Lovely You Read online

  “Thank you. That statement is just like a warm hug.”

  “You were rude, condescending, nasty,” he continued. “And Jesus, you were a fucking mess when you got that sunburn. Like a human lobster. The peeling was a horror show.”

  “Fuck off. I’m hanging up,” I told him.

  “No, don’t.” He paused. “When you left and went home, I thought of you a lot. Not how rude you were, or how the peel was frightening. I thought more how you were pretty funny. How nice you had been to Joey. How you kept leaving plates of fruit around for me. Did you only eat fruit when you were there?”

  “Mostly. But the plates of fruit weren’t for you. I was hoping there was a house elf.”

  “Your diet is terrible,” he told me. “I don’t think you ate anything before we came to stay with you.”

  Yeah, well.

  “You kept coming inside the house to get more mangoes or whatever, and you kept finding stuff to talk to me about. Whenever I looked up, there you were, pretending that you weren’t watching what I was doing.”

  “So this has turned into a story about how you came to realize that I was a stalker?” I asked.

  “I came to realize that I liked you some. Even though you made it difficult,” he conceded.

  “Well, maybe I feel the same way. Some.”

  “And then when we came to California,” Nate continued, “I liked you more, and now…I want you to come home. I don’t want you down there, by yourself.”

  I nodded. I was not liking it too much, either.

  “Are you sleeping at all?” he asked me quietly.

  “Not too much,” I admitted. “It was better when you were there.”

  “For a long time, I had to take pills to knock myself out. It was getting to be a little habit, so I stopped, but I have a hard time, too. It was good to hold on to you.”

  I nodded again. I didn’t trust my voice.

  “Are you nodding at me?”

  “Yes,” I choked.

  “I’ll see you soon. And we’ll sleep better, together.”

  I nodded again, my heart hammering away, and he laughed, which sounded just like pure happiness to me. We hung up and I sat in the car for a while in the dirty parking lot. Then I started up the car and turned back out onto Glenoaks Boulevard, and the smile on my face was real.

  Chapter 11

  About a second after I got on the road, my phone started spitting out notifications.

  “Scarlet! Its me your in LA,” my screen announced. Oh, my God. It was Klere!

  I typed furiously, because I was realizing more and more that communication from her was a little like purported sightings of the Loch Ness Monster: few and far between, and also not to be relied upon.

  Me: I’m here, in Los Angeles, California. [Just to make sure there was no confusion.]

  Klere: come hlp

  Me: What’s wrong? You need help?

  Klere: no come hlp

  Me: Are you ok?

  Klere: Yes! Hlp!

  Me: I don’t get it. [I wanted to bash my phone against the car window]

  Klere: come to hlp.

  Realization dawned on me. I had looked into her before, reading everything I could, and I had suddenly remembered where she lived.

  Me: Does HLP mean Highland Park, the neighborhood? Do you mean that I should come to there? To your house?

  She didn’t answer but I was already pulling up the map to the address I had gotten earlier when doing background research on her. If she was there, I wasn’t going to be just an influencer to the influencer: I was going to be the woman in charge. We were going to go by my playbook now and not hers. My face had lost the Nate-induced smile when I saw Klere’s messages, and now I set myself for battle. Klere had been calling the shots, but now, since quitting my job was possibly on the horizon and since she was nuts, I was going to try things my way rather than following her lead. No more groveling and catering. I drove as fast as I could over to Highland Park, which, with the current traffic situation, was not very fast.

  Klere’s house was painted completely black, even the trim and the front door. It probably looked pretty chic in the daytime, but at night with no lights on, I drove right by it twice, thinking it was a hole before I realized that there was a building hiding there in the darkness. At least I was able to pull right up in front to park, and mostly on the street. I used the flashlight on my phone to find my way up to the front porch, past the crunchy lawn, dead plants, and various religious statues—there were at least 20 of them. Either Klere wanted to cover her bases, God-wise, or more likely, she didn’t want to miss any religion-as-a-fad possibilities for her pictures.

  I rang the doorbell above a large Buddha on the porch, but I didn’t hear it make any sound, and there was a weird, burned odor when I pressed it a second time. I knocked and knocked then listened. There was definitely noise in the house, some kind of humming and thumping. I took off my shoe and pounded the door with it.

  “Klere!” I yelled. “Open this. Klere!”

  The black door flew open and there she was, almost invisible inside the dark house until I turned my phone flashlight on her. “Yes? Oh, is it you, Scarlett? What are you doing here, all the way up from San Francisco?”

  “I told you I was down here and we needed to meet,” I answered, trying to stress that Los Angeles was actually south of where I lived. “You just texted me and told me to come.”

  “And you were hanging here on the porch with our little elephant guy and the pretty flower girl?” she asked, patting the concrete head of Ganesh and smiling in the direction of the painted Virgin Mary.

  Holy shit. “I’m coming in,” I told her, and she kept smiling and moved out of the way. As I entered, I felt for switches and turned on the lights. There was no way I was wandering around with Klere in the dark.

  A pink glow filled the room and I looked up and saw the colored bulbs in the fixtures. I took a step and a voice yelled, “Hey!” A man lay on the floor, stretched across the entryway, and almost under my feet.

  “Jerry, get up! Jerry, this is Scarlett. She’s going to give me some money,” Klere announced. “Stop pouting down there! You’re rolling around on the floor like a tapeworm and scaring the cat,” she scolded him, then turned to me and smiled. “Scarlett, this is my partner, Jerry.”

  “Will you stop calling me that?” Jerry asked, scrambling up off the floor. He was covered in dust and cat hair. “I’m not your partner. I’m your other.”

  “He means that he’s my other self,” Klere explained to me.

  “Can’t you give me the respect I deserve?” Jerry continued. “A tapeworm?” He kept talking about how she wasn’t treating him right, how he had sacrificed for her. I looked around the house, hoping he didn’t mean he was actually sacrificing things, like animals or people.

  “Sure, sure,” she muttered, and gestured to me. “Come on and sit in the med room.” She squeezed around her other in the narrow hallway and I avoided touching his body too as I followed her. He was dirty, and not just with the grey fluff of dust from the floor that even the soft lighting showed up. It looked like it had been a while, quite a while, since he had bathed. His face and hands and neck looked grimy, and since he wasn’t wearing a shirt, I could see dark streaks of what could have been grease on his bony, starkly white torso. As I walked behind Klere and looked more closely, it looked like it had been a while without soap for her, too. Probably pre-Old Mexico, judging by the mess that was her hair.

  “Ok, so what do we need to do so I can get the money from you?” she asked me, sitting in a black leather sling chair that I recognized from her pictures online. It was one of her favorite places to pose. “I need it, or I wouldn’t have texted.”

  I spelled out our expectations about number of posts, hashtags, image content, etc. Then I pulled out the contract. “We can’t do anything until you sign this,” I told her.

  “Do you have a pen?”

  I handed her one. “Aren’t you going to read it?”
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  She paused in the act of scrawling out her name. “Should I? I never read these things. They’re so boring.” She moved to the next page and scribbled again on the line. “Hey, are you interested at all in Jerry?”

  “Interested, how?” I asked. “Interested like I would want him to be in your posts?”

  “No, like, are you interested in having sex with him? He’s been on my case all day and I am so not in the mood for him. He’s, like, not very good, you know?”

  I shook my head. “No, I don’t want to have sex with him. No way.” The man himself wandered in and lit up a bowl. “Can you smoke that somewhere else?” I asked him.

  “This is our med room,” he said, offended.

  “What does that mean?” I looked at Klere.

  “Where we go to mediate. And medicate,” she explained, and opened the big metal cabinet facing her chair. It was chock full of pill bottles, baggies, and paraphernalia.

  I closed my eyes for a second. Then, since I had decided that I was taking charge, I opened them again and stared the dirty guy down. “Jerry, Klere and I are working. Go somewhere else.” He looked very aggrieved, but he left and took the pipe with him. I turned back to Klere. “I know that you didn’t read the agreement you just signed, but I do want you to be clear that your pictures with our merchandise have to be up to your usual standards. By that I mean, specifically, that you’ll have to take a shower before you post anything with our clothes or accessories or mentioning our brand.”

  “Oh, I will, for sure,” she assured me. “I just haven’t in a while. I figure, if I’m not working that day, why should I bother to take a shower? Who am I trying to impress?”

  “Yeah, I don’t take showers to impress anyone. I bathe to be clean,” I said.

  She nodded thoughtfully. “It’s definitely an idea.” She jumped up from the chair. “Are we all done with the boring stuff?”

  I thumbed through the papers to make sure both copies were initialed and signed on every place I had indicated for her. “Looks like we are. Do you understand that you’ll make a minimum of—”

  “Just leave it here and let Jerry read it and he’ll explain it to me. He handles all that stuff. He’s my lawyer.”

  “That guy?” I asked incredulously. “That dirty, whiny guy, he’s your lawyer? Like, a real one? He passed the bar exam?”

  Klere nodded. “He’s really smart, except when it comes to me. He still thinks we’re monolingual.”

  “Monogamous?” I asked.

  “That too, except I mean that I have another guy set up in an apartment in Quebec and we speak French together.” She looked me up and down, appraising. “We should go out! I just took some…” She reached for an amber prescription bottle from their stash and squinted at the name on it. “I just took some of these, and I’m ready to have some fun.” She shook the bottle, offering it to me.

  I ignored it and looked at my phone. “It’s pretty late. Where do you want to go?”

  “Let’s go dance! You took me, now I’ll take you.”

  “No, not tonight.”

  “Come on,” Klere wheedled. “If you do, I’ll throw in an extra post, free.”

  “Why do you want me to go with you so much?” I asked.

  “I’m bored, and you’re hot.” Klere narrowed her eyes, studying me again. “I want to find a piece of ass for tonight and they’re definitely going to come around if you’re there.”

  “No, I don’t think so.” I had gotten what I came for. Now it was time to settle onto the couch next to the bed that I wouldn’t be able to sleep in and watch TV until all hours. “I’m going to head back to my hotel,” I told Klere.

  “Two extra posts,” she bargained. “Come on!”

  I thought for a second. “Write it in the contract and initial the change, and fine. I’ll go.” I would stay for the shortest amount of time possible while she picked up someone, then I would be out.

  “I’ll drive,” she suggested.

  “No, we’ll take my car.”

  “Bye, Jer,” Klere called as we left, and I heard the weird humming I’d noticed earlier coming from another room. “Is your car parked in my yard?”

  “All the grass was dead anyway.” I sat in the driver’s seat for a moment before I started it. This was against my better judgement. The last time I had gone out with Klere, I had run into—

  But that would be impossible in Los Angeles. I would just stay for a moment, and it would be fine. I had just gotten her to agree to more exposure than she had ever given to any other brand, according to the research I had done. That included the car company, Scemo, which had flown her to Italy and let her drive on their test track in a bikini, barefoot. She had almost run down their CEO as he watched her and took pictures. I would be legendary, almost, if I got her to do all this. Legendary in my own office, anyway.

  The moment Klere got in the car, she started getting in touch with people to let them know where we were going. That was pertinent information for me also, as the driver. “What’s the name of it?” I asked her, after she had said that this place didn’t have a real address.

  “Turn right. Oh, I meant left!” she lamented as I started to follow her directions. I shot across the road and made the left. “It doesn’t have a name, either, it’s so secret. Isn’t that fun? You can do anything there.” She talked more about the things she had done: sex, more sex, drugs, and then even more drugs. It sounded great. Just great!

  She finally directed me to stop, and I found a spot that I thought was probably fine for the car, and Klere led me down one street after another, deeper into a neighborhood that made me increasingly nervous. “I’m almost sure it’s here,” she kept saying for block after block, until finally she shrieked, “Yes! There it is. We can stay here until breakfast and then go down to the beach and do tree pose to greet the sun!” She considered. “Naked. That will be a great shot. I’m gorgeous with backlighting.”

  We walked right up to the front of the line, past all the other grungy would-be club goers slouched against the wall of a dirty alleyway. The big bouncer at the door nodded at Klere and grinned at me as he opened the door for us. “Nice,” he told her, pointing my way. “Great tits.”

  “Screw you,” I answered him, but he let me in anyway, down a narrow flight of stairs into a teeming mass of people that reminded me of snakes writhing together in a pit.

  Klere went right out into the middle of the crowd, pushing and wending her way through. I followed her onto the dance floor and tried to let go, to have fun and relax. I moved with the music and put a smile on my face. Bodies bumped and rubbed against me. The smell of sweat and the thick odor of perfume and various drugs filled my nose and mouth. Someone grabbed my hips and ground into me and I yanked myself away, into another woman who shoved me back. I couldn’t get a full breath in. My chest moved up and down, faster and faster, as I fought for more air. Lights flashed and the crowd screamed, and the music pumped through me. My vision started to blur in a weird way.

  “Scarlett, what’s the matter with you?” Klere yelled, punching my arm.

  “I don’t like this,” I managed to say, “I don’t want—” and I got so dizzy that I grabbed onto her and started to crumple a little.

  “Fuck! Come on.”

  I felt her pulling me back through the slick, packed bodies, up the stairs again and into the fetid alley.

  “What’s the matter with her? What’s she on?” I heard the big bouncer ask.

  I leaned against the dirty wall, trying to get myself back under control. When I opened my eyes, Klere, the bouncer, and most of the line of people were staring at me. I walked in an unsteady path over behind a dumpster and I threw up.

  I heard feet shuffle up behind me. “Scarlett?”

  “Just a minute,” I told Klere. “I just need a minute.”

  “The guy at the door got you a bottle of water. What did you take?”

  “Nothing. I just don’t like crowds.” I wiped my mouth on my sleeve. I felt so dirty and
disgusting I wanted to dip myself in antiseptic. “Thank you,” I said, as I took the water from her.

  “I probably have something that could bring you back down, even you out.” She dug in the pocket of her tight jeans and pulled out a small assortment of different colored pills. “Want one?”

  “Klere, no. I don’t need anything to bring me up or down or anywhere. I swear, I’m not on anything.” I breathed in through my mouth so I wouldn’t smell the dumpster and my own vomit. “I just felt sick with so many people around me, touching me.” My stomach rolled again, thinking about it. “Go ahead, you can go back and have fun. I’m sorry.”

  Klere looked at me, very quietly. “Remember how you didn’t want me to go with those guys?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was the first time I came up to San Francisco, the day when I tried on stuff in your ratty little showroom. You guys are really pretty small potatoes compared with the other people I deal with.”

  I stared at her, with her filthy hair and sweaty face. “Uh huh. We’re very lucky that you’re working with us.”

  “I was so surprised because you talked up this fun trip up to San Diego, but you only gave me a few outfits and it wasn’t really worth my while.”

  “San Francisco. You were up in San Francisco. San Diego is south of here,” I couldn’t help correcting.

  “Really?” She thought for a second, then shrugged. “Anyway, after you got me a terrible lunch, we went out with some of my friends and I met some guys. I went home with them to score and you didn’t want me to go. You tried to stop me,” Klere reminded me.

  Even in the state I was in, I was shocked that she remembered that. “Yes. I thought it was dangerous for you to go with them.”

  “Yeah, that was nice. That was why I did the posts for you and everything.” She shrugged. “I mean, it worked out fine because they were ok lays and then I got with Mary later for some coke, but I thought that was nice that you tried to help me.” She hooked her hand at me. “Come on, let’s go get a drink somewhere. Somewhere quiet. You can tell me what you want me to write because I’m not good at making stuff up on my own.”