of the afternoon, I busied myself with organizing my canned goods according to type, then size. I also tore down my curtains and washed them all, then hung them back up to de-wrinkle. I vacuumed and shampooed my carpets. And then I began construction on my bedroom closet, hanging shelving I’d bought long before Eva entered my life. By midnight, I decided enough time had buffered between my last heroic tweet message and I could face her response.

I logged in.

Nothing.

I fell to the ground and wept some more, reopening all the pain gates, the vacuum seal on my air, the wounds that hadn’t quite healed over enough to protect my insides from being torn out again.

# #

The next morning at work, I logged on to Messenger and Eva popped online. My heart clenched. “Hey you,” I wrote as casually as my fingers could manage.

“Hey.”

“Did you get my message?”

“Yes,” she wrote.

“Okay. Good.” Her choppy answers rattled me. “So what’s going on?”

“The event. The event is. Are you going to be there to help or are you too busy?”

I had already destroyed my chance with her. She hated me. “I won’t be able to be there.”

“You make no sense. One day you’re making love to me online, the next you’re telling me how happy you are that I’m back together with my girlfriend.”

“I am. I want you to be happy.”

“What is going on with you? Did I say something to offend you?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then why?”

“I’m going through some things,” I wrote. “It’s just too complicated to get into right now.”

“You’re always hiding yourself. You’ve never once told me something deep, something real about you. I don’t understand.”

“I’ve got some dark things that you wouldn’t understand.”

“Well you could’ve tried me.”

“It’s better this way. I really think it’s better if I don’t go.”

“You are so selfish.” Despair lingered in her typed words.

I couldn’t handle the slap of her insult. I signed off on a tremble.

A few minutes later, I went into my email and Eva had written to me.
I always dug to learn the real you but you never let me in. You hid behind a flirt or a virtual kiss. And now you’re hiding behind a fear that has you gripped so tightly you’re willing to turn your back on someone who really needs you now. Shame on you. Where is that girl I fell in love with? Hmm? Where are you, CarefreeJanie? This event isn’t about us. Life is more than who you are, more than who I am. It’s about being there when it matters.

Regret crawled up the back of my throat and traveled into my brain where it sat like a heavy fog, drowning out the sun light and all the good I’d managed to do along the way.

Chapter Fifteen

I walked into work the next morning and poured myself a cup of coffee to the vibes of Kelly Clarkson singing “Miss Independent.”

I spotted Katie in her cubicle. She bent over and her underwear showed. I could’ve taken this to a winning level where I claimed the one-up position for the day. Instead, I sat idle at the coffee stand chewing on a coffee stirrer contemplating the mess I created every time I indulged in messing with her.

I threatened her somehow. I threatened her equilibrium. I attracted her husband, her boss, even the friend she could’ve had in Doreen. I stole the limelight of credit on that big project, garnered a raise when the company had buckled their belts tighter and no one else got one, won the affection of our boss, and received those things that Katie desired most—recognition, raises, great parking spots, high-profile projects, a seat in focus groups, pretty much everything she wanted. She deserved the right and pleasure to hate me.

I didn’t hate her. I should’ve hated her for being too pretty, too shapely, too athletic, too focused, too determined, too intelligent. Yes, the envy ripped through me and forced me into discomfort, but not enough to hate her.

She annoyed the shit out of me. She laughed too loudly, played too roughly, tried too hard to be chummy with higher-ups. She put two-and-two together with Sanjeev offering me special privileges, and her husband checking me out, and Doreen shunning her for me, and squirmed in her high heels.

I toyed with her because I could. I knew she could handle it. And, it felt good because in those temporary moments, I craved a mighty and powerful control over the present, helping to shadow the past. But in the moments that followed, I hit the ground hard, empty and cowardly.

I sipped more terrible-tasting coffee, hoping it would block the sadness crushing my heart. How I wanted to go back to that day when the sweet wink in Eva’s tweet and the sultry smile in her picture melted through my troubles and fears. I wanted to be CarefreeJanie again, that girl who lived a good life, the girl who never bullied another girl out of fear of losing ground with her friends, the girl who never exposed her weak heart to a best friend who would destroy her life moments after the discovery, the girl who never uprooted her family and sent them off to a prison sentence where they sought unsuccessfully to recapture the light that once shined on their great lives, the girl who Eva Handel first fell in love with.

Now, another girl had captured her heart, a girl who didn’t come riddled in the sticky sap of a dying tree, a girl who could proudly declare her innocence and beauty without fear of being uncovered as sinful. She’d never have to fear that look of disgust in Eva’s eyes, the sudden detachment of her love, the hollow gap after she ran from the ugliness of lies.

I tossed the coffee down the drain, watching it spiral away from me. Then, I turned on the faucet and washed out my mess. I would not heave my ugly past into her life and drag her down into my tunnel of darkness. She deserved the bright light of purity, not the shadows of sin. I would work that day and focus on what I could control. I would proofread Sanjeev’s annual report and make it shine. I could control that. I would eat lunch with Doreen and listen to her stories of her grandchildren and genuinely smile and nod at her inflections.

I walked out of the collaboration room, determined to stay in control. I walked past Katie. She shoveled pictures into a box. None of her usual paperwork cluttered her desktop. She looked up at me and her eyes leaked tears. Her face flushed.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Congratulations. You win.” She dumped a can of pens into a box.

“What do you mean?”

She pulled in her upper lip, bit down hard, but the pain won out and her face strained under the pressure. The tears fell in giant drops onto her naked desk. “I was fired a few minutes ago.”

A sight of her sitting in an unemployment office begging for work flashed in my mind. Ravaged from months of no paycheck, her eyes swollen, her face puffy, her lips battered from all of the biting. She’d be skinnier with sallow skin due to the cruel shedding of nutrition from her life. Her eyes would be sunk, lacking that creative, competitive spark all because I messed with her, causing her to mess with me, and with one ugly insult after the other, our lives were inextricably pulled out from under us both. The fun stripped away, we would spend our lives trying to get back to that place we filled before the silly games began. “How?”

“I took things too far.” She tossed a couple of picture frames into the box. “I hacked into your system, stole your idea for the new public service announcement and handed it in as my own.”

She exhaled a shaky breath, looked around her empty cube and the tears rained down hard. “My envy got out of hand.”

I shook off the stunning blow. “I feel like I’ve just been punched in the face.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, staring at me with hollowed eyes too similar to Rhonda’s. “Like I said. You win. I’m out of your hair for good.”

I walked away still numb to the news. I sat down at my seat and opened to the daily e-newsletter. I scrolled through it and counted two comments from Katie. My heart sat heavy, and I labored for air. Another sadness joined the one already in me, and this one coated me in an emptiness of unease. Losing Katie didn’t feel good.

My lips numbed, my fingers buzzed, my head pounded. I couldn’t take this burden on, too.

I stood up and walked back over to Katie. She was blowing her nose. “Why do we do this to each other?”

We stared blankly at each other, two boxers without gloves, blood dripping from our foreheads, our cheeks, our mouths, defeated and tired, ready to throw in the towel.

“You just rattle me to the point I can’t think straight,” she said. “I can’t compete with you on regular terms. You’ve got all the balls in your court, and I’m left with these flat ones that don’t bounce. I had to level the playing field somehow. I figure, you stole my credit last time. I could steal yours this time around and we’d be even.”

“How did they find out?”

“Sanjeev knows your writing. He took me out for a coffee this morning and asked me if I had stolen it from you. I couldn’t lie to him.”

“You thought that I wouldn’t have challenged you on taking my idea?”

“I didn’t care. I figured I’d just tell him you were lying and jealous.”

Our tangled mess of tactics bunched up between us. We were both equally as guilty of destructing each other and at playing this warped game. I thought back on my article and the question I posed in it.
Was this the secret? Find the good even in your enemy and bring it out?

“We can fix this.”

She looked at me, a flicker of hope dancing on her wet eyelids. I saw a child reaching out to me from the dark, murky depths of a cold, harsh lake, begging for me to save her from the unknown below her. She stared at me with the same beg as Rhonda did so many times before. I definitely couldn’t carry another burden.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“Sure we can.”

“I don’t know.”

I felt sad for her. I was the one left holding the prize of a job that I didn’t even want. “I’m about to do something really stupid.”

“Well, don’t let me stop you.” She smiled weakly, tossing out one last hurrah.

I smiled sweetly at her for the first time since before her husband groped me on the side of the bar. Then, I tore off to Sanjeev’s office.

# #

He was typing away when I entered.

“Can we talk?”

He stopped typing. “Sure.”