So I ate a glazed doughnut the size of my head and tried not to obsess over it.
Yet here I am, preparing for another crummy shift at my crumby (Ba-dum-tss) job…obsessing over it. Probably a reticent side effect of my ADHD. Rejection-sensitive dysphoria coming on strong in the face of no news, which I’m taking as bad news. Bad news that is making me seriously reconsider this career I’ve put my all into with such little return.
Wanda leans back in her red chair, wavy hair fanning out behind her. “That’s the business, Maggot. It’s a waiting game, not a wish machine. I thought you knew that by now.”
“I do,” I say unconvincingly, looking around at all her accolades up on the wall. She was a star touring act for a while in the nineties before she gave it all up to come back and work here. The road was too hard for someone with chronic pain. At least here, in a stable location, she has an office to come back to when she needs to get off her feet and an apartment close by when her migraines set in with a vengeance.
“But,” she says, “you were hoping it would be different for you. Am I right?” She takes my silence as an answer. “I’ve seen it all before, Maggot. Being talented and catching a break are not linked. Sometimes the funniest comedians fizzle out before they even get started. Sometimes hacks become household names. It’s the luck of the draw.”
“What if,” I begin to ask, “I feel the fizzle starting?” Ever since CeeCee began to push the office jobs at Doop on me, I’ve been questioning my life plan. By twenty-five, I swore I’d have graduated to a bigger club and be regularly gigging on the road for a big name. By thirty, I told myself I’d be that big name, selling out theaters with my face on T-shirts. I’d have a gorgeous apartment, a dependable man (cough—Drew—cough), and an adorable corgi named Milkshake.All those well-laid plans seem a million years ahead of me, completely out of reach.
Can’t I skip to the good part?
Or, at the very least, skip past CeeCee’s wedding so I don’t have to show up alone?
“Only you can decide when to throw in the towel,” Wanda says in a way that’s stern but not patronizing.
“The ladder to success just seems so steep and tall, and I’m hanging for dear life from a low rung,” I tell her, drained. “If I fell, I probably wouldn’t even break a bone.”
She gives an understanding nod, hair bouncing along. “So jump and find out. You can always start climbing again.”
I take her words to heart.
Defeat follows me like a shadow out of her office. I know she wouldn’t say it, but I could tell even she was a little disappointed. Notinme, butforme. She wanted to see me grow, fly.
Fly.It felt for a second there, hearing Clive’s glowing approval a few weeks ago, that I had finally sprouted wings. Too bad I can see the hot-pink plastic swatter in my mind’s eye headed straight toward me.
What I don’t see headed straight toward me is the very real swinging door as I walk into the back for the start of my shift, completely lost in thought. The saloon-style piece of wood comes flying back at me. For a second, the only sound I hear is an unfortunate crunch, and then unfathomable pain spirals out from the center of my face.
Chapter Six
“Maybe it’s broken and insurance will cover a nose job. How New York glamorous is that?” Drew asks from the craggy blue chair in the corner of the urgent care exam room, tabbing down a page in the romance novel he’s been reading. “I think you could look really good with a Jennifer Aniston or a Kim Kardashian. Oh, hold on a second, wait!” He pulls up his phone and shows me the first picture in a hasty Google image search. “Your face shape would complement a classy Elizabeth Taylor nose.”
“While I appreciate your optimism,” I groan from behind the absurdly large ice pack I’m holding to my aching, throbbing face, “I was quite fond of the nose I already had, so this is more of a loss than you’d think.”
He sits. “Should we have a moment of silence then?”
His joke makes me crack both a tiny smile and a bone somewhere south of my eyes. “Fuck! Don’t make me laugh. It hurts more when I laugh!”
“Sorry, sorry,” he says, patting my knee, which hasn’t stopped bouncing since I sat on the cushy examination table after walking the few blocks from the Hardy-Har Hideaway. Drew’s soothing touch somehow shuts off those fast-firing neurons. I calm downsome—he’s good at helping me do that, always has been—even if the pain radiating from the center of my face won’t subside.
“Thanks for meeting me here,” I say. Drew showed up to urgent care in record time, all the way from the bookstore in Brooklyn. It’s not exactly a speedy subway commute given the walk and the train schedule, but like magic, he appeared in the waiting room before I was even called in by the burly nurse in Baby Yoda scrubs.
“Of course,” he says, so reassuring it could bowl me over. “It’s not every day your best friend calls to tell you he’s suffered a Brittany Murphy inUptown Girls.”
“Swinging door,” we both recite in unison.
“An underrated classic.” I smile, but even that hurts. I bet I look like a rabid raccoon, dark bruising beneath my eyes where the blunt force of the old door smashed me in. I pull the gauze out of my nostril, happy to see the bleeding has ceased.
Drew is the paragon of concern as he leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I can’t believe you didn’t see that door coming. What were you doing?”
I close my eyes. “Thinking about how I can’t do anything right.” That statement somehow hurts more than my nose.
“We don’t have enough time before the doctor arrives for me to dissect the multitude of ways you are wrong about that,” he says in a disarming way.
I pull the ice pack away to give Drew a good hard look at the wreckage that is my once moderately attractive face. He makes a good show of pretending not to grimace. “I’m going to be reminded of my failures every time I look in the mirror or take a selfie until this eggplant heals.” Even pointing at my nose makes it feel like it’s swelling more.
“Put the ice back on and take a deep breath,” Drew says. The breath helps. His presence helps more. God, I’m an asshole, but at least I have the best friend in the entire world.
