Going in Circles (12 page)

Here she is holding a margarita, pretending to lick her own cleavage.

Here's one where she's with a group of girlfriends. She's the one in the middle with her hands throwing up devil horns, tongue licking her own face.

There's a picture where the woman next to her must be her grandmother, and yet, the tongue. It is still out of her mouth,
this time pointing right at her grandmother. What woman threatens to lick her own grandmother in a photograph?

Occupation: pharmaceutical sales. Oh. One of
those
girls. A drug pusher, someone who gets prettied up and flirts with doctors until she finds one to marry her.

Status:
IN A RELATIONSHIP
.

Oh, really, Undercleavage? That's a big word, don't you think? Aren't you more like a rebound? More like Matthew's marriage is on the back burner, and you are what he can easily make in the microwave. Get it? You are nothing more than a Hot Pocket. And just like a Hot Pocket, one day he will regret putting you anywhere near his mouth.

Charlotte Goodman is rarely grateful to be alone, completely by herself. But the fact that there's nobody around right now to hear her call someone a Hot Pocket is truly a blessing.

Undercleavage has a name. It's Kallie. I'm sad to lose her nickname.

Kallie writes that she did her undergrad at Cal State Fullerton, but she's still trying to figure out what she wants to be when she grows up.
Adorable.
She likes surfing, sunshine, going vegan, going topless, and chickening out right before she gets a tattoo. She wants to meet Chris Martin someday.

I get an evil thrill out of the fact that Matthew is spending so much time with a Coldplay fan. I hope he has to hear “Clocks” every single day of his life. I hope she can't fall asleep without the sound of “Viva La Vida” playing on her nightstand. I hope she's forced him to watch DVDs of concerts, and downloaded every track they've ever made onto his iPod, demanding that he love Coldplay if he wants to be with her.

I hope he's drowning in Coldplay. I hope he's choking on
it. And when she's done, when he's at what he thinks is the end of it, may she start up with Dave Matthews Band.

I search through ten pages of photographs of this girl playing centerfold before I find one with Matthew in it. The two of them aren't alone. It's a group shot. They're sitting around a poker table, game in session. Her arm is slung around his shoulders and she's leaning into him for the picture. I can't see her outstretched tongue because it's covered by Matthew holding his beer up, toasting the photographer. There's a glint on his hand from his wedding ring.

Our wedding ring.

Wait. Stop everything. This girl has a blog. I click on the link.

She wrote “were” when she meant “where.” Twice. She misspelled “San Francisco.” She wrote an entry about how hard it is to maintain her bikini wax, lamenting the fact that her “pubes are out of control.” She wants me to believe she loves having threesomes, but I'm calling bullshit on that.

Her dad died three years ago. I stop reading her Father's Day entry before I start to care about her, before I think of her as a girl named Kallie.

She claims to love to cook, but every night she appears to be going out to another restaurant or bar. Actually, she might have a bit of a drinking problem, as she often starts her entries by saying how drunk she is, or how hungover she is, or how she can't wait to be done working so she can start drinking. A drunk, Coldplay-loving prude. I wonder what Matthew's firm will think when he takes her to the Christmas party.

I click more links and find myself on another girl's page, one where Undercleavage has written a comment. “Shels! It's been so long! Can't wait for you to meet my boyfriend.”

The word
boyfriend
is underlined. A link.

My finger acts completely and immediately on its own, clicking.

A new page opens. A Facebook profile.

But it's not Matthew.

It's some other guy. And he's got Undercleavage in every single picture. They're together—on the beach, at a bar, at poker. Both of them with their tongues wagging, devil horns flying, holding each other so closely their tans have meshed. His interests: “Kallie, Kallie, Kallie. What can I say? I'm in love!”

The upper corner of my laptop blinks, letting me know my battery is almost dead. I've just spent three hours learning the entire life of some girl named Kallie, a girl with an epileptic tongue who loves booze, Coldplay, and a gym-addicted frat boy named Wes.

Okay, so maybe Francesca has a point. Maybe it's time to quit the Internet.

F
rancesca can't stop laughing. “Please, you don't have to tell me the entire story again. But please repeat the part where I was right.”

“You were right.”

“Again! When will you realize I'm the only person who knows what's best for you?”

Francesca came straight over. She claimed she was here to seize my laptop, but she arrived armed with a full bottle of wine. That was a couple of bottles ago. I'm currently facedown in a pillow on the floor of my own apartment, drunk in ways I didn't know were possible.

“I am intoxicated,” I say.

“Me too.” Francesca slaps at her face with both hands. “I can't feel any of this,” she says.

“Kallie would be so proud of us right now.”

“Let's call her.”

“We should.”

“I feel so close to her. She'd love us.”

“She would. We're great.”

“We can't, though. She's out tonight.”

I push myself up onto my forearms. “How do you know that?”

“I found her Twitter page. She's currently partying big time with her friends At-MarcyLand and At-Bootytown. I think there was a ‘Woo' in there somewhere.”

Francesca is also on the floor, lying a few feet away from me. She scoots down and holds up one foot. Her black sock is dotted with small white skulls and smells like the inside of her combat boot.

I swat at her foot. “Move that.”

“No.” Instead, she kicks her foot closer. Her toes touch my face.

“Quit it,” I say, hitting her ankle with my palm.

“Better,” she says, truly impressed. “I like it when you get mean.”

“Then keep kicking me in the face.”

She laughs. “That is exactly your problem, Charlotte. You don't get mean enough until someone is actually kicking you in the face.”

“I can be mean.”

“No, you can be a martyr. It's completely different.”

Francesca wiggles on her hands, stumbling on her arms until she's sitting upright, staring at me. The drunken effort has caused her bangs to fall in front of her eyes, making her look a little like a furious terrier. “It seems like you never stop thinking about your problems,” she says. “Never. Don't you get sick of that?”

“Hey,” I say, but I'm too weary to protest properly.

“I'm drunk, so I can tell you what's what.”

“Since when do you say, ‘What's what'?”

“When I feel the need to preach to you, I turn into James Carville, okay?” Francesca holds up her wineglass and talks in
this old-man Southern drawl. “I do declare, Charlotte Goodman, that you need to either get over yourself or get yourself a life. And Lord have mercy, I hope that you decide to do both, preferably in that order. Amen.”

“You sound like Foghorn Leghorn.”

“I think James Carville is hot,” she says.

“You
must
be drunk.”

“Hot,” she says, pushing her sleeves up her arms. There's a nasty welt on her wrist, the kind of wound that compels something inside you to reach out and push it. So I do.

“What is going on with you?” I ask as I push. “Are you anemic?”

She yanks her sleeves down around her wrists. “It's nothing.”

“Come on,” I say. “I'm seriously concerned. What about that bruise on your ankle from earlier this week?” I reach down for the cuff of her jeans, but she's surprisingly fast and I miss her leg entirely, swiping the air.

“Stop,” she says. “They hurt when you touch them, dumbass.”

“Is something going on? Do we need to talk about Jacob?”

“No. He's out of town, remember? And even if he were in town, it's not him. He'd never do anything like that.”

“Then why do you always look like you just survived a car accident?”

Francesca pulls her knees up to her chest, crossing her arms in front of her shins. As she hugs herself I am surprised at how small she can be. Ever since she exploded into my life, she's seemed much larger than this small-framed woman fetal on my floor.

She's staring at me, sizing me up. “Okay,” she says, after another moment. She nods her head, licks her lips. She tucks
the corner of her lower lip under a crooked tooth and sighs. “So you don't call the cops on me, I'll tell you what's been going on.”

“Thank you,” I say, relieved.

“But I want to be clear: I don't think you're ready for this. You didn't do Go Outside and you've failed miserably at Quit the Internet.”

“This is part of the plan?”

“No, the plan was to get you ready for this. But I think I have to abandon the plan and just throw you in there.”

“In where? Wait, are you in
Fight Club
?”

“Sort of.” She chuckles as she scribbles an address on a piece of paper. “Go here tomorrow night,” she says. “Don't dress up.”

I
'm standing in front of a warehouse in South Los Angeles. The billboards along this street are mostly in Spanish. I've never been to this neighborhood before. There are abandoned shopping carts tilted against the curbs. Puddles of trash line the street. A few transients have taken up temporary residence, organizing their belongings in possessive semicircles around their bodies. They're wearily propped between storefronts, resting beneath bold, multicolored blasts of territorial graffiti.

A white building with no discernible entrance looms over me. There's a parking attendant guarding the twenty or so cars in the lot. There isn't a vehicle less than five years old parked here, so it's unclear if his job is to keep people out or in.

“Do you know how I get in there?” I ask him, pointing at what I fear might be a sweatshop. I can just see Francesca forcing me to sew thousands of cheap T-shirts until I break down.
“Now will you leave your husband?”
she'll boom. And I'll wail,
“Yes! Anything! Please just let me go! My fingertips are bloody stumps!”

The guard points around the corner, smiles at me, and winks. “Good luck in there,” he says.

This morning, when I made today's plan, I told myself I had to go to this address, if only to be a good friend to Francesca, to find out why she looks like someone's throwing her against a wall when she's not at work. I'm sure whatever's inside is some kind of simple explanation. Maybe she's into kickboxing. Fencing. What do you do inside a warehouse?

I round the corner to find an open metal door. From inside the building I can hear squeaking, kind of like tennis shoes on a basketball court. Then there's this constant drone, a rumbling like something's coming, something's gaining speed.

I take a few steps forward, entering the building. Now I can hear women. They're shouting at each other, something urgent, but I can't quite make out what they are saying.

Inside the warehouse, it's gray and surprisingly bright. I zip my hoodie to ward off the chill in the air. It smells like someone turned an auto shop garage into a locker room. Like I'm getting my oil changed by a volleyball team.

Even though I can hear people, I still haven't seen anyone. There are benches in front of me; bags and shoes are scattered around, left unattended. Open suitcases are empty and abandoned, as if something went horribly wrong in an airport terminal.

I turn a corner to find a series of bleachers. The women are louder. I hear cheering.

There's a structure in front of me, about as high as my face, and at first I can't see what's inside it. It's got rails and posts, like an elongated wooden wrestling ring, but it's shaped more like a racetrack. A miniature racetrack, oval and tilted.

Standing in the middle of all of this, where it's flat and level, are about thirty women on roller skates. Not like the white roller rink skates with pink wheels that everybody had when we were kids. These look like leather tennis shoes with thick, chunky wheels in blue or green. Some are hot pink. The women are all in protective gear like skateboarders wear. Helmets, knee pads, elbow pads, and wrist guards. I see some of them chewing on mouth guards. Maybe they're all still learning to skate.

A group of the women peel off and stomp to the track together. Two other women wait a few feet behind them. A whistle blows, and the women in front all start skating. That's the word for what they're doing, but it doesn't describe what's happening. It's more like an attack, like an army on the move.

Wham-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam!

That squeaking I was hearing earlier, that strained squeal, was from the track. The wooden funnel is groaning and shaking under the pressure of these women like a roller coaster bracing the weight of a train out of control.

Another whistle, and the two women who were hanging back take off. Their speed makes me nervous as they propel themselves closer to the other women up ahead.

About ten of them swoop by, directly in front of where I'm standing. They slam into each other, pushing and leaning back and forth. It's chaotic, and I don't know where to keep my focus in this mob on wheels.

Sometimes they slam to the ground, tumbling on top of each other. It looks like it hurts, but they immediately get right back up and skate away. The protective gear they're wearing must be really effective.