Crashing the A-List Read online

  We take our food and feast while piled on Gertrude watching Friends, because sometimes you just have to embrace being a cliché.

  After dinner, we lounge about, and I check my email on my phone. Not a single response to any of the résumés I’ve sent out. It’s only been a few months, but the creeping fear of never finding another editing job is growing. I certainly wouldn’t be the first person thrust out of their chosen profession and into the horrors of having to pick a new career.

  I’m not particularly sure I’m qualified to do anything else, though. What do you do with a master’s in English Lit besides working in publishing, or maybe teaching?

  Oh god, I’d be the worst teacher ever. Not only am I strangely terrified of teenagers, but I can’t imagine having to teach little kids anything. How do you impart knowledge on small people? It’s genuinely scary. I’d probably be the teacher who tried to inspire them to love reading and wound up inciting a riot over banned books or something.

  Actually, that doesn’t sound too bad. We can call that plan B.

  “So,” Trina says with a yawn as we finish stashing leftovers in the fridge and remnants in the trash. “What kind of units are you doing tomorrow?”

  “I don’t look until I’m ready to start cleaning,” I answer.

  “Why not?” Tom asks.

  “Because if I looked in them, I’d have to spend all night panicking about the hell that’s waiting for me in the morning. And right now, the worst thing in my head is sex couches and beet smell.” I shudder. “This way I can pretend that’s as bad as it’s gonna get.”

  Some things are best left to be lived in the moment. Like falling in love.

  Or, you know, stumbling onto dead snakes.

  5

  This is the most ass-numbingly boring thing I have ever done. It actually has me missing the physical and olfactory assault of the beet unit.

  I seem to have stumbled upon a paperwork-hoarder’s wet dream. And of course, this is exactly the type of stuff that I’m supposed to be carefully sorting through, according to Charlie. Boxes upon boxes upon boxes of what looks like every record some business owner ever had from the mideighties to late nineties, by the look of things.

  I whimper to no one. This is going to take forever. This isn’t just hoisting boxes of ancient and cracked china into Brutus. This is sifting through a million trees’ worth of paper looking for some random bond or something valuable.

  I suddenly hate Charlie and everything he stands for on this planet.

  Obviously I need coffee.

  I close the unit up and head down to the gas station mini-mart two blocks away.

  The cashier greets me with less friendliness than I’d care for. I give him my very best smile. He narrows his eyes at me.

  I pour myself a monstrously large coffee from the little self-serve station. There’s a sign informing me I can save fifty cents per coffee by bringing in my own reusable mug. I will roger that. Fifty cents is fifty damn cents.

  It’s still jarring to me that four months ago, I could have dropped fifty cents on the sidewalk and not even noticed. Not that I was fiscally irresponsible, but I would have had it to spare and just told myself it might make another person’s day to find fifty cents.

  I kind of hate myself for that now. It makes me feel all entitled and elitist. Although, I do think finding fifty cents now would rock my world, so maybe there’s more to my original theory than I’m giving credit.

  I head to the register to pay and set my coffee on the unnaturally orange counter. It coordinates a little too well with Charlie’s vest.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “One-seventy-five,” the cashier says.

  I hand over two dollar bills and read his name tag. “Rufus. That’s a cool name. I like that.”

  He hands me back my quarter. “I was born with it.”

  I don’t quite know how to respond to that. “Okay, then.” I pocket my change and pick up my coffee. “Lovely chatting with you, Rufus.”

  I can feel him scowling at me as I head back into the chilly outdoors. I don’t know why, but I suddenly feel the need to get Rufus on my side. He’s my only potential ally in this battle of forgotten storage relics.

  I open up today’s unit again and sigh. This looks like today’s, tomorrow’s, and possibly forever’s unit. Why would anyone keep this much paperwork? They had scanners and computers in offices in the nineties. I mean, I was in grade school, but still. The internet had to be in play during the dates on at least some of these papers.

  I take measured sips of my coffee to avoid too many bathroom breaks. I don’t want to earn any more ire from Rufus, and the gas station looks to be the only available bathroom for many blocks. Charlie doesn’t have an office on the lot, so there’s no dedicated E-Z Potty for me to utilize. Plus, this coffee is spectacularly bad, so the urge to chug isn’t strong.

  I’m not entirely sure what I’m looking at with these papers. I think they’re invoices, but I can’t tell what for. There isn’t any letterhead, so for all I know, this could have been the beginnings of a Fortune 500 company, lost to the wastelands of E-Z Storage and Charlie’s grabby hands.

  Okay, no, that’s stupid. No one with a Fortune 500 company is going to let their storage unit get behind in payments. Probably. Hell if I know what someone with a billion-dollar company might do.

  For every worthless box I sort through, I take great satisfaction when the time comes to fling it into the back of Brutus. Each one seems to take about twenty minutes to filter through all the pages. Multiply that by eleventy trillion boxes, and I should be done with this unit by the time my not-yet-conceived children graduate college.

  There’s a fun subject. My nonexistent children who have no chance of existing unless I get my feet on the ground and find someone to, uh, make babies with.

  Yeah, that’s not exactly how I want to start a relationship. “Hi! Great to meet you! Shall we spawn now?”

  This is why I’m single.

  But seriously. I had plans. And I was so close. I really loved my job. It was stressful and exhausting, and I was technically doing the work of at least three people, but it was mine and I was good at it. The track was laid, and I was well on the road to being ready to meet the right guy and settle down and do all the things.

  It does sting a bit to watch my little brother strolling into domesticated bliss while I’m just sitting over here with my unemployment checks and boxes of papers.

  I should probably be recycling these papers, now that I think of it. Charlie didn’t say anything about a recycling center, but it feels outrageously un-green of me to just throw all of these boxes into a dump somewhere.

  I call CiCi. “Do you know of any recycling centers in the area?”

  “Why? Are you branching out in your trash removal?”

  “Sort of. I hate throwing all this paper into a landfill. Yuppie guilt.”

  “If you ever call yourself a yuppie again, I will punch you in the face. With love.”

  I snort. “Noted. But really. Any ideas?”

  “I’ll see who my office uses for recycling and get back to you,” she says. “Find any buried treasures today?”

  I pop the lid off a new box and start rifling through the stacks of papers, balancing my phone on my shoulder. “Not a damn thing.”

  “Any more dead reptiles?”

  “Not yet, but the day is young.”

  “That’s the spirit, cupcake.”

  “How’s work going?”

  “I feel like a jerk talking about work with you,” she says, and I imagine her making her squinky face.

  “Just because the world of the job-having has cast me out doesn’t mean I begrudge others the joy of a paycheck.” These invoices look a little different from the last ones. They say CRANSON as a letterhead in an ancient-looking font, presumably an early ancestor of Comic Sans.

  “Well, I’ve got a new author who is supposed to be the next, next James Patterson with a book launch coming up, so that’s cool.”

  “The next, next Patterson?”

  “The ‘next Patterson’ label was taken by that guy last year who released the first book in a series about a professional swimmer who solves crimes, remember?”

  “Oh, right,” I say. “Yeah. That book was really bad. I couldn’t get three chapters into it.”

  “In chapter four he went into great detail describing his swimmer’s body. It picks up there.”

  “It’s the simple pleasures.”

  “Simple, hell. It’s like I could smell the chlorine and see the Speedo.”

  “You say strange things.”

  “And you love me for it.”

  “I really do.” I frown at the papers in my hand. “Okay, these invoices are bizarre.”

  I hear her chomping on something through the phone. “What’s bizarre ’bout them?”

  I let out a laugh. “You’re eating sunflower seeds, aren’t you?”

  “They help me focus! Shut up. It’s these or smoking.”

  “I’m not sure which is a more unattractive habit...”

  “Shh,” she says. “If it was good enough for Mulder on The X-Files, it’s good enough for me.” I listen as she spits out a shell. “What’s on the papers?”

  I flip through a few more pages and gasp. “Oh my god.”

  “What!?” she hisses at me.

  “CiCi... I think whoever owned this unit was running a brothel. Or was a pimp. Or... Wait—do pimps give receipts?”

  “Well,” she says, taking a moment. “I mean, maybe a reputable pimp?”

  “That’
s a big oxymoron, hon.”

  “You’re an oxymoron.”

  I scan another couple of pages. “Seriously, though. I think this is the invoices for the, erm, customers? It looks like it’s listed by who they, uh, hired? Dated? And then there’s a number for what they...ordered? I don’t know how to explain prostitution. This is hard.”

  “So were they.”

  “You are the classiest damn person I know.”

  “Does it have the names of the customers?”

  “Yeah.”

  The sound of her spitting out what I assume was a cheekful of sunflower seeds into a trash can explodes in my ear. “Text me what unit you’re in. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  6

  “Oh my god,” CiCi says, bouncing with glee. “These people were absolutely running some kind of escort thing. A ring? What’s the terminology?”

  “I’m not hip on the vernacular,” I say, rolling my eyes.

  She parks herself on a box and starts flipping through stacks of paper. “This is way more fun than answering the ten thousand emails in my inbox.”

  “You’re so responsible.” I sip the wonderfully overpriced latte she brought for me and feel the urge to kiss her. “But you bought me this, so I’ll let it slide.”

  She chews on her thumbnail and furrows her brows as she reads. “Okay, so it looks like these Cranson people had, like, what? An escort service? And these were the customers...” She points at the page in her hand. “And these were the, uh, escorts. So this must be what they paid to have done? But what do the numbers mean? Is it like ordering a value meal? You’ll take the number three, and supersize it?”

  I laugh. “That’s definitely what it looks like to me. I wonder if the menu is around in any of these boxes.”

  “Clara,” she says, looking at me with fiery blue eyes. “Do you realize there could be incriminating things in here? What if we find some politician’s name on the customer list? Or the escort list?”

  I go wide-eyed. “I didn’t even think of that. Oh god, can I get in trouble for seeing this stuff? Is this illegal?”

  “Hell if I know.” She shrugs. “But, oh man, what if there really were? Some crappy family-values politician with a fuck-ton of escort receipts? You could sell that or something. Pay for a whole damn apartment if you get the right creep!”

  “Isn’t that blackmail?”

  “It’s only blackmail if you tell them they have to give you money, or else you’ll give it to TMZ. It’s just business if you take it right to TMZ.”

  I make a face. “That’s horrible. I couldn’t do that to someone.”

  “Well, I absolutely could, and I’d split the money with you.” CiCi snorts. “This is real life. And we could do it anonymously.”

  I shake my head. “I’d feel so gross. I don’t think I could live with that.”

  Now she rolls her eyes at me. “Lady, come on. You’re living on a couch and sorting through trash. This could seriously mean a lot of money. We can’t all make it through life on rainbows and kitten kisses.”

  I frown at her. “I know that. But come on—this is ridiculous. We haven’t even found anything interesting other than that we think it’s an escort service.”

  “Then let’s look faster,” CiCi says. Her smile gleams with wicked delight.

  Three hours later, the sun is starting to go down, I haven’t had anything besides crappy coffee and a latte in the way of sustenance, and we are still up to our armpits in invoices.

  Not a single interesting name has appeared.

  “I think we’re on a wild dick hunt here, hon,” I whine.

  “Can we have pizza delivered to the unit? I’m starving.”

  I scoff. “I love you, but I’m not eating anything inside one of these things. That’s how the Black Plague started.”

  “I’m questioning the historical accuracy of that statement.” She stands up and pops her neck.

  “Can we go?” I groan. “I still have to drive Brutus to the dump.”

  She pouts. “Okay, one more box each, and I’ll help you drive him. Two boxes, and I’ll buy dinner?”

  “You’re a woman obsessed.”

  She gives me a toothy grin. “We can have sushi.”

  I glare at her. “Fine. Jerk.”

  She climbs over a stack of boxes, obviously trying to up her luck by moving on to a new area, and I begrudgingly lift the lid off another box.

  “Don’t forget to look for stocks or bonds or whatever,” I mutter.

  “Yep. Got it. Totally invested.” She rifles through the pages like her life depends on it.

  I’m looking at another box of invoices. Stupid invoices. Even if I found the pope himself in here, I don’t think I could go through with selling someone out like that.

  Though CiCi’s not wrong—I’ve heard the icky news outlets will pay a lot of money for this sort of thing. And beggars can’t be choosers, and all that.

  I’m just not sure if I haven’t yet reached beggar status, or if I’m unwilling to admit I’ve reached it. Either way, this doesn’t feel great.

  “You know,” CiCi says, scowling at what I’m guessing are disappointing names. “We don’t know the names of all the politicians. What if we’re looking at them and just not recognizing them?” She pushes one box aside and yanks open another one. “Maybe we should start looking up the names?”

  I scoff. “Are you freaking kidding? That would take forever. Like, all of our actual lives. I’m not spending the rest of my existence trapped in unit 234.”

  She slumps. “Well, maybe just the fancy-sounding names? Anything that sounds like Benedict Worthington the Third or something.”

  “Is...is there a politician named Benedict Worthington the Third?”

  She shrugs. “There could be? I don’t know! That’s why we should look them up.”

  I shake my head. “Ci. Come on.”

  “Okay, but if they sound even kind of familiar, we should Google.”

  I stamp my feet in a very toddler-like manner. “Fine. But I’m getting crab rolls tonight.”

  “Understood.” Her voice sounds positively gleeful.

  I make my way through my pile, then scoot the box out of the way. I’m pretty damn sure CiCi is on at least her third box. Cheater.

  I pull off a new lid and my eyebrows go up. These aren’t invoices. I pick up some papers and gasp.

  “What!?” CiCi shrieks. “Who’d you find? Is it that senator from upstate? Please let it be the senator from upstate!”

  “I think I found the escorts...”

  She comes flailing over to where I’m sitting, tripping spectacularly over several boxes. She scramble-crawls the rest of the way to me.

  “You are way too into this.”

  “Shut up,” she pants. “Show me!”

  I hand her a stack of what look like head shots with résumés stapled to the back. But where credentials or job experience would normally be listed, there are likes and dislikes—things like workout preferences, sexual preferences, and at the bottom of each résumé, a list of what they like doing with clients.

  “Oh. My. God,” CiCi whispers.

  My eyes bulge. “This is surreal.”

  She bursts out laughing. “Clara, oh man. This chick says she likes a glass of pinot grigio and watching Melrose Place to get her in the mood. That is the most nineties fucking thing I’ve ever heard. This is amazing.”

  I can’t help myself—I’m captivated. These profiles have everything. Every gender identity, every orientation. The pages detail any sexual scenario I could possibly imagine, and just...a whole bunch I could not. Some who are willing to role-play. Some who will provide bondage. There’s even one guy who will only accept a client if they wear a suit.

  My hunger and impatience are soon forgotten as we take turns reading the most impressive and mystifying ones out loud.

  “Oh god, okay, oh man,” CiCi says, bouncing on her cardboard box. “This guy says he’s had over five hundred sexual partners and can show you things you’ve never even dreamed of.” She holds up a picture of a very pale guy who looks more 1985 Dungeons & Dragons than superstud, posing in yellow boxer shorts adorned with hedgehogs. “His quote is, ‘Let me lead you into temptation.’” She practically falls over laughing. “What do you say, Clara? Shall we look him up? I need some temptation!”