“Sorry. I’ll try to be quieter.”
“And tell your aunt to turn down her music,” she shouted after me. “It’s been blasting all day!”
I waved in agreement as I tucked my bike around the corner of the house and let myself in.
Aunt Sue was waiting for me at the kitchen table, wearing a powder blue polyester track suit. Her snowwhite hair was curled into tight ringlets against her scalp, and her watery blue eyes shone behind a pair of thick, wire-rimmed glasses. A plate full of steaming brown stuff sat in front of her.
“Hi, peanut, how was your day?” she asked.
“Fab. Mrs. Carmichael said you should turn down your music.” I crossed to an old eighties boom box playing Frank Sinatra. At top volume. Unlike Mrs. Carmichael, Aunt Sue had industrial-strength hearing aids. Which would have worked wonders if she ever wore them.
“Hattie Carmichael is on old fuddy duddy,” Aunt Sue protested.
“Amen. What’s that?” I gestured to her dinner.
“Meatloaf.”
I sniffed. It smelled like meatloaf. But it looked like dog crap. “It looks a little, um, runny.”
Aunt Sue glanced down at her plate as if seeing it for the first time. “Well, now, it does a bit, doesn’t it?”
“What did you put in it?” I crossed the galley kitchen to make sure the oven was, indeed, off.
She pursed her lips, pronounced wrinkles forming between her thin wisps of eyebrows. “Same things I always do.” She paused. “I think. It’s hard to remember. Maybe I forgot the bread crumbs.” She shrugged.
I pulled my “just in case” burrito out of my bag and set it on a plate for her.
“What’s this?” she asked, her eyes shining like I’d placed a Christmas present in front of her.
“Beefy bean and cheese.”
“Hot sauce?”
I dropped a couple packets of Del Scorcho on the table next to her.
“You are the best niece I ever had,” Aunt Sue said, digging in.
“I’m your only niece.” I grabbed her plate of runny meatloaf and gave it a proper burial in the garbage disposal.
“That’s beside the point.”
“Thanks. You’re my favorite, too.” I dropped a kiss on the top of her head.
“Mmm,” she said, making little yummy sounds. “Why is it that the worse a food is for you, the better it tastes?”
“Burritos aren’t that bad,” I countered.
“Come on now, all that fast-food stuff is terrible. Full of preservatives and cholesterol. That stuff will kill you. Clogs your arteries, you know. Millie Sanders said her cousin ate that McDonald’s stuff every morning, and he dropped dead of a heart attack just last week. He was only seventy-three!”
“Well, then it looks like I’ve got a few good years of drive-thrus ahead of me before I have to start worrying about it.” I gave her a wink.
“Got any more hot sauce?” Aunt Sue asked around a huge bite.
I dropped a couple more packets on the table.
“You eat already?” she asked.
I nodded.
Her shoulders sagged. “Darn. Because I made meatloaf.”
I bit my lip. “I know, Aunt Sue.”
“Oh.” She paused a moment, as if her brain was struggling really hard to make those connections. Finally she shrugged. “Well, maybe I’ll make lasagna tomorrow.”
I put the pan of meatloaf mush in the sink. “Well, I’ve been warned.”
Aunt Sue gave me a playful swat on the arm as I brushed past, stopping to deposit another quick kiss on her little old forehead, before scooting off to my room.
Once there, I kicked off my shoes, sat cross-legged on my patchwork bedspread, and booted up my laptop, going through my nightly ritual of checking various email accounts, Twitter posts, and celebrity watcher blogs for any hot leads to pad tomorrow’s column. Thanks to a carefully cultivated network of informants, I had eyes all over Hollywood.
A couple baby-bump sightings on Melrose, a fender bender in Malibu involving a judge from American Idol, and one from a guy who worked at Dunkin’ Donuts in Santa Monica who swore a certain bulimic actress was in buying glazed old-fashioneds like they were going out of style.
Envisioning tomorrow’s headline, GOLDEN GLOBE WINNER GORGES ON GLAZED GOODIES, I opened a Word doc and started snarking away.
I was halfway through tomorrow’s masterpiece when an instant message popped up in the corner of my screen. From ManInBlack72.
A quick jump of adrenaline hit my stomach, and I bit my lip to keep the corner of my mouth from curving into a smile.
Like most of Hollywood, I have my own dirty little secret: an online crush.
When Felix took over as managing editor, he was appalled by the paper’s lack of “digital exploitation,” as he put it. Personally, I figure a paper should be on paper, but Felix was more of a computer whiz than I, and his first steps were to put everything online-an interactive Informer webpage, daily tweets, blogs, and Facebook and MySpace accounts for all the staff.
ManInBlack72 first contacted me through my new MySpace account this past summer. He was a friend of a friend of a friend…Well, you know the drill. How does anyone know anyone online, but suddenly you’ve got five hundred friends, right? And one of them was him. He put a pic of that cartoon robot, Bender, from Futurama in my comments section. You know, for Tina Bender. Ha, ha. Pretty cheesy. And I told him so. Surprisingly, he had a sense of humor about it and sent me a cartoon with a wedge of Swiss cheese in it the next week. Pretty soon comments turned into private messages, which turned into emails, which turned into giving out our IM handles.
Which turned into me suppressing a smile as I clicked the “accept message” button.
Hey, Bender.
I quickly typed back. Hey.
How was your day, babe?
If anyone else had called me “babe,” I would have given him a thorough lecture on the history of the feminist movement. But ManInBlack was the only one, aside from Aunt Sue, who ever asked about my day. And considering Aunt Sue didn’t remember what I’d told her two seconds later…it was nice someone asked.
Good. Got my column in on time.
Look at you being all prompt.
I grinned at the compliment.
Anything juicy to share? he asked.
Sorry, pal, you’ll just have to read the papers like everyone else.
You’re a cruel woman, Bender.
I know.
Good thing you’re so damned cute.
My stomach did a funny little shimmy. Even though I knew he was full of it. I never posted photos of myself online. The fewer people who knew what I looked like, the easier it was to do my job. The only avatar pic I had up on my MySpace page was of me morphed into a Simpson’s cartoon character that I’d gotten during the movie promo. Not really an exact likeness.
But, instead of calling him out as a blatant liar, I responded with, I try.
Hmm…that was where you were supposed to mention how hot I am.
Like a tamale, I joked back. Even though I had no idea what he looked like, either. The only photos on his page were of Johnny Cash, Darth Vadar, and the Will Smith/Tommy Lee Jones duo. You know, all men in black.
So, how was your day, hot stuff? I asked.
Ahn. But it’s getting better.
Rough day at the office?
I had no idea what Black did. He’d joked a few times that he could tell me, but then he’d have to kill me. Not that I minded. It added to the mystique that he had some unmentionable job. In my mind, he was kind of like Batman-too modest to tell me he was a billionaire by day and a superhero by night. So I never pushed the issue. It would have totally killed the fantasy to know he pumped gas for a living.