Thirty. New Year’s Absolutions
Thirty
NEW YEAR’S ABSOLUTIONS
Christmas Day in LA, and I’m alone. I left Powell Park on the twentieth, claiming a work emergency no one in my family likely believed.
But I couldn’t be around all the holiday cheer and couldn’t face more of my mom’s concerned looks.
I couldn’t risk running into Grant again.
Or worse, Grant and Fiona. I bought a ticket back and have spent the lead-up to the holiday pretending my whole trip never happened.
This is where I belong, in my sad apartment, kept company by my garbage tree that, despite being fake, is somehow shedding its plastic needles.
I’ve spent the entire morning slumped at the kitchen table, clocking each one as it falls.
There was one thing I did before I left Powell Park.
I went back to the CVS to see if the Santa was still outside, and if he had any Santa-adjacent wisdom to offer me.
He was there, as was every desperate clueless shopper in a five-mile radius.
I marched up to him and put a five-dollar bill in his cracked Big Gulp cup.
“What did you mean when you said my sweet tooth would serve me well?”
“Who are you?” The guy looked at me like I was the one with the sign that said Gimme a dollar or I’ll make a reindeer run over your grandma.
“A few days ago, I gave you some money, and you said my sweet tooth would serve me well when you saw my SweetHart’s Bakery receipt. Like, am I supposed to go there again? Should I date a baker?”
The guy took my five out of his cup and tried to give it back to me. “I think you need this more than I do,” he said. “Why would you think a guy who sleeps outside knows who you should date?”
“I’m supposed to have learned something!”
Arguing with this guy about my life’s course was the last sign I needed to get out of Powell Park.
“Maybe you already knew!” For some reason, when my Powell Park Santa stand-in said this, it struck me as wisdom.
When I left Powell Park early, I had every intention of coming up with ideas for my Heartfelt meeting—I finally texted Lacey to confirm the date of the meeting: January twelfth—but I’m stuck in every way. I’ve written nothing, and I fear I might never write again.
The day after Christmas, Zav calls from Caesars Palace. He spontaneously joined a group called Healthful Hedonism—which sounds like the real-world counterpart to the Purposeful Pleasure class he was taking when I contacted him from Sweetville—and they invited him to their Vegas retreat.
“You should come. I’ll buy your flight. Tomorrow, I’m spending the whole day in a fluffy white robe and getting nothing but room service,” he says.
“The whole group does it. We call it Isolated Ingesting, and it’s supposed to put you in touch with the appetites of your past selves.
Our group leader thinks I might have been Cleopatra in a past life! ”
“Zav, does this sound culty to you?”
“You’re just saying that because of the robes,” he says.
Then, more seriously, he adds, “You shouldn’t spend Christmas alone.
You still haven’t said exactly what happened.
” Zav’s in the dark about my Sweetville hallucination—someday I might try to explain it, but it still feels too real to talk about, as if it were a crazy dream—but he knows something went wrong with my mom and that I saw Grant.
That I saw Grant and Fiona. That every day since has found me more and more depressed.
“There’s plenty of time in the new year,” I say. “Just make sure to order extra fries. And call me if it’s a cult. If I have to fly to the desert to rescue my best friend, it will give me a purpose.”
“And material. Like you always say, everything is copy!” Zav sings. I do say that a lot, but it’s a Nora Ephron line. Jill Jacobs doesn’t have any wise quips to offer herself or anyone else.
Zav emerges from his retreat unscathed, though also in borderline need of joining Gamblers Anonymous.
I make it through Christmas by not thinking about Christmas.
One small miracle, though, is that thanks to almost no one else being masochistic enough to want to work at Li’l Ballerz, I’m offered my old job back.
The owner tells me I can work off my designer-stuffie debt.
My credit card bill after moving my flight back to Los Angeles up by six days during a holiday week also demanded I do something besides walk pointlessly around my neighborhood, willing an inspirational bolt of lightning to strike.
“I don’t know if I can even stay in LA,” I’m telling my new coworker, Bolero, a senior at Beverly Hills High School who only took this job because of Li’l Ballerz’s proximity to Sephora, where she frequently records new content for her Real Face Positive TikTok account.
Bolero can be real-face positive because her own face has no discernable pores.
Also because she knows how to use all the products at Sephora to optimum effect, even as she claims to be barefaced.
“Like, maybe it’s not going to happen for me.
Maybe I have to go back to Powell Park. But I can’t do that, obviously. ”
“People say obvi now,” she says, as she turns her back on me to answer an email. “As in, ‘I’m obvi going to do this collab with YSL, and you’re obvi going to have to help that lady.’”
She points one of her bare-look nails at a woman crouched on the floor beside one of the dreaded claw machines. Right away, I see it’s Frankie Carroll and her son, Peter. Her latest movie came out on Christmas Day, and—surprisingly to me—it bombed.
Right now, she seems less put together than our first encounter. She’s wearing an oversized coat over a baggy LA Sparks hoodie and yoga pants, her short hair scraped back in a rushed ponytail.
“Ma’am, can I help you?” I ask as I walk up behind them.
Frankie cranes her head up and with a grimace says, “My son won a prize, and it didn’t come all the way out.”
“It’s not a big deal, Mom,” Peter says. He looks at me with serious eyes and doubles down. “I really don’t mind. I think it was a PAW Patrol dog, and I don’t even like that show.”
“A prize is a prize, though,” I say. Then, with a wink, “Plus, I’ll let you trade it for something different for your troubles.
” Unhooking the keys from my belt loop, I unlock the machine’s lower compartment and free the cop dog stuffed animal that got stuck as it dropped.
I use a different key to open the machine’s glass front and gesture for Peter to pick an alternate toy.
“Really?” He looks from me to his mom, like he’s not sure if this is some kind of test.
Frankie gives him a quick nod, and he grins with twinkly eyes. “Is it okay if I take a minute?” he asks.
“Absolutely. Choose what makes you happy,” I tell him. That I think of Sweetville Allie for a brief moment isn’t lost on me.
“Thanks,” Frankie says. “His dad had to leave on a work trip the day after Christmas, and he’s a little blue. A new year treat.” When she says it, I realize it’s now January second.
“It’s no problem.” Frankie’s skin is dry in a way Bolero would love to tackle. I wonder if she’s struggling with inspiration, too. “I saw your movie,” I say, feeling emboldened. Last time she was here, I was too nervous to admit I was a fan. But it’s a new year. “I really liked it.”
Frankie brightens. “You know who I am?”
“Yeah, of course,” I say. Then, because very few people in this town would recognize a screenwriter, even a successful one, I add, “I write, too. Or, I did. You’re sort of my hero.”
Frankie looks down at her sloppy outfit and self-consciously touches her hair, which has a few wriggly grays popping up from it. “You sure about that? Also, you’re just about the only person who liked my movie. Three good reviews from major newspapers don’t matter if Instagram critics panned it.”
“It will find its people,” I say.
“Maybe you’ll find yours, too. You said you did write. Are you really done with it? Is there anything I can help with?”
Peter points to a stuffed green monkey at the back of the machine. “Can I have him?”
I nod and reach past the menagerie of animals for his prize, a decidedly non-hypoallergenic stuffed toy with a cute face. From inside the machine, I ask Frankie, “When you wrote your first stuff, like, how did you know you wouldn’t wind up in a rut, writing Heartfelt movies forever?”
I grab the monkey by its head and pull it out, handing it to Peter, who squeezes it tightly before running off to swipe his card on a ball drop game where you hit a button and if the ball lands in the center hole, you win a bunch of prize points. No one ever wins.
Frankie watches him fondly, then smirks at me.
“You know my Heartfelt work? You really are a fan.” She pauses to pull a piece of fuzz off her coat sleeve and adds, “But I didn’t know what would happen.
I mean, for a minute, I was like, ‘If I do these movies, no one will ever take me seriously.’ But I was so desperate for work that I felt like it was either write whatever was offered or move back home.
It was hard, though. My life was such a disaster at that point.
I could barely go on a first date that made it past an appetizer, and my apartment was a room in a house in Van Nuys with an older woman who had breakfast with her doll collection. ”
“And you didn’t write horror movies after that?”
“Ha, no. I fancied myself the person who’d bring back adult thrillers, but Heartfelt was the only work I could get.
I really had to dig deep to tell myself there was something worthwhile about writing movies where no one was a total creep.
And I found out that I liked writing happy endings and that love is as much a serious subject as all the broody stuff I was into. ”
“Mom! I hit a jackpot!” Peter is jumping up and down next to the ball game. “Two thousand tickets!”