PART ONE
BLACK OBSIDIAN
Face your true self
Chapter One
Jokes, they say, are a lot like life and love: all in the timing.
Right now, I should be planning out the jokes for my next open-mic stand-up set, practicing the punch lines that are going to bring the house down, butno. Instead, I’m doingthis.
Come quick. It’s an emergency, I type before throwing my phone on the bed like it’s a bomb and assessing the unmitigated disaster that surrounds me.
Ever since my sister announced her surprise engagement and subsequent blowout wedding, my timing has beenwayoff. Like, life-in-utter-disarray off.
Case in point, I’m midcrisis on a Saturday night, running majorly late to meet someone, and banking on my best friend to come through with a fix like he always does.
Footfalls bound down the hall to my right. The door flies open, and a frenzied Drew—all six-foot-three of him (90 percent limbs, 10 percent miscellaneous) thrusts the fire extinguisher we keep stashed under the kitchen sink into my bedroom, nozzle first. “I told you not to light any more of those Doop candles if you’re going to take a nap,” he shouts. “You flail in your sleep. You’re a flailer!”
He points and weaves, clearly trying to decipher where the fire is.
There is no fire. Not this time, anyway. Just socks. Lots and lots(andlots) of discarded socks, dumped from an overturned drawer and sprawled all over the floor. Tall socks. Short socks. No-show socks. Socks with zany patterns and TV show quotes and corgi butts printed on them. But sadly, detrimentally, no dress socks.
There is, however, dress sock. Singular. And I am now dejectedly holding it up for Drew to see.
“It’s not an I-accidentally-started-a-small-fire-by-flailing emergency. It’s a do-you-have-a-clean-pair-of-dress-socks-I-can-borrow emergency.” I look back down at my mess and correct myself. “Even dirty dress socks would suffice at this point.” I’d buy my own if I were in any kind of financial position to do so. Perks of being a struggling stand-up comedian with a tip-based survival job.
Drew retracts the extinguisher, powering down from red-alert mode. “You couldn’t have texted me that instead of making me think our entire building was going to burn down again?”
“Where’s the fun in that? Where’s thedramain that?” I waggle the sock in his face for emphasis, which he swats away, left eyebrow twitching. The one with the tiny scar above it from when he had to get stitches in high school after a bookshelf-building attempt gone wrong. “Sorry, but in fairness, how was I to know the Go to Sleep, Bitch candle was going to put me to sleep in literal seconds? I don’t fuck with witchcraft.”
Drew snorts. “Of course, blame witchcraft and not your shifts that sometimes last until 3:00 a.m., or your off-again, on-again insomnia.”
“I know you don’t believe me, but there is totally something weird about where my sister works,” I protest. Doop claims to be a lifestyle brand, and yet they operate more like a cult. A very trendy, very wealthy, very health-conscious cult. It’s creepy. “And they definitely put something in that candle.” What else would I expect from a company that started as a popular anonymous blog and rapidly became ubiquitous in the world of “wellness”?
“I bet the Doop higher-ups possessed your body in your sleep and forced you to knock it over too.” Drew’s accusatory expression is completely unwelcome here.
“At least I acted quickly!”
“Yes. Your prompt yelling of ‘Drew! Drew! Fire! Fire!’ was both chivalrous and helpful.”
I would dispel that absurd rumor if it weren’t completely true and I weren’t talking to the world’s leading Nolan Baker Bullshit Detector. “At the very least, nobody was hurt and the damage was minimal.”
“True,” Drew concedes. “But we definitely lost our security deposit.”
“Which is not a problem, considering we’re going to live here together forever and ever until we’re gray and wrinkly and senile, and then nobody will ever know about the unsightly singe marks until we’re dead and buried.” I shoot him with my most winning smile. “Won’t need that money when we’re in side-by-side burial plots somewhere shady and beautiful, perhaps with an oak tree and a bench.”
Drew’s expression warms. Red rising to the tops of his cheeks, matching the stark red of his hair that has always made him easy to pick out even in the largest of New York City crowds. Well, his hair and his previously mentioned height.
He’s basically a giant. A gentle giant. A gangly gentle giant who is looking at me like I just solved the universe’s oldest riddle. “You have it all figured out, huh?”
“Indeed.” I give his cheek a light, friendly smack. “What I don’t have figured out is what I’m going to do about this sock-cession…”
“Are you saying ‘succession’?”
“No. Sock. Cession.” I chop the air with each syllable. “A recession of socks.”
Drew goes from looking at me like I hold the key to enlightenment to looking like I’ve swallowed said key and now we’re going to have to wait days to weeks for me to poop it out. “Clue me in here.”
