Chapter 7 In a Rush
In a Rush
Marín
Noa is sitting in one of the chairs in the meeting room with a bored expression and her phone in her hand. If I could, I would make her eat it.
She’s the snottiest teenager on the face of the planet.
She wants everything, demands everything…
and then she doesn’t even appreciate any of it.
My boss decided that I could get this girl “on the right track.” Just because I don’t scream, cry, kick doors, or throw things like some of my colleagues doesn’t mean I don’t have a limit.
Although, to be honest, this girl crossed it a long time ago.
And now I have to chaperone her on tour.
“And there won’t be a makeup artist?” she asks sullenly, looking up from her brand-new phone for the first time.
“No,” I say, flipping through the folder given to me by the poor intern whose job it is to take all the documents and organize them: tickets, the car rental, hotel information…
“Well, that sucks. Can’t we demand one?”
I side-eye her mother, who’s looking at her like she’s afraid of a tantrum and only takes two seconds to beg me with her eyes to take charge.
“No. We can’t demand one, Noa. The record company is the one who’s eating the costs of all these gigs. It’s promotion. Do you remember when we explained to you about promotion?”
“Fine then, you can eat the cost of the makeup artist too, right? I need to look pretty at the gigs.”
She throws me a pseudo-seductive look, and I bite my upper lip, looking at her mother.
“Pilar, please,” she says. “If Martin says it can’t happen…”
A year working with them and she still doesn’t remember that my name is Marín, not Martin. I sigh and run my fingers through my hair.
“Pilar…” I plead.
“My mother can call me Pilar, but you call me Noa, okay?”
I have a mental micro-orgasm imagining myself putting my hands around her neck and throttling her until dear little Pilar turns purple. I smile.
“There’s no makeup,” I give the final word. “Or hair. We’ve arranged the wardrobe with a brand you need to mention on social media.”
“And who’s gonna take the photos? You?”
I swallow. I’ve been tempted to talk to Coco hundreds of times about this girl and how much she pisses me off, but I never have because I think she would encourage me to kill her.
Or she would do it herself. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in jail or have to take Tupperwares of tortilla to her in the women’s prison.
* * *
When I leave the meeting room, the intern gives me a sympathetic look and I roll my eyes, taking advantage of the fact that they’re behind me: a sixteen-year-old tyrant and a mother who doesn’t know how to handle her. Any junior record label project manager’s dream.
“I’ll see you at four,” I say to her mother. “At the station. Try to travel light. I’ll bring the wardrobe. As soon as we get there, we’ll pick up the rental car.”
I walk them to the door and then slump into my chair.
On my desk, besides the company-issued laptop and phone, I’m greeted by a mug smudged with coffee grounds and Coco’s face smiling at me from the side.
It’s the worst photo in the world—she’s cross-eyed, she has chocolate smeared on her teeth, and her hair looks like a bird’s nest—but that’s what makes it so funny.
She has one with my face, with more or less the same expression, at her office.
It was a secret Santa gift from Loren last year.
Mine says “Sardine” and hers says “Anchovy.” We’re not exactly what you’d call normal in this group.
I see my boss come out of his office, and I jump up to try to intercept him.
“You’re still here?” he says.
“The train doesn’t leave until four thirty.”
“Go on…” He stops and smiles. “Get out of here. Relax a little if you have time. You’re going to need to muster a lot of patience.”
“She can really sing, but…” I sigh.
“But she’s a huge boob-buster.”
I furrow my brow. “A…boob-buster?”
“Oh, yeah. My daughter says I have to make an example of eliminating micro-machismos from my language. At our house, we’re smashing patriarchal language, and ‘ballbuster’ has negative connotations for women. So now they make me say ‘boob-buster.’”
“Well, you won’t believe it, but she’s kinda right.”
“This time she is. Not like when she told me I’d look good with a goatee.”
“I don’t know if I want kids.” I smile at him.
“Gema turned out okay.”
I can’t help but laugh. Ever since I told him there are sixteen years between Gema and me, he’s been convinced that she’s actually my daughter. If he weren’t so into music, he would’ve been great at writing soap operas.
I recover quickly. When I cross the threshold of the record label’s imposing building, the temperature contrast makes me shiver. Or maybe it’s an “itchy neck,” an intuition. I won’t be back for a month because I have time off after. Will I still be the same person?
I grab my phone and click on the first contact who shows up in my call log. She picks up on the third ring.
“Lemme guess, you’re so bummed about missing the best bachelorette party in history that you just quit your job so you can join the camper crew?”
“I don’t like the whole camper crew thing,” I hear Loren say in the background.
“Coco…” I try to get her attention because she’s cracking up. “Where are you?”
“On the patio of Loren’s parents’ bar.”
“Are you all drunk already?”
“Aroa and I are a little. Loren’s not. He’s driving.”
“Good.” I check the time, ignoring Aroa’s voice trying to tell me something through giggles in the background. “It’s noon on a Monday. You’re kicking things off right.”
“Full throttle. What are you offering?”
“They gave me the morning off. I wanna give you all a hug before you leave. Will I make it in time?”
“Go to Blanca’s house and keep her company. Something tells me we’re gonna be late to pick her up.”
“What time are you supposed to be there?”
“Eleven thirty.”
“For fuck’s sake…”
* * *
Blanca’s wearing a black strapless dress and a denim shirt tied around her waist; she’s ready for the adventure, and she smiles when she sees me at the door.
“I thought you weren’t…?”
“I’m just here to say goodbye,” I clarify before I give her a hug. “Where’s Ruben?”
“He has stuff to do,” she replies without missing a beat. “Do you want something to drink?”
“No. But you should probably take a shot or something to catch up.”
“Do you know something?”
“I dragged it out of Coco yesterday.” I shrug. “Don’t worry. You’ll like it.”
She looks at the closed door, like she’s expecting someone to burst through it at any moment.
“Did you come alone?”
“Yeah. I left the Huns’ army stockpiling alcohol.”
Blanca cackles and gives me a warm hug.
“Please tell me you imposed a little sanity on this bachelorette trip.”
“I wish, Blanca, but they didn’t let me have any say, honestly. I found out yesterday. The whole handcuffing-you-to-a-stripper thing seemed like a bad idea, but…”
She elbows me, and I let my laughter calm her down.
“Come on. I’m going to make you a lemonade while I drink straight from the bottle of Catalan cream liqueur I keep on hand for emergencies.”
* * *
They screech around the corner on Blanca’s narrow street like they’re driving a Vespa instead of a fucking tank.
A tank covered in streamers, to be specific.
They’re honking, waving their arms out of the windows, and blasting the music as loud as they can.
The image looks like something out of a hellish music video directed by an insane monkey.
Blanca covers her mouth with both hands and takes a deep, exaggerated breath.
Blanca’s mouth is hanging wide open.
“You’re too much, you bastards!!” she yells. I can’t tell if she’s horrified or charmed.
“I’m dying! I love youuuuu!”
Okay. Honestly, I’m seething with jealousy. Why the hell am I missing this? For a teenager named Pilar who makes everyone call her Noa. And to keep a job I love—that too.
I get the feeling they’ve forgotten I’m even there when they clamber out to hug the future bride, but Aroa wastes no time popping up in front of me.
“Thanks for coming,” she says, biting her lip.
I know it’s not exactly sordid, but the truth is…it’s sexy. Everything about her is.
“No problem.” I look away. “I wanted to give Blanca a hug.”
“But we’ll see you on Wednesday, right?”
“Yes.” I nod. “But she doesn’t know that.”
“It’s so great you’re coming…” Her fingers caress the cotton of my T-shirt in a seemingly distracted way, but I take a step back.
She looks at me. I look at her. Fuck…
“Sardine!” I yell in Coco’s direction.
“Talk to me, Anchovy.”
She doesn’t come over. I beckon to her, but she seems to resist coming closer.
“Come over here. You’re so annoying,” I tease.
She drags her feet over to us with a clear expression of disapproval: She must think we’re flirting.
“What do you want?”
“You’re not going to give me a kiss before you head off in the mobile club you’re driving?”
She blinks kind of nervously, and I kiss her on the forehead.
“You grouch. You’re like my sister when she goes on a trip…”
“Well, I’m fifteen in my head, so that tracks,” she says self-deprecatingly.
“She’s anxious because she just discovered Gus still loves her,” Aroa pipes up.
I raise one eyebrow, and she looks at the ground automatically. “What’s up with that?”
“Aroa’s being paranoid. Come on, say goodbye. We have a lot of ground to cover.”
I plant a kiss on Aroa’s temple and immediately hurry over to the other two, not giving her a chance to respond. One more minute and she’d be on her tiptoes in front of me, looking deep into my eyes, biting her bottom lip, asking me for a kiss. And no.
“What’s the deal with Gus still being in love with Coco?” I ask when I get close to Loren, who’s tessellating Blanca’s suitcase with the others in a kind of Tetris.
Both straighten up quickly without looking and smack their heads on the gleaming white frame of the camper.
“What?” They both say at the same time, rubbing their necks like it’s choreographed.
“I don’t know. Aroa just told me.”
“Bah…” Loren waves it off. Aroa has always been kind of a romantic, it’s true. “Anyway, what does it matter to you?” he asks, waggling his eyebrows.
“Dude, it smells like drama to me. I’m worried about Coco.”
“Worry about yourself. Come on, honey.”
I can’t help furrowing my brow, but I don’t say anything. I wouldn’t know what to say if I wanted to.
I’m fine. I repeat it to myself every morning when I wake up.
I’m fine. It hurts—of course, it hurts—but it’s true what they say about time and breakups.
Every day it hurts a little less. Although, I still have no idea how the hell we got to the point of no return, how the hell we spent so much time together and started to really get to know each other so late, how we didn’t stop time to tackle what ended up happening.
I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I don’t even know if I still love her.
They almost leave without saying goodbye, in a cloud of giggles, cheers, and chants while I’m a mere bystander.
I want to be climbing into the RV with them instead of standing there like a gawker, watching them take the music away with them.
Besides my obvious predilection for Coco, who I would follow to the end of the earth, Blanca has always been special to me.
So determined, so acerbic and intelligent.
There’s something magical about Blanca…and I’m missing her bachelorette trip.
“Be careful.” I pat the gleaming bodywork a few times, like it’s the flank of a huge but docile animal that they’re riding off on.
“Have fun,” Coco calls out with a wink, sticking her head out of the window.
“If you weren’t my best friend, I’d pull your hair out,” I joke.
“Jelly.”
“And you know it.”
Loren winks right before he starts up the engine.
They leave a long black skid mark on the street, and I shove both hands in my pockets.
What is this thing strangling my stomach?
Am I worried about them? Am I jealous they’re going to have fun for a few days and I’m not?
Was it that look from Aroa? How weird Blanca has seemed for the last few months?
Or…Coco? It’s been really hard to hide everything that’s been happening from her, and something tells me this trip is going to escalate a lot of things.
Everything. Aroa’s not going to be able to hide that there’s not as much light in her as it seems for such a long period.
Me either. My lies are starting to plague me.
I check the time, sigh, and start heading to the metro station.