Chapter 13 Take Back Some Danger
Chapter 13
Take Back Some Danger
“I can’t believe you agreed to that taco stand,” Chloe said when she rolled up to my place the next morning. “Julia fucking Child says it’s good and now I’m doomed to eat overrated plates of peppers for the rest of my life. Thanks, old white lady.”
“Uh, you’re welcome,” I said, and Chloe burst into laughter.
“I meant Julia Child, not you, you idiot,” she said, though she hopped out to help me with my bags. “Who’s taking care of Small Jesse Pinkman? Is this the first time you’re leaving him? Are you OK?”
“I’m very uncomfortable with this, but my assistant’s handling it,” I said with a grimace. “You know I hate overlapping worlds, but I remembered she’d said something about cat sitting for one of her neighbors, and honestly she’s one of the people I trust most to handle things, so.”
“I’m proud of you,” Chloe said, as we got into the Bronco and buckled up. “Small Jesse Pinkman deserves the best care, even if now your assistant will know what kind of toilet paper you like best.”
“Oh, god , I didn’t even think about that,” I said, as she laughed at my expense. “No, you’re right, it’s worth it.”
“He’ll be fine,” she said in a kinder voice than I was used to from her. “It’s so hard leaving them, I know. I wish Fernando could text me to let me know how he was doing.”
“It would be so cute if they could text,” I said. “Even if it was just emojis.”
“Why would it be just emojis ?” Chloe shrieked. “So in this world, they have the power to use phones but only use emojis ?”
“Why is that so weird? I feel like the power of the English language might be beyond them. Emojis are so straightforward.”
“Oh my god,” Chloe said, but she grinned at me. “Are you ready?”
“For what? A whole weekend devoted to a couple’s eternal love while we’re there scamming the system?”
“Uh, no, and what system?” She gestured to her iPhone in its dashboard mount. “Are you ready for the amazing playlist I made for us to get there and back?”
“That,” I said, “I’m absolutely ready for.”
She tapped play and the opening notes of “Ya Got Trouble” from The Music Man rang out. “That’s right. It’s wall-to-wall musicals.”
“Hell yeah ,” I said. “Did your friends tell you when they came over to help me the other week that I had a Broadway playlist blasting? They all acted really nice about it but I definitely did not feel very cool about the whole thing.”
“Oh, please,” she said. “They’re all nerds in their own ways. No one said anything to me about that night except that your condo’s great and your cat’s amazing.”
I imagined being discussed in my absence, in a group that contained both my fake girlfriend and my actual boss, with only compliments. A rush of warmth was too intense for me to worry about other possibilities that the fears of being talked about behind your back usually brought up. The stuff I worried Fiona and Hailey talked about these days in the texts they sent directly back and forth, our group chat quieter than ever.
“You know, I was so nervous about hanging out with some queer friend group,” I said, leaning back against the headrest and letting the morning sunlight warm my face. “But I haven’t felt like I was, you know, entering some new culture or something. It’s been easy.”
“Yeah, you nerd, it’s because you’re super queer,” Chloe said with a laugh. “What new culture? It’s your culture, remember?”
“No, I know, just—you know. Outside of Instagram meme accounts I followed, my life just felt really straight before. Straight friends, straight boyfriend. And when you’re—you know, you look like me? I can tell people just read me as straight.”
“Ah yes, the invisible femmes,” Chloe said. “I mean, not to me. I always knew about you.”
I turned to look out the window because I didn’t want her to see how much that made me smile. “Wait, you did?”
“Yeah, you’ve got bi written all over you,” she said.
“That’s so funny,” I said. “Growing up, I would have never thought that. I felt like in movies or TV shows or whatever, bi people were always, you know. Like wearing black leather and having sex outside of some hot club at three a.m. or whatever. All mysterious and dangerous and provocative . Not, you know, wearing some twee dress with glasses and sensible shoes and listening to show tunes while home by an appropriate hour.”
“Uh, Clementine, I’ve hooked up with a lot of bi girls,” Chloe said. “Some twee dress with glasses and sensible shoes basically is a bisexual stereotype.”
Chloe passed up the entrance to the 5 Freeway and pulled into a McDonald’s drive-thru. “I assume we want giant Diet Cokes for the road.”
“Great assumption, yes.”
“Stereotypes are hard to shake,” she said, glancing at me. “So don’t let me come across like I don’t get it. The shit people say about Asian girls, it still gets to me sometimes.”
I bit back a does it really? because even though Chloe had told me she hated it when people acted like her emotions didn’t run deep, I guessed that it still surprised me more than a little. Despite her literally making me promise not to speak of her secret softness, I still saw her as tough.
“I’m being quiet,” I said, “because on this subject I am just a white lady who hasn’t experienced any of that.”
“Good girl,” she said with a smile, and pulled forward to order our Diet Cokes. “You know, all that quiet and submissive bullshit. It doesn’t help that I’m like the size of a large doll.”
“You’re such a badass, though,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I think it’s because I feel like I have to be,” she said. “Like, I can feel that, you know? People expect me to be sweet and quiet, so I’m like this instead.”
“Again, white lady disclaimer,” I said, and she laughed as she pulled up to the first window and paid for our sodas. “I know all the societal stuff is racist and bullshit and terrible. But I also think you are a badass. Two things can be true at once.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said, but she threw me another smile. “I dunno, I have this reputation, you know. My friends still refer to me as their friend who punches people or the one who got thrown in jail. That shit all happened in my twenties.”
“Wait,” I said, as Chloe pulled up to get our drinks. It was the most anticipation I’d ever felt in a McDonald’s drive-thru. “You were in jail ?”
“They, like, use that story as an example of how feral I am,” she said, pulling back onto the street in the direction of the freeway. “Chloe can’t control her temper, punches a guy right in the face. And I did punch a guy, right in the face, that much is true. But that asshole who then pressed charges called me and the girl I was with a fucking slur. But he was a white guy with a fancy car and a law degree, so obviously it was me, the queer woman of color, who paid for it.”
“Wait,” I said again. “Do your friends know that? I know you know them a million times better than I do, but it doesn’t seem like something they’d talk about that way. Also not to doubt your version of the story.”
“Nah,” she said. “They bailed me out, and Phoebe has an ex who’s a fancy lawyer who does pro bono work, so she handled it. I didn’t feel like getting into it. And I think they do know that if I punched a guy that he deserved it.”
“Truth,” I said.
“But also …” She sighed and stared straight ahead, in a way that seemed beyond paying attention to the road. “I’m angry all of the time, and I don’t know how other women, queer people, people of color, considering the state of the world and all, how we’re not all just punching assholes whenever they give us an excuse, you know?”
Greg’s face flashed into my mind and, even though I knew it wasn’t what Chloe meant, I laughed in recognition anyway. “Yeah. I’m not usually in punching mode but I hear you.”
“Ooh,” she said, perking up in her seat. “I forgot I put this on the playlist. There are honestly a lot of bangers in Annie .”
I laughed and leaned over to crank up the volume of “Easy Street.” “Making a playlist is an important part of a road trip, so I’m glad you remembered. I used to be so good at stuff like that, back before I broke up with Will.”
“Good at playlists?”
“No, just … making things nice. Remembering to do shit. Getting up every morning and doing yoga. Dinners with leftovers for lunches the next day. It’s like he left and I went feral.”
“Yeah, he was boring, you needed to take back some danger,” Chloe said, pulling onto the 5 Freeway. “OK, trip’s officially begun. I feel like it doesn’t count when you’re still on surface streets.”
“Oh my god, believe it or not, I think that too,” I said. “Also, Will wasn’t boring. I know you’ll never believe me, but he wasn’t. He just had an idea of our life together that didn’t actually take me into account, you know? Just this idea of a wife and a mom and this whole future together that made me feel like he’d never actually seen me.”
I realized I’d never quite realized I thought that until the words left my mouth, and the awareness rattled through me. This hardly felt like the best place for a bunch of post-relationship processing, though, so I leaned forward to crank up the music—“La Vie Bohème” from Rent had just come on—instead.
Driving to Santa Barbara always started as a slog, heavy traffic up the 101 through some of the most boring parts of the regular Valley and then the way-out Valley. The sites were strip malls and little else, until suddenly you rounded a corner, and there it was, the crashing wet blue of the Pacific Ocean. Paradise had been creeping up on you all along.
“Is there a reason Ari and Nina wanted to get married here?” I asked, as Chloe swung the Bronco off on the exit that would lead us to our lunch plans. “Like did they meet here, or one of them grew up here?”
“Nah, Nina said they wanted an easy destination wedding, and since they own a place in Palm Springs that apparently didn’t feel destination-y enough for them. It feels random but I’ve seen photos of the venue, it’s going to be beautiful, blah blah.”
I laughed. “I’ve never had, like, the greatest attitude about weddings, but, I don’t know. The thing that’s given me pause is how generic so much of it feels, you know? Taking these steps everyone takes in a way that feels like you’re legally required to. But it hasn’t felt like that? Even last night felt really special. Is it embarrassing to admit that?”
“No, the embarrassing thing is having such wonderful friends who are so happy and good ,” Chloe said. “Trust me. Bianca and Phoebe’s wedding was so great and poked all these holes in my feelings about big weddings, you know?”
“Yeah, annoying.”
Chloe found a parking spot, and we walked up to the restaurant, where everyone else was already in the long line. We’d all literally seen each other mere hours ago, but the truth was that it was always a little exciting seeing your friends when you were out of town together. Or even your fake girlfriend’s friends.
As we waited, I chatted with CJ about work—they actually worked on the back end of digital ads at a fairly large entertainment site network so in some ways we did the same job from different angles—and with Phoebe about our favorite restaurants around work, for some reason, and even with Bianca, because as much as she still made me nervous, I wouldn’t survive if I didn’t find out where she’d gotten the bright patterned maxidress she was wearing. And I felt like most plus-size people who loved clothes were usually pretty excited to share intel with each other.
I got so wrapped up in that conversation that it felt like we barely waited in line at all, and by the time we were all seated with our food—and Chloe was elbowing me so I’d notice how many of our friends had ordered what amounted to plates of peppers—I decided that whatever suspicion Bianca once had seemed to have cooled off. Though of course I knew I could have just been overestimating the value of a conversation about shopping on Instagram.
We caravanned to the hotel after lunch, and it was in the hotel lobby, as I was standing next to Chloe, behind Phoebe and Bianca, and in front of CJ and Sofia, that it hit me. Chloe had told me that Nina and Ari were handling the accommodations for everyone, and I’d had far too many other things on my mind to think of it any further. Task managed, fantastic.
But now I was standing here, waiting to check into Chloe’s and my room , singular. There was, it hit me, only one bed.
How had I gotten this far in this fake girlfriend scenario without predicting this exact situation? They built entire romance novels around them, for god’s sake! I had somehow agreed to this weekend, packed my bags, cheerfully sipped Diet Coke and sang show tunes for two hours up the coast, and yet it hadn’t occurred to me at all.
I tugged on Chloe’s arm, though I hadn’t yet decided how I’d ask her if she was prepared for what was about to happen while surrounded by her friends who would hardly expect us to be surprised by the situation. But then Phoebe and Bianca stepped away, and Chloe gave me a look before walking up to the front desk. “Room for Lee. Or maybe it’s under Hayes. Maybe both.”
I stared at her so intently she must have felt it.
“What?” she asked.
I gestured with my arms out to my sides.
“Did you lose the power of speech?” she asked, before turning back to the front-desk clerk to get our key cards. For the room we were sharing together. That only housed one bed.
I all but dragged Chloe away from her friends, down the corridor just a short distance to room 107. “Just one room.”
“Clementine,” she said with a heavy sigh, and turned away from me to tap the key card against the sensor. “What did you think the setup would be?”
We walked into the room and I stared at the bed. It was large—larger than mine at home, at least—but it was still just the one bed.
“You’re being weird,” she said, tossing her suitcase on the bed with surprising ease and unlatching it. “At what point did it hit you we’d be in the same room?”
“Somehow literally just now,” I said. “I don’t know. This whole thing’s been a weird blur at times. Somehow I’ve overthought the wrong parts.”
“Come on,” she said. “Hang up your nice stuff so we don’t look like dirtbags.”
“Speak for yourself,” I said, but I followed her example and got my nice dresses into the closet next to Chloe’s array of suits and jumpsuits. “You’ll be the best-dressed ring bearer here.”
She grinned at me. “To be fair, that suit is from the boys’ side of J. Crew.”
“When’s dinner tonight?” I asked. “Is that the next thing on our agenda?”
“Well, I think CJ and Sofia want to go look at some old religious boring thing, right?” she asked with a roll of her eyes. Santa Barbara was as full of historic monuments, like the Old Mission that I’d been to on multiple field trips, as it was full of wine and beaches and other ways to relax. “I’d rather get in the pool. But go see some old building if you want.”
“Thanks, you make both sound really great,” I said. “I didn’t bring a suit, so maybe I’ll go with them, if you don’t think that’s weird.”
“Uh, I think it’s weird you didn’t bring a suit,” she said.
I shrugged, trying to look casual. Thin people reminded me of myself as a little kid, complete confusion over why anyone wouldn’t be one hundred percent pro-pools. “Public-ish pools can be weird for me. I just don’t always feel like being the fattest person there.”
Her head whipped around, and she stared at me. “Clementine. That makes me really fucking sad. Especially because you probably have some old-timey retro swimsuit and you look superhot in it.”
“It is pretty old-timey,” I said with a laugh to disguise the fact that Chloe’s words actually made me choke up a little. “No, it’s fine, sorry, it’s not about me, it’s just about how other people can be weird sometimes and I don’t always want to deal with it.”
“Ugh,” she said loudly. “Fine. Let’s both go see an old building.”
“It wasn’t completely boring on my last field trip,” I said, flooded with gratitude that she’d change plans for me, and we both laughed. And it actually turned out that California state history was way less boring when you were with a few friends in the bright sunshine on a weekday off from work. Everything seemed less impossible by the time we got back to our room—post a quick stop at a nearby restaurant for some wine for three of us and a cheese plate for all of us—and I managed to calmly unpack into the hotel bathroom all the various creams and gels it took for my face and hair to look presentable, without dwelling too much on the accommodations. Despite the terrifyingly ridiculous scenario I’d found myself in, it was increasingly tough to worry about anything in this sun-drenched beach town where everything seemed to be designed around drinking wine, glimpsing the ocean, and doing very little else.
My phone buzzed while Chloe was exploring our little private patio (this was definitely the nicest I’d traveled) and I’d been thinking about joining her. Our room did back up to the Metro train, but the little outdoor space was still inviting as hell. But yikes . The only message worse than a work emergency. Well, or than a frantic weird passive-aggressive text from Greg. OK, far down in the terrible category, but still concerning.
Hey Clementine, could you stop by our hotel room? Thanks, from Bianca.
“Do you know what this is about?” I called out to Chloe. She pointed at her earbuds and waved me away, and I didn’t know what else to do besides make my way to my boss’s and her wife’s hotel room. Surely if it was some kind of work emergency or if Phoebe had made the decision not only to not expand my department but to shutter it altogether, Bianca wouldn’t have been the one to summon me.
“Hey,” Bianca greeted me, opening the door and stepping aside. She looked perfectly vacation-y in a hot pink caftan. “Chloe told me you forgot a swimsuit and assumed I overpacked, which was accurate.”
“Oh, I—” I shook my head. “I’m good. Sorry she texted—”
“She also said you don’t always love public pools in a casual way that small people say things like that,” Bianca said with a little smirk. “Anyway. I was going to head down anyway, so let’s all go together.”
I studied Bianca in her hot pink caftan, the tied strings of a bikini visible, and wondered just what swimsuit I’d be agreeing to.
“Here,” she said, apparently reading my thoughts, pointing me toward the dresser where three two-pieces were laid out. One was solid black, not usually my vibe, but with a modest cut that was pretty retro. I didn’t hate it.
“I forgot the other option,” she said, and I wondered if some magically perfect suit would appear. “The other option is we tell your girlfriend she’s being a meddling pain in our asses and we sit poolside in whatever you want to wear and order cocktails while we talk about online shopping some more.”
“You can do whatever you want,” I said. “Don’t feel like you have to babysit me. I’m really fine. I mean, I know you’re really confident and cool and whatever and—I don’t know. I have no more complaints with my body than I guess anyone does about theirs, but I just feel like sometimes people can be shitty to fat women in swimsuits so I keep myself out of those situations.”
“I’m genuinely flattered you think you have to explain any of this to me,” Bianca said with a grin. “Girl, I get it. I work out at this awesome all-sizes gym because I love a dance class but I grew weary of thin women telling me I was so brave to be there. Yeah, I know I seem confident, but it’s more that I fight back against all of that bullshit because I love pools and also because I think I look great in a bikini. And I’m sure you do too. So come or don’t come, but between me and Chloe, trust me, no one’s going to bat an eye at you without some serious consequences.”
I shrugged, feeling myself wanting to give in, to feel like a kid again when the excitement of getting into a big fancy hotel pool outweighed literally any other possibility. “Is Phoebe coming?”
“God, no, Clementine, I’m not making you put on one of my bikinis in front of your boss ,” she said with a shriek, and then we were both laughing and I somehow felt the most comfortable I’d been in—well, ages, really. How did these people keep doing that, just upping that comfort level constantly?
The borrowed swimsuit was still a little sexier than I would have ideally picked for myself, but—no surprise—Bianca also had extra caftans and coverups to offer me, and I felt almost comfortable as I headed down to the pool with her and Chloe. And maybe I imagined it, but the way Chloe’s eyes dragged along my body when I tried to casually slip out of my caftan at the pool’s edge made every uncomfortable part of the afternoon worth it.