The tea here is a punch to the heart, a shock from a defibrillator, a towline out of my benzo muck. Who says I’m a penny-a-liner all out of decent metaphors? Oh right, The Smoking Gun.
“I take one during the day and sometimes two to sleep if I’m traveling,” Lauren had said last night, shaking seven Valium into my palm. The triggerman herself had come to my room with the cameras, glassy-eyed, straight tequila in her cup. What’s wrong? she asked, almost sounding sincere. Is it Vince? I so longed for the days when the only thing I had to worry about hiding from the cameras was my husband’s wandering Willie that I actually said yes Yes, I think he’s cheating on me. Lauren got all excited, thinking she was about to deliver the scoop of the millennium on national TV: Some of us think it might be Kelly, she told me, reaching for my hand to comfort me. You dumb twat, I would have said if I wasn’t busy savoring every last ounce of her sympathy. I’m about to become too repugnant to touch—might as well enjoy these last dregs of human contact.
Lauren said she takes two at night when she’s traveling, so I took three, figuring it’s like when a new partner swears they’ve only slept with eight other people before you. Multiply by two or three or four (in my case) for a more accurate count. Fifteen minutes later and my brain felt like a tube of toothpaste oozing out of my ear. I’d slumped on the edge of the bathtub while Lauren jammed a wand into a tube of lip gloss and applied what felt like too much. Even to me.
The van hits another pothole and all of our heads lurch left. I’m sitting in the last row, party of one. My erratic behavior’s gotten me quarantined. I feel like I’m being treated to a private preview of season five with Kelly, Jen, and Lauren seated in the row ahead of me, Brett and Layla in the row ahead of them. Layla has released her braids, reminding me that it’s been twenty years since I’ve seen my natural hair texture. I take another sip of tea.
I started with the straightening treatments my freshman year of high school, not long after I had the bright idea to dress up as my best friend for Halloween. Ashley had big red hair, freckles under her fingernails, and pale blue eyes. It would be hysterical, we decided, if I came to school as her and she came to school as me. Despite the obvious differences in our coloring, we were roughly the same height and build, and in profile, our long curly hair almost matched. We just had to swap clothes and buy that hair spray paint from Hot Topic. We even went as far as to order non-prescription colored contacts from a dicey-looking “online pharmacy.”
I showed up to school on October 31 wearing a long-sleeved waffle shirt underneath a short-sleeved piped crew neck—one of Ashley’s signature stylings. I had used my mother’s foundation to lighten my skin—something that did not ring any of my mother’s alarm bells when I told her why I needed it—and my hair was stiff and passably red from the temporary colored spray. It took forever to get the contacts in. I hated touching my eyeball, but in that scene from The Craft, the black girl had used magic to make her eyes light and I thought she looked sooooo pretty.
I lent Ashley a pair of my loudly printed Lilly Pulitzer cigarette pants and a complementing kelly green cable-knit sweater. My mother barred me from loaning out my real pearl earrings and so we had provisioned a pair of plastic bulbs from a jewelry kiosk at the mall. We had then gone to CVS and purchased “tan” foundation for Ashley, so I was even prepared for that. I was fourteen and knew nothing about the offensive history of blackface—who in that town could have possibly educated me?
In short, I thought I knew what to expect when I saw Ashley at school. I had helped to appoint every defining detail of her Stephanie Simmons Costume. So when I met her at her locker that morning, I was unprepared for both what I saw and what I felt. Ashley hadn’t just sprayed her hair my color, like I had done that morning in our garage, standing on old newspapers at my mother’s behest. Ashley had used a comb to tease and rough up her texture to within an inch of its life. She looked like a troll. She looked like she had lice. She looked heinous. Pretty good, right? she asked, patting her rat’s nest. And that was the part that hurt the most. She hadn’t done this to hurt me. That was just how she saw me. I wanted to die.
I pretended to have bad cramps so that I could go home early. I went straight to the shower to rinse off the remnants of the costume, the way women do after they’ve been raped in a Lifetime movie. The slight had been unintentional, but it hurt like a physical assault. Maybe I would have preferred a hit, to have had my underwear torn off. At least then there would have been evidence for forensics to collect, a bad guy to catch, my uncomplicated pain.
Later that evening, my mother knocked on my bedroom door. I’d told her what happened in the car ride home, and she had fallen silent. When I looked over at her, I saw that her cheeks were streaked with tears, and I had rushed to comfort her, to reassure her that it was just a stupid misunderstanding, that I knew I would be able to laugh about it in the morning. A few hours later, she had arrived at a solution: Would I like to go into the city that weekend to have my hair styled at a salon she read about in Glamour? They offered a service not yet available anywhere else in the United States. Some chemical treatment from Japan. All the girls in New York were crazy for it, she said. It would make me look so polished.
It feels like the van is tightrope-walking the crag after a few beers. Lauren has her eyes glued shut in terror and Brett is laughing at her, telling her this is nothing, just wait until we get to the apex. I tried to get out of going this morning. I care fuck all about these bikes. Why are we giving them bikes? How much does it cost to make these bikes? Would it not be more economical to send a year’s supply of Poland Spring? I guess a bottled water studio wouldn’t attract twenty-something million from investors. Wouldn’t attract Rihanna. You know what should have happened when I outlined the terms of the fake fight to Brett? Brett should have told me to come up with something else, because of course Brett would never refuse to pass along my book to the perfect person to play me because she does fucking owe me. In fact, Brett should have gotten on the horn that minute and made it happen. Brett didn’t know Van Cleef from Van Halen before she met me, and now look at her, protecting her eyes from the splendid North African sun in the limited edition SPOKE sunglasses designed by Thierry Lasry. Don’t make me feel guilty for flying first-class when the money you’re charging for a pair of plastic sunglasses could feed a family of drumbeaters for a year.
I’m racist. I’m elitist. I’m a liar. I’m going to hell, but even hell will be better than today. Today, at some point, The Smoking Gun plans to publish a report regarding the “multiple” discrepancies between my life and the account in my memoir. Gwen learned this information ahead of the public after promising The Smoking Gun’s copy editor she’d read her lousy manuscript.
I told Lisa that I couldn’t leave the hotel today, that I had an important phone call I was waiting to receive and I couldn’t be without service, but Lisa showed me her MiFi and threatened to call Jesse in a voice that could shatter the glass ceiling. So here I am, trapped in this van with a weak signal and five type-A lunatics in caftans, myself included.
“That’s Mount Toubkal,” Brett says to Layla, pointing out the window. “It’s the tallest mountain in North Africa.”
Layla takes a video with her phone and thumbs a red caption.
I lean forward and speak between Lauren and Jen. “Did you just post an Instagram story?”