Chapter 4 #2
Margie levels a look at me. “Maybe he’s pissed. This is a lot of work. I told you this was a bad idea.”
“No. You didn’t. You introduced me to a lawyer who told me to do this, and then you cheerleaded every step of the way.”
“Oh, yeah. I guess I just thought it was a bad idea.” Margie’s lip-twitch explodes into a proper grin at my glare.
My shoulders sag. You did this to yourself. “I made it all worse. I’m such an idiot.” I rub my temples and begin pacing.
“Stop,” Avery says. “It’ll get fixed.”
“And cheer up,” Margie adds. “At least he’s nice-looking. What if you lived next door to a Gorbachev and had to see that in his boxers?”
“Why Gorbachev?” I ask wearily, rubbing at my eyes.
“He took down the Berlin Wall. I guess I thought it was fitting.” Margie shrugs and crunches on carrot sticks I didn’t know I had.
“I’d be Gorby in this scenario,” I mutter.
“I need to get out of here,” Avery says. “Got to go shower.”
“Not showering once after work won’t unleash a plague on New York,” Margie says, mocking Avery’s daily ritual after finishing work in the lab.
Avery hefts himself up from my plush sofa with effort. “Incidentally, a woman is being treated for the plague right now at Beth Israel Hospital. There’s an average of about seven cases in the country each—”
“Why are you standing? Are you giving a lecture? Or leaving? What is this?” Margie demands.
“You’re a plague.” Avery chuckles and kisses her forehead before hugging me, interrupting my pacing. “I’m headed home to shower, eat, and pretend I’m not best friends with people whose problems include holes in their walls that they put there.”
The door closes behind him, and Margie turns to me. “I love that stick-in-the-mud. So, this distracted me from what I wanted to tell you, but we’re filming in your office next week.”
“Oh, no kidding?” I say, trying my best to show interest. “I think I’m the one who gave your location scout the idea when I visited you. Boardroom scene?”
Margie nods and crunches slowly on a carrot. “Lucas asked about you.”
“Yeah, okay. Sure he did.”
“Whatever, Gorton’s Fisherman. Believe it or not. He said you reminded him of Sophie Turner.” She sets her plate down. “I told him you’re not down to mess around.”
“If you ordered her from SHEIN, maybe. And good—I’m not. I’m done with dead ends.”
Margie makes a skeptical sound in the back of her throat and pulls out her phone. “New phone. Give me your wifi pass—” She chuckles.
“What’s so funny?”
“Your wifi network name is…”
“‘Penny for your thoughts.’ And?”
“Guessing this one is your neighbor’s?”
She holds up her phone. I grab it out of her hand. Right under my network name is one that reads, “Dollar to go away?”
I shake my head and set Margie up on my network. “That’s some of his weaker work.”
“You two are a mess.”
“I’m serious. Last month he put globs of Vaseline on my doorknob. Or lube. It was so fucking gross. And then he denied it when I confronted him and said maybe I’m just naturally greasy.”
The memory teases me out of my funk for just a moment.
“So I told Mrs. Russo down in 2B, who is the sweetest lady and the most religious person I’ve ever met, that I hear him through the walls worshipping Satan.
Maybe sacrificing chickens. She was horrified.
She’s taken it upon herself to save him, I think.
I’ve heard her in there trying to pray over him a few times. ”
Margie accepts her phone. “Just another day at the zoo.” She abruptly shifts and kneels on the sofa to peek her head into Jack’s apartment.
“Get down! If he comes home and sees you…”
Margie pops her head back in. “Maybe he has better snacks. I’m gonna snoop.” She extends one long leg through the hole. The rest of her follows before I can do more than gawk.
“Margie!” I scramble after her and dangle a leg through The Hole, mimicking her move. But my legs aren’t long enough to reach the sofa on the other side, and I end up falling through in a heap, sending plaster all over Jack’s sofa in my wake. “Margie!”
She opens his fridge, and the massive laminated Poison Control card anchored to the door by a magnet gives me pause.
Margie’s already on the move, closing the fridge and then opening and closing all his cabinets willy-nilly.
I catch a glimpse of a fire extinguisher under his sink before she shuts the cabinet.
She finds chips in a cupboard and smiles, reaching in to grab a handful and then handing the bag to me.
I toss the bag back into his cupboard and run after her. She’s now in his bathroom.
“Margie, I’m going to kill you. This is breaking and entering.”
“Technically this is just entering. Gence did the breaking.” She polishes off her chips and dusts off her hands before inspecting the contents of Jack’s medicine cabinet. It is shockingly well stocked. Is that…a pulse oximeter? And a blood pressure cuff?
“You said you wanted snacks! What are you looking for?”
“The right pills can be snacks, Penelope,” Margie drawls. “But mostly I’m looking for evidence of STIs. Incontinence. Erectile dysfunction. Anything interesting. Maybe Viagra?”
“Why? You’re not going to—” I don’t finish the thought. The image of Jack smiling affectionately at Margie, her pulling off his snug tee, running a hand up his chest, him cupping her face tenderly… I swallow a grimace.
“Not me, girl. He’s your snack. All that passion and anger? And now you two hot tamales have no wall to contain your libidos? It’s my job as your best friend to make sure your ticket to Bonetown ensures a safe ride.”
She clicks her tongue. “He must get migraines. My mom takes these.” Margie rattles a bottle of pills.
Then she pulls out her phone to look up the label for one of the tubes of cream.
“This one is for an allergic reaction. Thought maybe he had a fungus. Okay, I think he’s clean. You’re clear to do the no-pants dance.”
“I need a new best friend.”
“You love me too much.”
Margie leaves me to close the mirror, and I catch my expression.
My hair is honey at sunset, tousled from my couch dive.
My blue eyes are extra vivid. My cheeks are pink, flushed with…
fear? Excitement? I’m not going to lie, the adrenaline makes me look pretty damn good.
Maybe marketing isn’t for me… Cat burglar.
That’ll make Mom proud. I pluck a piece of plaster off my head and toss it into Jack’s wastebasket. Then I hear a crash.
I rush to the bedroom in time to see Margie on her hands and knees, picking up coins. “Knocked over that little bowl of quarters.”
“Margie! What the fuck?” I’m on my hands and knees next to her, gathering them up as quickly as I can.
When we’ve collected what I hope is all of them, I look around.
His room is neat: white walls, bed made.
Masculine, but not in a spartan, bachelor way.
There’s some character here. Beige curtains streaked with razor-thin vertical blue lines.
A surrealist painting of… Is that Citi Field?
Pictures on the walls of people who look to be his parents, another of a dog, one of Jack shaking hands with an older man while they both hold up an award.
Another of him and a tall woman, side by side, captured mid-laugh. Margie looks at it over my shoulder.
“He has a girlfriend?”
My chest twinges. A memory leaps into the fray, desperate to be tagged in by my consciousness. “They broke up, I think. Right after he moved in.” I turn away, my dislike for Jack crowding out what little tolerance for him I’ve built up. I’m glad for the reminder.
“He’s pining,” Margie says. “That’s sad.” At my expression, she tilts her head, curious. “Why don’t you like him, anyway? There had to be something that kicked all of this off. You don’t just instantly hate someone.”
“I told you why.” I reach under his bed for a renegade quarter.
“Nope.”
I sigh and sit back on my haunches. “When he moved in, I ran into him in the hall. He was carrying a sofa in, helping the movers. I— I mean objectively, if you overlook his awful personality, his shitty tree-candle smell… I mean, he could be considered okay-looking in some circles.”
“Young Harrison Ford,” Margie says. “Continue.”
“Yeah. Fine. If you squint and then take some shrooms. Whatever. He made a comment—something funny. Funny-adjacent. I don’t know.
I laughed. We didn’t even exchange names, but it felt like…
Anyway, I had to run because I was meeting you downtown for that thing?
The day Chris got food poisoning and you had the extra ticket? ”
“Ugh, Chris.” Margie is briefly distracted by the mention of her ex.
I haul in a breath and release it, trying to control the disdain and anger that course through me at the memory.
“When I got home, I was coming up the stairs and this woman…that woman,” I say, gesturing to the photo, “came running out of his apartment in hysterics. I stopped her and asked if everything was okay and she… She said, ‘No. I’m not okay. Cheating asshole. I thought he loved me,’ or something along those lines. And then she bolted.”
“Oh, Pen.” Margie is well aware of the nerve that episode would have touched.
She’s heard about my cheating father more than once, from me and my mom.
I’m sure some people can rebound from being cheated on, but not us.
It was the cloud that hung over our house my entire life, the thing that tainted almost every memory from my childhood.
Why? Mom’s anguished face as she stared down at me drifts through my mind. Why did I say anything to him? Why didn’t I leave well enough alone?
“So, the next morning, when I ran into him in the hall, he was all smarmy, as if a woman he clearly cheated on hadn’t fled his apartment the night before.
Like he didn’t hurt someone in that way.
And he had the audacity to ask me out.” I wrinkle my nose.
“So I borrowed your line from Geneva Convention.”
Margie covers her face with both hands, but I hear the laugh in her voice. “You told him you’d rather slather honey on your belly and hug a beehive than go out with him? That is, like, the worst line in the worst B-movie I’ve ever done.”
“It was all I could think of in the moment. I gave him the deep freeze after that.”
Margie stands and sets the bowl on the dresser. “He’s still got that picture, Pen. Maybe he regrets—”
“They don’t change. Ever.”
Margie opens her mouth to say something, but we hear a sound that makes the blood freeze in my veins: keys.
“Go!” I whisper.
We race out of his bedroom and back to the sofa. Margie climbs over quickly, and I dive-bomb after her, landing in a sprawling heap on my floor after bouncing off my sofa, just as the door on Jack’s side opens.
My pulse thunders. For a moment, there is silence. Margie doesn’t make a sound. I hold my breath. Jack doesn’t move right away. Then many things seem to happen at once. The door slams, and Jack appears in The Hole like an Emerald City guard from The Wizard of Oz.
“Can I help you?” I force myself to release my breath in a controlled hiss, and glance up with what I hope is casual disinterest.
“What are you doing on the floor?” His voice is suspicious. He looks at Margie, maybe thinking this stranger is more likely to tell the truth. But actors are capable of poker faces. I’m the weak link. His gaze swings back to me.
“Yoga.” As he watches, I raise my hands, pretending my undignified sprawl is somehow an intentional and very Zen pose.
His lips purse. “That’s yoga? Maybe you need an instructor.”
“You’re ruining my flow. Go away.”
Jack looks back at his apartment, then into mine again. “Why is this thing now double the fucking size?”
“That’s what she said.” I slap my hands over my mouth. Nervous babbling is a curse.
Margie issues a strangled sound, but she remains completely blank-faced.
Jack’s brows gather, his stormy eyes narrowing with focus.
“Maybe you can call Gence. He won’t answer when I try him. Tell him to get up here and plug my hole. This hole.” Oh God.
The strangled sound comes from Margie again. Jack looks back and forth between us, his hands on his hips, and disappears out of The Hole. I stand slowly, then duck to observe him inspecting his apartment. He suspects something.
I turn to whisper that to Margie, only to find her shoulders shaking, her face pouring her amusement into my blue throw pillow. “Your fault,” I whisper instead, which just makes her laugh harder.
I’m almost grateful when I hear Jack’s vacuum going.