Wicked Jealous: A Love Story (6 page)

You would think that after what I had just been through, the universe would cut me a break. Whoever ran it would just let me make my way peacefully to 7-Eleven, and when I arrived, not only would there be some Butterscotch Krimpets waiting patiently for me to claim them, but there’d be an ice-cold fuschia-colored Tab can smiling at me from the refrigerator section.

Instead, I got my yoga pants leg stuck in my bike chain so that when I tried to get it out, the semi-cool oil-based design it had left got smeared and turned into one big blob. And when I got there, not only were there no Tabs, but due to an earlier power outage, all the sodas were warm. Warm soda made me nauseous, and so that left me having to drink plain old boring water. With my luck (or lack thereof) so far, I had given up on the hope of Butterscotch Krimpets, but when the gum-snapping Goth girl behind the counter looked up from her
Fangoria
magazine to tell me that because of a pit stop by a troop of runway models on their way downtown to a fashion show for L.A. Fashion Week, pretty much the only snacks left were salt and vinegar potato chips (“Salt is to models what garlic is to vampires,” she informed me), I was about to lose it.
This
was exactly why I didn’t like to leave the house—because when you did, you lost any kind of control over what happened to you. My life may have been on the small side because of it, but that just gave me that much more time to think about what it would look like when it was actually
big
in Paris or New York.

“I love those,” a voice said as I gazed woefully at a box of Nilla Wafers, thinking about what a pathetic excuse for a cookie they were.

I turned around to see Jason Frank. Of course it was him. I was sweaty, wearing orange yoga pants with an oil stain, and about to cry. The way my afternoon was going, who
else
would it have been?

“Don’t you?” he asked.

“Actually, I don’t. On the cookie scale I’d have to rate them . . . a negative seven,” I replied.

His face fell. “How come?”

I shrugged. “Lots of reasons. First there’s the whole consistency issue,” I replied. “They’re a little sandpaperlike.”

He thought about it. “I guess they are.”

“And then the taste thing,” I went on. “Meaning there isn’t any. They’re supposed to be vanilla, but they fail miserably. Which is probably why they call themselves ‘nilla.’ You know, so they don’t get sued for false advertising.”

He shrugged. “Personally—”

“But then again, vanilla
is
a synonym for bland, so maybe what that’s what they’re going for,” I added.

He looked a little offended.

“I’m not saying you’re bland or anything,” I quickly corrected. “It’s just that I can get passionate on the cookie front.”

He nodded. “I see.”

As my eyebrow went up, his face turned red. “I didn’t mean ‘I see’ like that,” he quickly said. “I meant it as in just from the tone of your voice, I can see. You see?”

Wow. So popular kids babbled sometimes, too. Who knew?

He motioned to my outfit. “So, uh, just finish a workout?”

I looked down. Oh God. I had almost forgotten that I looked like something that had gone through the spin cycle using Crisco oil instead of water. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Yoga?” Jason asked.

I totally could have lied right then and it wouldn’t have been a big deal. I mean, it’s not like Jason Frank was going to take time out of his very busy life and trail me like some detective in one of the
Law & Order
shows to see if I was telling the truth. That being said, I was one of the people who, no matter how much time I took to make up a lie, and how foolproof it sounded when I practiced it in front of my mirror, somehow I always got busted. Which is why I decided to tell the truth.

“Umm . . . something . . .
kind of
like yoga but . . . not exactly,” I replied. Okay, maybe not exactly the truth. Maybe something that
resembled
the truth. A little. If you closed one eye and turned the lights down really low.

“Pilates?”

“Nope.”

“Ballet?”

Ballet?
Was he was taking me for someone with
grace
? “Uh-uh.”

“Tae kwon do?” Jeez. Talk about nosy.

“Oh! I know—is it that thing where—”

“It was Zumba, okay?” I blurted out. Whoa. Did I really need to be that honest?

“Zumba.”

“Yeah, it’s this thing—”

“I know what Zumba is. My mom does it.”

Oh great. With my luck, she was probably one of the women in my class. “Well then, if your mom does it, you probably know that it’s an excellent form of exercise,” I said defensively. I was defending Zumba? How’d that happen?

He nodded. “Yeah. She’s looking good. She even stopped wearing mom jeans.”

I winced. Could he make it all sound any
less
cool?

Suddenly, he started bobbing his head. “Oh man—I
love
this song!

I listened, but didn’t recognize it. Probably because it was poppy and Top 40–ish, which was so not a world I lived in. I didn’t even like to go there for weekend getaways. “Who is it?” I asked.

He laughed. “That’s a good one.”

As the daughter of a sitcom writer, I knew how to joke around at times, but this wasn’t one of them. “You’re being serious.”

I nodded.

“It’s
Bieber
.”

“As in . . . Justin?” I asked, confused.

“Well, yeah,” he said. “What other Biebers are there?” I kept waiting for the “just kidding” part, but it didn’t come. I even looked over my shoulder to see if I was being Punk’d.

“I’m not sure,” I admitted. Maybe one who sang songs that were more appropriate for a sixteen-year-old varsity-soccer-playing boy to listen to rather than a thirteen-year-old girl.

“So if you don’t listen to the Biebs, what
do
you listen to?”

I shrugged. “Lots of different stuff. Jazz . . .”

“Jazz?” he said, surprised. “Like
jazz
jazz?”

I nodded. “Yeah. Miles Davis? John Coltrane?”

He squinted. “I think my dad has some CDs by those guys.” Jason’s dad was this famous Academy Award– winning director named Stan Frank who made Films-with-a-capital-
F
versus movies-with-a-little-
m
. A lot of the parents at my school worked in the business, but the whole Academy Award thing was as close to royalty as it got in Hollywood, which therefore made Jason Frank sort of a prince. Although his dad’s movies weren’t my kind of thing (films set in the 1950s about the Mafia, Vietnam things, biographies about famous boxers), I had once read an article in the
Los Angeles Times
about how François Truffaut was his biggest inspiration, which therefore made him okay in my book. “But it’s not really my thing.”

I nodded. It was understandable that he didn’t like jazz. As Nicola was always reminding me, not many teenagers listened to it. (“Maybe the kind who wear sunglasses indoors and then grow up to write angsty memoirs do, but not, you know,
normal
ones.”) But if that was the case, I wasn’t even going to bring up how I liked French music by Edith Piaf and Serge Gainsbourg, because if he barely knew who Miles Davis was, he probably wasn’t going to be familiar with two dead French people.

We stood there, both staring at the Nilla Wafers as if they somehow contained the secrets of the universe.

“Well, I guess I should get going,” he finally said.

I nodded. “Yeah, me, too.”

“I gotta get to SAT tutoring.”

“And I have to . . .” He really didn’t need to know that I had to get home and jump in the shower so that the sweat that had now dried on my skin wouldn’t turn into some disgusting rash. “Anyways, nice talking to you.”

He grabbed a box of Nilla Wafers. “All this talk about cookies made me hungry. See you around,” he said as he walked away.

Hungry? He had no idea what I was planning on inhaling once I was back in the safety of my own room.

three

It made sense that after gorging on frozen yogurt from Red Mango, peanut-butter-covered pretzels from Whole Foods, and iced sugar cookies from Ralph’s, I’d feel nauseous. However, I was pretty sure the queasiness came from replaying the image of Jason bobbing his head to the Biebs.

“So he doesn’t have great taste in music,” Nicola said the next afternoon as I helped Brad go through garbage bags full of stuff that he had gotten at a garage sale of some sitcom actress from the eighties. I got really excited when I saw a fake leopard A-line coat. Not only was it something you could totally have seen Jeanne Moreau wearing in a Truffaut film, but it was large enough to fit me. I was all set to buy it . . . until I saw the cigarette burns in the left sleeve. (“I think I remember reading something in
People
about how she had a little problem with the bottle and would pass out with lit cigarettes in her hand,” Brad said when I pointed it out.) “It’s not like it makes him a bad person,” Nicola added.

I looked up from a colorful-looking caftan with long flowy sleeves (“I think that was from her
Eat, Pray, Love
stage,” Brad said, “when she took the money she made when the show went into syndication and went to India for a year to find herself.”)

“Nicola. We’re talking the
Biebs.
”

Brad stopped his Etsy surfing. (Because he and Luca were back on—at least for that week—he had turned off his OkCupid profile.) “This Testosterone Tweet guy listens to Justin Bieber?” he asked.

“It’s Twit, not Tweet,” I corrected. “And, yes, not only does he listen to him, but he
admits
it,” I said. “Like without any irony whatsoever.”

Brad wrinkled his nose. “Oh, that’s not good,” he said. “Even my people don’t admit to that. In fact, I don’t think my people even
listen
to him.” Brad’s “people” were gay men. I don’t know if any official studies had been done, but I was pretty sure that if they had been, research would have shown that they were the ones responsible for keeping all the CAPS (Cheesy Awesome Pop Stars) such as Cher and Britney neck-high in feathers and belly rings.

I looked at Nicola, who was checking out a high-necked, long-sleeved blouse. (“I think I remember reading that when she was done in India, she became born again-Amish and moved to Pennsylvania,” Brad said.) “That, from a guy who has not one but
two
box sets of Barry Manilow’s greatest hits,” I said. I turned to Brad. “I hope you don’t take that the wrong way. I’m just making a point.”

“No offense taken,” he replied. “And I still say that ‘Copacabana’ is the single greatest song ever written.”

Nicola shook her head. “I can’t believe
you
of all people are judging someone based on something so superficial. So he’s got awful taste in music. That’s exactly what a girlfriend is for!” she cried.

“I’ll say it again—the idea that you think Jason Frank is interested in me is insane.”

“To teach guys right from wrong and
mold
them,” she continued. Her eyes narrowed. “So then, after you do that, they can break up with you and hook up with the Madison Stovers of the world, who then get to reap the benefits of all
your
hard work.”

Brad and I looked at each other nervously. If Nicola got going on one of her rants about Nate Buckner, her one and only boyfriend whom she met last June because they both “liked” Apu from
The Simpsons
on Facebook, only to break up with her six months later after he met this skank Madison on the “I Hate Farmville” page, we’d be here for hours. “Don’t worry—I’m not going to go there,” she promised.

“Thanks. And you know where else we’re not going to go? To any more conversation about Jason Frank,” I said as I marched over to the rack where the blue satin dress lived. Except it wasn’t there. “Brad. Where’s my dress?” I asked, panicked. “I mean,
the
dress. The blue one.”

“I moved it over to the Dresses for Winter Even Though L.A. Doesn’t Really Have Seasons display,” Brad replied. Brad was always coming up with displays that he hoped would sell more stuff.

I relaxed. Not like I was ever going to buy it, but I couldn’t imagine letting anyone else own it, either.

“Look, Simone, I feel like I can say this because you’re my best friend,” Nicola said. “You’ve spent your life having people judge you and make cracks based on how you look, right?”

I nodded.

“But if they took the time to get to know you, like I did, they’d learn that you’re totally cool, right?” she asked.

“We were seventh-grade lab partners,” I reminded her. “It was me or that weird kid who was into furry animal costumes, so you
had
to get to know me. And by the way—it’s not just the Bieber thing that’s weird. There’s also the fact that he likes Nilla Wafers.”

“Nilla Wafers? Those are so . . . not exciting,” Brad said, disappointed.

“Thank you,” I said.

Nicola shook her head. “I can’t believe I’m best friends with someone who is so judgmental. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

Maybe Nicola was right—maybe I wasn’t being fair. But it didn’t really matter what Jason Frank listened to or snacked on, because even though we may have lived in the same zip code literally, figuratively we lived on different planets.

Although I had told the Zumba-ers I’d be back on Thursday, I wasn’t planning on actually showing up. Instead, I was going to come up with a totally viable excuse so that if the group hunted me down or saw me on the street or something, they wouldn’t burn me at the stake. But then I got home from school that afternoon to find that Hillary had hired these two women named Summer and Rain she had read about in some The-People-You-Must-Know-If-You-Want-to-Be-Thought-of-as-a-Hip-Angeleno list to go through each room of our house and clear it of all negative energy by burning sage and incense. I had to get out of there. Especially when they launched into some weird modern dance that was supposed to call in health, wealth, and prosperity (“And,” Summer said, glancing at her notes, “a four-carat diamond engagement ring”).

With Nicola at therapy (“I’m thinking today’s the day I tell him that sometimes I hear voices,” she mentioned during our drive home, “just to shake things up a bit.”); One Person’s Garbage closed for the weekend because of “remodeling” (Brad’s code for “Because Luca just told me that he can no longer deal with the way I pull back whenever he tries to get close because I’m terrified of intimacy, I’m going to lie on my couch all day with my cat LiLo and watch
The Way We Were
over and over and try not to sob so hard that I break a rib when Babs says ‘Your girl is lovely, Hubbell’ at the end”); and nothing playing at the Nuart Theater that I hadn’t already seen five times, I didn’t have anywhere to go. Which is why, after I changed into my Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers T-shirt and a pair of my brother’s old Castle High sweats he had left behind (I didn’t care how expensive those orange yoga pants were—they were never going on my body again), I jumped on my bike and pedaled over to the AFCC.

“Simone! You’re back!” exclaimed Cookie excitedly as I walked in.

“Well, yeah,” I replied, a little less winded than last time. “I said I would be, remember?”

“Oh, that’s just
wonderful
. You know, a lot of the girls didn’t think you’d actually return because they didn’t think you had that Zumba spirit, but I said, ‘Hey—just cool out. She’ll be back.’”

“It’s ‘
chill
out,’” I corrected.

“Huh?”

“It’s not
cool
out—it’s
chill
out.”

Her brow wrinkled. “Are you sure?”

I nodded.

She took out her little notebook and made a note. It was like she had her own Urban Dictionary going there. “Thanks. But I’m going to double-check that with my granddaughter when I see her.”

“That’s probably a good idea,” I agreed. I could hear the techno-Latin-fusion music start up in the gym. “Well, I’m going to go in,” I said. “I don’t want to miss a second of fun.”

Cookie smiled. “You don’t know how happy this makes me, to see a young person like yourself embrace the Zumba lifestyle. Most kids your age just make fun of it.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” I said.

At least not out loud.

Maybe it was karma, because I
did
make fun of it in my mind, but the first fifteen minutes of class Zumba kicked my butt. Big-time. Which I guess is what it was supposed to do. But to my surprise, after that, the strangest thing happened. Not only did I get my limbs to work in the order in which they were supposed to, but I actually started . . .
enjoying
it. Like I was
having fun.
To the point where, at the end, when Jorge said, “And that’s a wrap!” I added my own semi-disappointed “Ohhh” to the chorus in the room.

I still wasn’t willing to go to Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf with the group (“I have a feeling she’s very introverted,” I heard Marcia—a therapist—whisper to the women after I sputtered the very lame excuse that I had to get to the vet, because even though I didn’t have a cat, I liked to visit the sick ones there), but this time when I left, I didn’t go straight to 7-Eleven in search of Tastykakes. I was going to, but for some reason, the idea of scarfing that much sugar made my stomach do flip-flops. So I went to Whole Foods and after standing in front of the gluten-free, fruit-juice-sweetened cookies for a long time (at least they were
healthy
cookies), I found myself drifting over to an area of the supermarket where I had rarely ever set foot, unless it happened to be on the way to the snack aisle.

The produce department.

It was actually a beautiful sight—the dark lush green of the spinach and kale. The sunny, happy yellow squash. And the shiny bright red peppers that were the exact color of the walls in a Paris living room in this
Paris in the Sixties
photo book I had picked up at the Santa Monica flea market the weekend before.

I had actually had plans to go to the flea market with my dad, like we used to. He’d even scheduled it in his iPhone, laptop, BlackBerry,
and
iPad—but right as we were walking out the door, Hillary told him they were booked for brunch with her mother and her new husband, and now that he was out of the hospital and was allowed to go out as long as he brought his oxygen tank she really wanted them to meet before the guy died. Although I had held my breath and said, “Pleasedotherightthingpleasedotherightthing,” silently to myself, the minute Hillary started swinging her hips as she
clicked-clack
ed over to convince Dad, I saw his eyes glaze over, and I knew I’d be going alone, again.

I sighed, and looked over the vegetables. For someone who tended to stick to the four major food groups of flour, salt, sugar, and artificial flavorings, facing the wall of colorful produce was also really overwhelming—especially when all the misters clicked on at the same time and hissing filled the air. That’s when I walked over to the deli section and bought myself a pound of prepared vegetables. They were smothered in oil and feta cheese and other things that probably made them a little less than healthy, but it was better than my usual dinner of pizza and pasta. I wasn’t sure if it was the exercise or the veggies or what, but that night I slept better than I had in ages.

Much to my surprise, the veggie thing wasn’t a one-shot deal. A few days later, the craving for red peppers hit me like a shot. I wasn’t sure if it was the color reminding me of France, or that first pound of prepared veggies. In health class the year before we saw this DVD about the dangers of “gateway” drugs—things that led to more serious ones. Like, say, pot leading to cocaine, which then led to crack. In my case, veggies in butter and oil and cheese were a gateway food to other harder, healthier vegetables. Like red peppers with the teensiest bit of olive oil and garlic powder. And baked yams. And roasted brussels sprouts.

The following Thursday when I got home from Zumba I did something that only weeks ago would have been unthinkable: I unbookmarked the Tastykakes page. I had no idea why my cravings for Butterscotch Krimpets were replaced with a desire for cinnamon-roasted butternut squash, but they were. I even started cruising the Web for veggie recipes and using the oven to cook things. A few weeks into the veggies and eating better, I realized my cargos were loose—really loose. The weight was coming off.