Crashing the A-List Read online

  My eyebrows shoot up. “Um. Yeah. Sure! I’ve got it.” I glance down at his vest. “Do I need to wear one of those? Is it a safety thing?”

  He looks down at himself and brushes off his neon attire. “No. Somethin’ wrong with my vest?”

  I blink. “Nothing. It’s lovely. Great color on you. Brings out your eyes.”

  Charlie snorts. “When you’re finished, I’ll cut you a check.” He starts walking back toward his car on the other side of the lot. “My number’s on the top of the list if you need me. If you find anything you like or you think’s worth somethin’, it’s yours. Consider it a finder’s fee. And don’t stay after dark, ’cause that’s when the weirdos come out.”

  I stiffen. “Hey, just because I’m a girl...”

  He turns around and raises an eyebrow. “It’s not ’cause you’re a girl. Hell, even I won’t stay out here after dark.”

  I can feel my eyes bulging. “Great. Good to know. Thanks.”

  Charlie laughs and climbs into his car, which I am just now noticing is a shiny, newish Lexus. Being the Storage King seems to be working out well for him. “Good luck!” he calls. I pretend to study the list, looking as cool and collected as possible while he drives through the lot. I look up to see him give me a short wave before he’s on the street, disappearing from view.

  Now it’s just me and a smelly storage unit. Well, me, this stinky unit, and twenty-two others that I’m sure will prove to be just as palatable.

  I fold up the list and stuff it into the back pocket of my jeans, then tuck both sets of keys into my coat pockets. I take a deep breath and turn to face my Everest.

  Okay. So, this really isn’t too bad. All I have to do is move the stuff in here into the back of the truck. I’m not big on treasure hunting, so the job shouldn’t take too long. It’s a simple Point A to Point B scenario. No big deal. Might not be particularly glamorous, but a little hard work never hurt anybody.

  I can totally do this.

  3

  “I can’t do this!” I sob into my cell phone.

  “Yes, you can!” my best friend CiCi says back.

  I sniffle loudly. “No, I can’t! I’m still on the first unit and the sun is starting to go down! I’m not even half done with it! Everything is gross and heavy and it smells like beets!”

  “Beets?”

  “Beets!” I shriek. “Fucking beets! And I don’t even know why! There aren’t any beets in here! D’ya know what is in here, though, Ci?”

  There’s a moment of silence. “Do I?”

  “Well, let’s see,” I muse sarcastically. “There was the old couch at the front that I tried to clean off and ended up finding a stash of used condoms on. God knows how long those were there for. Then when I got back a few feet, I came across a dead snake hiding under a box of newspapers from 2003. And finally there was the giant trash bag full of old mildewed clothes that burst open when I tried to lift it, and a nest of petrified dead baby rats fell out!”

  “Jesus, are you serious?”

  I choke on a sob. “This is horrible! No amount of money is worth this!”

  “But it’s five thousand dollars, though, right?” she asks. “That’s a lot of money, cupcake. And okay, yeah, that’s disgusting, but they can’t all be that bad, right?”

  I hiccup. “But what if they are?”

  “Then we can take a wee bit out of your savings and invest in a hazmat suit? I dunno.”

  Laughing, I wipe my nose on my sleeve, trying really super hard not to think about what the fabric has touched today. “That’s a lot easier to say when you aren’t the one who’s going to smell like beets for the rest of your life.”

  “How about this,” she says. “You said you still have to drive the truck to the dump, right? Gimme fifteen minutes and I’ll meet you, and we can ride over together.”

  “You’d ride in the scary truck after dark with me?”

  “Honey, if there was a body in the back of that truck, I’d still ride with you and I wouldn’t even ask questions. Hell, I’d bring a shovel and an alibi.”

  “Love yer face.”

  “Love yers, too,” she says. “Hopping on the train now. See you in a few!”

  She clicks off the line, and I turn back to the unit that’s barely half-emptied. I remember how I’d fantasized about setting Trina’s hideous couch on fire, and think that those flames would have been a waste. This is where the inferno belongs.

  I’m also getting a tad bit concerned about my sudden pyro tendencies. Unemployment is not proving beneficial to my mental health.

  I debate crawling in the cab of the truck and hiding until CiCi gets here, but my desperate need for that money coupled with the knowledge that I will be cursed to smell like root vegetables until I finish unloading this damned unit sends me shuffling back inside.

  How could people put all this stuff in here and just leave it? Though I honestly can’t understand why anyone thought these things were worth saving in the first place.

  Although, based on the gross couch, I’m thinking this might have started out as a storage unit and morphed into a love den. Maybe someone was having an affair, and the only secret place they could run off to for their dalliances was this storage unit. Then once the marriage broke up or the affair was past its prime, the unit became a forgotten place, or perhaps a painful reminder of infidelity?

  Or maybe people are just completely disgusting. I mean, my damn.

  These units were owned by someone, though. Actual people. People with lives and families and possessions.

  Maybe even people who had their dream jobs and lost them all in one fell swoop and couldn’t afford to keep their storage units anymore. Maybe these are filled with items people would have given anything to keep hold of, but they were grabbed by overdue debts and corporate greed.

  I can’t picture Uncle Charlie as the face of corporate greed, though. I think it’s the mustache. That poofy of a mustache couldn’t be on a bad guy.

  Although, now that I think about it, Charlie did have this hint of an oddly intimidating vibe that I can’t explain, though it was slightly cloaked by the mustache.

  And three rows over from where I stand now is a small unit crammed with my own life. Boxes upon boxes of books, the clothes and shoes I had to pack away, and my blessed mattress, shrink-wrapped to death.

  This is all so depressing. I don’t have a lead on a job. I don’t have a lead on an apartment, not that anyone would lease to the unemployed. Most of my worldly possessions are sitting here in a temperature-controlled cement dungeon. And a metropolitan telltale heart in the form of an auto-payment from my meager checking account each month to E-Z Storage will continue to remind me of what I had and what I’m nowhere close to edging back into.

  I fling a stack of old magazines into the back of the truck. What if one day my checking account runs dry, and my payment doesn’t make it? What if Charlie has to lock up my unit and it’s taken away? Some poor schmuck might wind up sorting through my things and judging me based off what they found. Maybe they’d wonder what kind of life I’d led to lose all those things.

  My life wasn’t upper-class by any stretch, but I prided myself on having a few nice items that I’d worked for. Like, I own a great mattress. It has a little remote, and I can change how firm it is at my every whim. For years, I shopped thrift stores to mix and match newer items for my professional wardrobe. I packed my own lunch each day. I cut a lot of corners that, while now I’m glad I did, at the time, I hadn’t really needed to.

  But I wasn’t about to scrimp on my mattress. That thing was worth every penny. Watching the deliverymen cart away the full-size I’d slept on since eighth grade and smoothing down the sheets on the luxuriously huge queen felt like my official invocation into the Hall of Adults.

  I almost sold it. In a moment of overdramatic worry, I determined I had no use for a mattress,
so why bother holding on to it when it could be sold for cushion money? I even went so far as to place a Craigslist ad for it.

  A mechanic from Crown Heights answered the ad. He was so happy to find it. Personally, I’d be too icked out to buy a used mattress, and in the guy’s defense, he was suspicious at first. But I’d taken immaculate care of it. I’d even kept the expensive mattress protector on the entire time I’d owned it. I wanted to keep the warranty valid, after all.

  He was a nice guy, but I definitely would’ve gotten screwed in the deal. Only a few hundred bucks for a three-thousand-dollar mattress. I had to give the guy credit for his haggling skills.

  But at the last minute, I freaked out at the thought of someone else sleeping on my one piece of material pride and joy, and sent Mr. Mechanic on his way before pulling the ad.

  I suppose if you hear the story from his perspective, he was seconds from a great deal and had it ripped away by a cruel mattress tease. He’ll tell it from the stance of his good fortune gone awry. He was a nice guy, and it was my fault for jerking him around.

  No. Screw him. I worked hard for that mattress. I interned under a hellish acquisitions editor at a midlevel publishing house that went from procuring literary fiction to trying to “stop the pussification of America” by buying books from every Reddit troll gone viral. That’s not even including the author who wrote on a fucking Tandy computer, forged before the earth’s crust cooled, and sent every chapter in a separately saved file on goddamn floppy disks, written in a word processing program that hasn’t existed since 1994. And each of this author’s books contained some variation of the phrase “Her tits tittered tittily.”

  I worked my way up from that dick editor to earn that mattress. So I don’t care how nice the mechanic dude is. It’s my mattress.

  “Uh, Clara?”

  I wheel around, still scowling. “What?”

  “You’re snarling at a lamp,” CiCi informs me.

  I look down, and sure enough, there’s a little bendy desk lamp clutched in my hands. I continue glaring at it for a minute before I accept that my being pissed at this lamp isn’t going to bring my bed out of unit 118.

  I sigh and fling the lamp into the back of the truck. “Hey.”

  CiCi assesses the situation calmly. “So. How’s it going?”

  “I miss my mattress.”

  “Who wouldn’t?” She scans her eyes over the contents of the unit and scrunches her nose up. CiCi has what one might call a moneyed face. Her parents are the kind of rich that people rally against, and my blond-haired, blue-eyed pal definitely looks the part. Well, until she opens her mouth and a myriad of profanity falls out, anyway.

  “Holy fuck-sticks, you were serious!” she says as she prances inside and starts looking around. “Oh my god, who keeps this stuff? I don’t even know what this is—AHHHH! SNAKE! It’s a snake!”

  “It’s dead.”

  She runs past me and stands by the front of the truck, clutching her chest. “I didn’t even know we had snakes in New York! Why the hell are there snakes? Isn’t that why people live in the city? To get away from snakes and shit?”

  “Maybe someone smuggled it in?”

  “They smuggled it in to let it die in a storage place?”

  I throw my hands up. “Yes. It was all part of their master plan to throw off the snake-smuggling authorities. Misdirection, and all that.”

  CiCi snickers and then studies me. “Cupcake, you look like hell.”

  “Thanks.” I make a sad face.

  CiCi’s my best friend because she’s amazing, and feisty, and all the things I strive to be. She’s also a kick-ass publicist. So while I am banished to the underbelly of the city’s abandoned junk, she’s still out and about in the professional world I long to rejoin.

  She looks over at the truck, which is taunting me with its giantness. I hate driving in the city’s traffic at any time, but with this monster, I don’t know what I’m going to do.

  “Okay,” she says, furrowing her brow. “You’ve had a shit day, yeah?”

  “Yep.”

  Pulling in a deep breath, she looks at me seriously. “Here’s what we’re gonna do. First, I’ll drive you over to the garbage place or whatever, because I know what an awesome driver you are. Then I’m taking you out for dinner because, damn, you’ve earned it.”

  I feel tears welling up in my eyes and fling myself at her for a hug. She clutches me back for a moment before pulling away with a jerk.

  “Between those things, we will stop by my place so you can shower and borrow some clothes.” She takes a fearful sniff. “Because seriously, though...beets. You absolutely smell like beets.”

  4

  “So, how is it?” Tom asks me as we huddle around the center island in his kitchen.

  “Technically, it’s probably horrible,” I say with a shrug. “But I’m doing okay with it. I may have to set aside some money for a chiropractor when all is said and done, but it’s not completely crap.”

  I can say this now, as the second unit I opened after sealing off the first was far less crowded and filled with things like plastic boxes of dishes and old tools. The stuff was heavy, but it was all stacked and orderly and made the rest of my day go smoothly. I was able to lock down that unit by the time the sun started to disappear, which made me feel pretty accomplished after the debacle that was yesterday.

  “That’s good,” he says, taking a sip of wine. With a small laugh, he adds, “I didn’t think you’d stick with it.”

  I want to unleash outrage on him, but I can’t muster the energy for it. “Yeah, me either.” I steal his wineglass and take a deep drink. “But hey, I’m in it now. I couldn’t leave Brutus behind. He’s my pal.”

  “Who’s Brutus?”

  “The truck.”

  “The truck?”

  “The big orange diesel pickup I have to drive to the dump at night,” I clarify. “We spend a lot of time together, and I figured that if I gave it a name, it might be nicer to me when I’m trying not to die in rush-hour traffic driving what is essentially a trash-filled battering ram.”

  “Whatever works.” Tom laughs as he fills himself a new glass and tops off the one I stole.

  “And tonight, I will sit on Gertrude in there and scour any and all websites listing job openings, and I will also send annoying check-in emails to everyone I know, to see if anyone has any bites. I have officially reached the point where I am not above begging for favors.”

  “That’s the spirit,” he says, and clinks his glass to mine. “Also... Gertrude?”

  I shrug again. “The couch.”

  “You named our couch?”

  “I really did.”

  He raises an eyebrow. “Should I be alarmed by your new fascination with naming inanimate objects?”

  “Likely so. But don’t stop me. It’s working, so I’m rolling with it.”

  “Fair enough.”

  We take a moment of silence to sip our wine. Or maybe I’m sipping wine and he’s mentally rating what level of lunacy naming his couch actually counts as.

  “So,” he says, his voice dragging out the word. “Mom called today.”

  I whine. Yes, I’m thirty years old, and I just whined.

  “Is she still mad?”

  “Yep.”

  Our mother is currently not speaking with me due to my refusal to return home during my current job/living situation crisis. I’ve tried to explain the irreversible damage my limping home as a failed adult would cause to my psyche, but she remains unconvinced. She maintains that no matter my age, I’m her child and should be sitting on her couch eating PB&J with the crusts cut off while she makes passive-aggressive comments on all my life choices.

  “I’m not going back to Buffalo,” I declare. “I’m actually scared that when we go home for Thanksgiving, she’s going to lock me in the basement.”
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  Tom considers this. “That’s a genuine risk. But cut her a bit of slack. Our entire family has lived within fifty miles of each other for at least four generations. The fact that we both moved away is like the highest sin we could have committed.”

  “We’re still in the same state. It’s not like we emigrated.”

  “Might as well have,” he says, assuming a scandalized expression that eerily resembles our mother’s. “I mean, we aren’t birthing children to be raised in the school system where Uncle Jack is a vice principal! We’re as good as shunned!”

  “No one should ever have to go to a school where their uncle is the vice principal.” I shudder. “You’d think he’d go easier on family, but Uncle Jack was all hell-bent on proving he wasn’t nepotistic.”

  “How many times did we get detention from him in high school?”

  I try to calculate. “I honestly lost count. Remember when he gave you one because you were walking on the wrong side of the hallway between classes?”

  Tom snorts. “Oh god, I’d forgotten that.”

  I take another sip. “It’s a special type of hell to see Veep Uncle Jack the Hard-Ass at school, followed by sweet old Uncle Jack who gave us better presents than Mom and Dad at Christmas. All through freshman year, I thought he had dual personalities.”

  “Looking back, I think it was his way of apologizing. He had a reputation to maintain,” Tom offers.

  I shrug. “I prefer the Dr. Jack/Uncle Hyde approach.”

  “It’s nice to see unemployment hasn’t damaged your grounding in reality at all,” my brother says.

  I hear the sound of the front door opening, and a few seconds later Trina is standing in the kitchen with us, holding giant take-out bags from Pandora Dragon.

  She gives us both a giant smile. “Cooking is for suckers.”

  “I knew I was marrying you for all the right reasons,” Tom says, relieving her of the Chinese food and giving her a kiss. I pointedly stare at the bags and realize it’s a lot weirder seeing your little bro smooching his intended inside their own home than it is literally anywhere else. I feel very intrusive.