Wicked Jealous: A Love Story (4 page)

Hillary smiled.

“Oh, wait—nope. Sorry about that, Hillary. I think it was just the way the light was hitting them. Simone’s are still a lot darker.”

The smile turned to a scowl before she recovered it again. “
Anyway
, I think it’s just great how you use so much color to express yourself, Nicolette,” she said, pointing at her nails. “All the research about you Millennials says after tattoos and piercings, color is your third biggest mode of self-expression.” Hillary may have had no clue about how to relate to kids my age, but that sure didn’t stop her from spouting research about us whenever she could. She pointed to Nicola’s feet. “But could you be a dear and take your feet off my coffee table?”

Nicola and I looked at each other.
Her
coffee table? I thought she was only going to be here for a few weeks.

She reached down and put my Coke can on a coaster. “Coasters, coasters, coasters!” she trilled. “Don’t want any rings now, do we?”

“Except for ones with diamonds,” Nicola said.

Hillary laughed. “That’s
good
. I
like
that!”

Hillary may not have known her movie trivia, but she got an A for going after what she wanted. The coffee table comment was a warning for what was to come. From the minute she crossed the threshold, the house went from being ours to
hers
. I could have used some company on the family front, although I would have never admitted it in public because it was kind of uncool. But hers was not the company I wanted. Within days, I went from my house being the only place I felt comfortable and safe to feeling like a total stranger. Within weeks, our comfy Spanish hacienda–style house, with its overstuffed couches and chairs and colorful antique rugs from Morocco that my parents had gotten on their honeymoon, had been moved out to make room for all this stiff, uncomfortable modern furniture that Hillary said was on every What-You-Need-to-Buy-in-Order-to-Look-Cool-So-It’ll-Take- People-That-Much-Longer-to-Realize-You’re-an-Idiot list in every magazine.

To make matters even worse, my dad was even more MIA than usual since Andrew was refusing to shoot the episode where he fell in love with a cat in the body of a tall blonde yoga instructor because—not like he was judging other dogs who went that way—he personally didn’t feel that his character would do that.

The kicker was the day Nicola dropped me off after our latest One Person’s Garbage outing, where I had scored a mint-condition 1982 The Who farewell concert T-shirt and I went upstairs to find that my red-walled bedroom, with its iron sleigh bed and flea-market knickknacks that I hoped made it look like it was on the Left Bank of Paris rather than north of Montana Avenue in Brentwood, had been dismantled and turned into this blechy boring beigy
thing
.

“Oh good—you’re home!” Hillary tweeted as she
click-clack
ed onto my now-bare-wood floor because my awesome Indian dhurrie rug was gone. “So what do you think? Isn’t it great?”

I doubted that even a forklift could’ve picked my jaw up off the floor so that I could answer her.

“I know how fond you were of all those . . .
used
things that you bought at the flea markets back when your dad and you used to go on your little bonding outings, but according to Mercury—she’s the psychic-slash-feng-shui-expert-slash-interior-designer I found through an article in last month’s
Vogue
—they really stop the flow of new and creative energy, which is going to be important once I start trying to get pregnant.”

Not only was I not going to be able to pick my jaw up off the ground, but I was afraid my eyes had just opened so wide they were going to be permanently stuck like that.

“That’s still two years out in the ten-year plan, but still, you can never start taking care of yourself too early.” She
click-clack
ed over to my closet. “Speaking of which, I cleaned out your closet and replaced it with some healthier snacks.”

My closet—my snacks. She sounded so nonchalant about it—as if it was completely normal for a person to keep boxes of snack cakes hidden in their closet with a paper bag full of wrappers next to it. This was even more humiliating than the locker room thing.

As she threw open the door, I saw that all my Krimpets were gone. In their place were boxes of Hostess Apple Pies, an apple tart, and an apple cobbler.

“How are those healthy?” I managed to get out.

She ruffled my hair. “Because of the
fruit
aspect, silly!” She laughed. “Did you know that apples are an excellent source of fiber?” She picked up a lock of my long dark hair and examined it. “This is really your natural color?” she asked doubtfully.

I nodded.

She sighed. “Wow. Women pay a lot of money for something so rich-looking.” She flashed a smile. “So what do you think?”

What did I think? I thought the woman was completely insane. I walked over to the closet and began to drag the boxes out.

“What are you doing?!”

“Hillary, I’m allergic to apples. Remember?” I replied. Just thinking about apples made my arms start itching, my eyes start to water, and my throat start to get all tickly and begin to close up.

She squinted. “Huh. Oh, riiiiiiiiiiight—now it’s coming back to me. Yes, I vaguely remember you and your father mentioning that at one point.”

Mentioned.
More like a half-hour oral history of the severe allergic reactions I’d had over the years after inadvertently eaten something with apple, as told by my father during the Sunday drive the three of us had taken up the Pacific Coast Highway a few days after she moved in. From anyone else, that would’ve come off as an odd remark, but seeing that Hillary was so self-centered and totally disinterested in what people said, unless it directly had some bearing on her life, it was kind of par for the course.

“Well, lucky for you, because all the books talk about the importance of being extra sensitive to a stepchild’s needs during those critical first months of blending, I had my assistant purchase some non-apple snacks as well,” she went on, reaching for a brown paper bag on the floor next to her. “Although because there isn’t a fruit component, they’re not very healthy.”

She handed it to me. Inside were Ho Hos, Devil Dogs, Big Wheels, and Sno Balls. Jeez. It would’ve been nice if Hillary had given me a
little
credit. Those things tasted like cardboard and Styrofoam mixed with dishwashing liquid and Windex.

“Hillary, what’d you do with my stuff?” I demanded. It was taking everything in me not to scream, but I didn’t want to give her the benefit of seeing how much she was getting to me.

A perfectly formed pout appeared on her (not-as-red-as-mine) lips. “That’s fine. I won’t take your passive-aggressive comment as yet another rejection of all the effort I’ve been putting into developing a relationship with you for your father’s sake. I had it put in one of those storage places,” she replied. “You know, the ones you hear about on the news where murderers store bodies and stuff?”

“I want it back. Now.” The sooner I had my room back to normal, the sooner I could breathe again.

She shrugged. “Suit yourself. I’ll have my assistant take care of it.” She flashed a smile as she smoothed her unwrinkled red dress and fluffed her already fluffy mane of hair. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go call the decorator about replacing all those horrible old mirrors around here. I mean, what’s the point of a mirror if it’s so old that you can’t actually
see
yourself in it?”

As soon as she moved in, I discovered that Hillary’s obsession with mirrors wasn’t just limited to her collection of compacts. It was wherever she could glean a reflection of herself. In a window, in our stainless steel refrigerator . . . I once even caught her crouching down, looking at herself in the sliver of chrome that surrounded the dishwasher. As for me, I tried everything I could do
not
to look in a mirror—which, when you’re attempting to tweeze between your eyebrows because your best friend has told you in the most gentle way possible that you’re starting to resemble a monkey, isn’t easy.

But those “old” mirrors she was referring to were actually expensive antiques. BH (Before Hillary) the whole house had been filled with antiques. In fact, that was one of the things people had always liked best about our house—the fact that everything in it, while old and eclectic, ended up mixing together perfectly and, in a world of CCRPH (Nicola’s abbreviation for Cookie Cutter Rich People’s Houses) made it feel warm and inviting.

But Hillary wasn’t into antiques. According to her, they were depressing. And Dad just let her get rid of them. So now, with its new furniture that looked like a collection of geometric shapes, our house was just as cold and soulless and uncomfortable on your butt as every other house in L.A. Not exactly the kind of place that screamed “Come hang out here!”

I walked over to my desk. She’d even taken the bulletin board with all the photos of Nicola and me. Who took away someone’s
pictures
? I looked under my bed. Mowki! Where was Mowki, the stuffed donkey that I had had since I was four?! There was definitely a circle in hell for people who took other people’s stuffed animals. I stood up and looked at the closet.

If she touched my shoe box, I was going to have to kill her.

I walked over to the closet, relieved to find a beat-up shoe box still tucked away in the top left-hand corner. As I took it down and opened it, I took out a photo of a woman who looked a lot like me, minus the snack cake weight.

“I’m not sure where you are right now,” I whispered to my mom, “but if you could help me out here, I’d really appreciate it.”

“I know—you can get a hobby,” Nicola suggested a week later at One Person’s Garbage as she tied a paisley silk scarf around her head, making her look like a boho hippy circa 1975. If boho hippies had had lavender streaks in their hair.

“I guess so,” I replied unenthusiastically. Due to my distaste for exercise and my Weird Fat Girl status, I wasn’t exactly a hobby kinda girl. But I couldn’t go home—not with Hillary taking over. “Aren’t they expensive?” Seeing that the only hobby I had was hanging out at the Nuart watching old French films, I hadn’t ever been exactly breaking the bank with my activities. But because of the redecorating at the house, and the fact that the Nuart was closed for renovations, I had been spending less and less time at home and more and more time at One Person’s Garbage. Even though I considered Brad a friend, I still felt guilty when I didn’t buy anything, which is why I was quickly going broke—vintage concert T-shirts are a lot more expensive than movie tickets.

She shrugged. “They can be, if you choose something like . . . collecting tribal artifacts from lost civilizations, like my grandfather does.” Nicola’s grandfather was this very bizarre guy who had made boatloads of money when he invented this screw that every airplane in the world used. He also dressed up in a different costume before dinner every night. Which, when you’re that rich, you can afford to do.

Brad looked up from his computer where, from the way he had been super focused and taking notes, I knew it had been an OkCupid versus an eBay kind of day. “You could try the AFCC over on San Vicente,” he suggested. “They’ve got lots of classes. That’s where I took that Find Your Soul Mate While Learning How to Make Jewelry! one.” AFCC stood for All Faiths Community Center. It used to just be a JCC—Jewish Community Center—but then the Christians and Muslims got all mad, so they changed it.

“I remember that!” Nicola exclaimed. “You came back with that beaded Native American breastplate thingie and the phone number of that actor-slash-life-coach guy.”

“I don’t know,” I said doubtfully as I petted the blue satin dress again. Now that I couldn’t spend my afternoons in the house visiting with Tastykakes, my pants were loosening up a little (well, at least they weren’t cutting into my skin and leaving marks), but I still wasn’t anywhere near fitting into a size 8. “I’m not sure I’m interested in something so . . . social. I’m kind of into hobbies you can do by yourself.”

Brad clicked away on the computer. “What about pottery making? That’s a solitary kind of hobby. Especially if you sit off to the side and don’t talk to anyone in the class.”