TWENTY-EIGHT
It was just before opening on the second Wednesday of January 2008, and I was hanging out with Chloe in her dressing room, as I usually did before my shift started. I’ll never forget it, because Chloe was putting on her makeup in front of the large vanity, and we were talking about whether she could cut her hair even shorter and more pixieish without Nicky having a heart attack. Then suddenly there were three faces in the mirror: mine, Chloe’s, and Veronica Farrell’s.
Now, I have heard guys refer to being tipped off about a beautiful woman’s mental instability by something they called “the crazy eyes.” I had always believed this notion to be somewhat fictional. Kind of like the male concept of “PMSing”—which I personally thought could be better identified as “the one time of the month when women saw shit clearly.”
But seeing Veronica in that mirror, I believed—clearly and avowedly for the first time—that there was such a thing as “the crazy eyes.”
In fact, after that I would forever call them Veronica Farrell in the Mirror Eyes—but only Chloe would get the joke.
And it took her a very long time after what happened next to be able to laugh at the reference.
“Hi, Veronica. What are you doing here?” The reason I got that far in my greeting is because it took me a while to fully register that she was grabbing me by my hair and pulling me out of my chair.
Even when Chloe screamed, “Oh my God!” I wasn’t fully getting it. It just seemed so out of the character from the Veronica that I knew. Veronica Farrell didn’t show up in my old dressing room, unannounced, with crazy eyes. Veronica Farrell wouldn’t lower herself to snatch a girl by her Afro. Veronica Farrell was certainly above throwing me to the ground and climbing on top of me.
Even when I saw her fist coming toward my eye with the sharp end of a metal nail file winking from inside of it, I still found it all just very hard to process.
Fortunately that didn’t stop me from catching her wrist about an inch from my eye and asking, “Are you serious?”
As it turned out, she was. She redoubled her efforts and pressed the nail file closer and closer to my eye.
Now, I should probably tell you that I had been chewing on the problem of Veronica Farrell, for a couple of months at that point. I still hadn’t been able to devise a scenario in which I could atone to Veronica for what I had done to her re the Chloe and Corey Incident. I had been trying to determine what Veronica might need, which was a tricky business with regular people, but even worse with Veronica because she was rich and beautiful and, from what I could tell, actually liked being mean. There didn’t seem to be anything that she needed, much less anything that I could give her as an act of atonement.
But while I was keeping that metal file out of my eye, the answer to what I had previously thought might be an impossible question shone inside the room pretty damn clear and bright: what Veronica Farrell needed was a fucking beat-down.
“I’m getting Nicky!” Chloe ran out to get help, but that wasn’t necessary. Veronica might have the crazy eyes, but I was crazy and poor. And in a street fight, poor and crazy beats down rich and crazy every time. Believe that.
I knocked Veronica’s hand away from my eye and began pushing her off me. She was so caught off guard by my actually fighting back that she dropped the nail file and it went skittering across the floor. I took advantage of her surprise, bucked up, and flipped us over, so that now it was me crouched on top of her.