“Smoothie?” I offer.
“Always,” he says. “Kale.”
I go next door and order the kale smoothie and I go into the bathroom and crush three more of Dez’s Percocets. Twenty minutes later, Calvin passes out. At last. I reach into his pocket for the password cheat sheet he keeps in his wallet and I get into his iPad and into the database for his improv group and boom.
The building is around the corner on Bronson and Amy did settle into this neighborhood. Maybe she got a wealth hangover and maybe she’s still the girl who tells the guy she’s using that she misses her own bed and maybe she’s back in it right now, freaking out about seeing me, eating frozen chicken and waiting for the truffle oil to evacuate her pores and ooze out of her body.
I go to the Pantry and buy violets—the painted ones. Then, I go to Bronson and buzz apartment 326. Nothing. I buzz apartment 323. Nothing. I buzz 101 and 101 is female and 101 is awake.
“Hello?” she says, husky.
“Flowers!” I say.
The girl in 101 doesn’t ask who they’re for because everyone likes to get flowers. Woody Allen knows this; Anjelica Huston gets murdered in Crimes and Misdemeanors because she wants flowers and lets a stranger into the building. My breath quickens when I enter the lobby and I have to dart into the stairwell because apartment 101 is just a few feet from the front door. In the stairwell, I freeze. I am shaking. The flowers rattle, swish swish. I don’t have to do this. So Amy is harassing me. So what? I could just slip out of this building and run back to Love. I prefer Love. She’s sweeter. She knows music and she’s ready for me. So what am I doing in this stairwell, jeopardizing my future with Love?
“Fucking closure,” I mutter. If only Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind were a real thing and it’s such an asshole Angeleno thought to have, unoriginal and bratty. I can’t erase my memories of Amy. But I can stop her from fucking around with my future.
I begin my ascent toward her apartment. This stairwell is concrete and white and every time I step it echoes. Everyone in this building is sleeping; Angelenos need beauty sleep. They need energy to make storyboards for web series and hike and talk about movies they’ll never make and walk their dogs that hate them. My heart pounds and I reach the third floor and I turn the doorknob and it squeaks and I flinch and I bet nobody was ever murdered here before.
I jimmy the “lock” of 326—nothing is built well anymore—and the front door opens directly into the living room, which is awash in bras, bowls of cereal, empty bottles of Corona Light, and US Weeklys. There is one sofa, covered in frayed blankets, and a small TV. To the left is a galley kitchen with a sad little countertop meant to facilitate socializing.
The TV is off and the apartment is quiet, but there’s an open box of Cocoa Krispies on the counter, like someone just made a bowl of cereal and wandered away. I pass the counter and walk past the Pier One barstools into a narrow hallway. The walls are white and there is a bathroom at the end of the hall and the door is open. A closet door to my left is ajar, which means that the door to my right leads to the bedroom. Amy’s bedroom.
This is it. I put my hand on the doorknob and push. The room is small and dark. Marilyn Monroe hovers above the bed, a breathy beacon in white, immortalized on the wall (why, hello, Joe). Beneath her is a rumpled comforter, covering the faint outline of a body. Hair peeks out from those covers, blond, greasy. My breath is short. I count down. I flex. I clench my jaw. And in one fell swoop I peel away the blanket.
There’s a shriek and a kick and a little ninja, a foot shorter than Amy in a black tank and black panties, springs up as I fall onto my back. The floor is hard. Wood. Her foot is a weapon and she knows it. She kicks me in the crotch. I scream and roll to my side and that foot gets my kidney. I fold into myself and now she gets my tailbone and I retreat and now that fucking foot jabs me in my belly.
“Stop!” I beg.
She kicks me again. Harder. And I deserve this because I didn’t find Amy, because I don’t know Love’s number, because my balls have been kicked into my intestines.
She jumps on the bed and stands in karate chop mode. She yelps, “Don’t move.” As if I could turn over. As if my body isn’t a collection of throbbing, busted places. I breathe. This was supposed to be Amy. That was supposed to be me on the bed, in control. I open my eyes. She perceives my eyes as a threat and she jumps off the bed and kicks me in the head. Everything goes away now, the pain and the fear and the anger and the lukewarm blood.
Blackout.
21
“DON’T move,” the girl says again.
I can’t move. She’s being redundant. While I was out cold she went to work on me. She tied my limbs together with resistance bands. I’m a mermaid flat on her white shag area rug. I can’t talk. A resistance band is wrapped around my head, cutting through my mouth and jamming my tongue. The girl paces. She grips her cell phone and I wonder when she called the cops, what’s taking so long, how bad this is going to get. Fuck these fucking resistance bands and I have only one move.
I cry.
In the big way. For everything bad, the starving kids and the way Harvey refreshes his YouTube videos, for Calvin’s body, how confusing it must be, the pot and the coke, the acting and the writing. I cry for Mr. Mooney and his eggs and for Marilyn Monroe, framed here too; she is everywhere and yet she is dead. My captor picks up a pair of scissors and kneels beside me. Ferberizing a baby is no easy thing. She pulls the band from my cheek and cuts it.
“Enough!” she screams.
I blubber. I work my lower lip. I drool. “My God, thank you.”
She grabs a hand towel and wipes my face. “Stop it.”
“I—I’m sorry,” I stammer. “I won’t move, I promise. I know the cops are coming.”
Her eyes flash to the left and she did not call the cops. She grunts, throws the hand towel on the floor, and she is still holding her scissors and her phone. “I said stop it.”
I nod. “Sorry.”
She paces and there is a reason she did not call the cops. Anyone would call the cops. That mysterious reason is all I have and I wish I knew what it was because if it goes away I’m fucked. “Sometimes they’re slow,” I assure her. “But they’ll be here.”
She stops moving. “I said, stop it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Stop talking.”
“I will,” I say. “There’s just something I want you to know before they get here.”
She groans. She looks at me.
I blurt, “I was looking for my girlfriend.”
“You broke in.”
“No,” I say. “The door was open.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Go look,” I plead. “I swear to you. The door was open, just like Lydia said it would be.”
The girl storms across the rooms, her thighs are hard, shiny. She opens the door. She examines the knob. She slams it. I do know how to pick a fucking lock. She returns to me. “Well, who the hell is Lydia?”
“Do the cops have your code?” I ask. I am #TeamGirl. “You should call 911 and make sure they know the access code.”
“They have it,” she lies. She grimaces. She gets a text and she reads and types and it’s probably her best friend, who is like call the cops and this girl is like I got this and the friend is worried like you need to call the cops sweetie this is cray. I can smell the dynamics and I know I have a shot at freedom.