The Cinderella Pact (10 page)

I'm so mad, I don't even notice that I am running up hill and that my heart is racing. When my ten minutes are up, I hop off and make a beeline straight to where the big boys are.

“Look who's back,” Rider says.

I smile, feeling curiously lightheaded, and choose my weapon. A long bar lying on a mat. That should be easy enough.

Sauntering over, I dip my hands in chalk, rubbing my palms as Rider and company look on. “Dead lifts,” I say. “Twenty-five.”

Rider smirks. “I'll bet ten bucks you can't do ten.”

“You're on.”

“As is?”

I eye the plain, rather light-looking bar, which couldn't weigh more than a curtain rod. “As is.”

“Shit,” says his buddy. “She can't do that.”

“Then she's out ten bucks.”

I walk over, stretch, bend, grasp the bar firmly, and lift.

For some reason it doesn't move. Is it tied down? I check the ends. No. They seem to be free. Rider is shaking his head. “She can't even do one.”

Locking my knees, setting my jaw, I try again. This time I have more success as I slowly lift the bar, the muscles in the part of my arm that prevent me from ever wearing a strapless dress fraying as I do so.

“That's one,” counts Rider. “Nine more to go.”

Carefully I lower the bar, the thought of raising it again, not to mention nine more times, making me vaguely ill.

My arms cry out again as I go for two. A small crowd has gathered behind me. I grit my teeth and do it again.

“Three,” Rider says.

I can't. I cannot do it for ten. I had no idea this thing was so heavy.

“Just keep your legs straight, Nola. Bend from the hips.”

Nola? Someone said my name. I check the mirror and see that in the middle of the crowd is the heart-stopping reflection of a tall surfer type in a ripped gray T-shirt and unbelievably sexy shorts. Chip.

“That's it,” he says. “You can do it.”

This is both good and bad. On the one hand he's cheering on my dead lifts. On the other hand . . . my fat ass is sticking out like a full moon over the Chesapeake. Please, I pray, please may I not be wearing my pink underwear. (Really, I should toss it all.) Then a crisis thought—
Do I have plumber's crack?

“Whatsa matter? Give up?” taunts Rider.

Number four is the hardest yet. I realize that pausing between lifts is a mistake. Maybe I can get away with not dropping the bar to the floor.

I try this strategy when I go from five to six, but Rider catches me. “Nuh-uh. You got to completely drop the bar, not just lower it. Those are the rules.”

“How many does she have to do?” I hear Chip ask.

“Four more,” someone says.

“Four. That's easy. You can do it, Nola.” Chip moves next to me, so close I can hear him whisper. “Bend slightly at the knees. They'll never see.”

I take his advice and am surprised. No wonder they tell you not to bend at the knees when doing dead lifts. It's much easier.

“Eight!” everyone shouts.

“Two more, Nola. Two more.” Chip pumps his fists.

Honestly, I wish he'd go away so I could give up. I'd much rather humiliate myself among strangers.

I lick salty sweat off my lips and will what's left of my arms to function.

“Nine!”

“This is it!” Chip is shouting. “You're going to do it. Use your thighs.”

I am. I am going to do it. One more. Just one more. I squeeze my eyes shut. The bar wavers from side to side. Chip steadies one end and I do it.

“Yeah!”

I drop the bar with a
clank
and slowly straighten my aching back. Through blurry vision I see that the small crowd has broken into applause.

“No fair. She cheated. You helped her,” Rider claims.

“Be a man,” Chip says, “and pay her the ten bucks.”

“Keep it,” I say, as black dots dance before my eyes.

“No way. You earned it.”

“That's all right.”

Chip is going in and out of focus. My sweatpants, I remember, stink. Stink famously. “I have to, I have to go.”

“Wait.” He follows me out the door as I stagger through the machine room to the exit. “That was awesome. I can't believe you took him on like that.”

“Uh-huh.” I am in no shape for conversation. I need to lie down and rest, preferably on a hospital bed with IV fluids.

He stops me at the women's room. “You know, I'd really like to see you again. Can I call you?”

Whatever, I think, unable to grasp how amazing this is that a cute guy, albeit a computer geek, like Chip is writing down my number. I mumble it off and then spin into the locker room, where I head for the sauna and promptly collapse.

Chapter Ten

My apartment is a total find.

The walls are painted a very faint peach with white trim and the floors are dark maple throughout. There are two bedrooms; one living room with, yes, a wood-burning fireplace and a pair of built-in bookshelves; a formal dining room separated from a small kitchen by a white Georgian post; and a bathroom with marble floors and a window, which is where Otis reigns, meowing warnings to oblivious male passersby below.

I would never have been able to afford the $2,000-a-month rent if it hadn't been for Belinda's extra income. Belinda made the one bright spot in my life possible. And for that I am indebted to her.

Otis scrambles off the windowsill to meet me as I enter carrying two bags of groceries, so sore that I can barely climb the stairs. He's a slick gray cat. Untrustworthy and possibly criminally insane. I'm not sure of this, as I don't know many kitty psychologists who would be willing to be alone with him in a room to perform a diagnosis.

What I do know is that in three instances he has leaped from the slate windowsill of the bathroom onto men wearing white T-shirts below. It's the puma in him. Or the psychopath. Either way, his claws must be deadly, judging from the howls of his victims.

I open a can of 9Lives and dump it into a dish as he wraps himself around my legs. Fat woman in her thirties with a cat in a pastel apartment. Could I be any more of a stereotype?

Ouch. My arms. My arms.

I shower off the gym sweat, the warm water doing wonders for my aching body, smear Bengay everywhere, and change into fresh gray sweats. Then I put water on to boil for whole-wheat spaghetti and give myself five minutes to empty my cupboard of all unhealthy food.

This is Brian the hunk waiter's idea, one he will highlight in the infomercial. While he's not a big advocate of diets, he said he helped his sister by eliminating all junk food from her pantry. I think I can do that—though I'm not sure about returning to the gym to face Rider. I figure I'll quit while I'm ahead.

After four minutes I have filled several brown-paper grocery bags with: half a bag of Chips Ahoy! cookies; a jar of peanut butter; half a jar of Nutella; three half-full, somewhat stale bags of Nacho Cheese Doritos; three Snickers bars; movie butter microwave popcorn; a box of good old-fashioned, high-fat granola; and a six-pack of Hires root beer.

That, I decide, is enough for one night.

As the water heats, I take a bottle of Evian (spelled backward—naive—did you know that?) down the hallway to where my laptop is hidden in the guest bedroom, what I like to think of as my own version of the mad scientist's laboratory. It would be cool if I could access it through a revolving door operated by moving a bust of Shakespeare. Better yet, if I had a fire pole.

I quickly check Belinda's personal e-mail—[email protected]—and find it is overflowing with messages from the likes of Lori DiGrigio and Belinda's agent Charlotte Barnes and even David Stanton. There is also one from lennonlives@ princeton.edu. The subject:
Met your editor recently.

Nigel Barnes.

I am tempted to open it. However, I don't because Belinda's column was due yesterday and I have yet to write it. Not really a problem since I also edit it, which puts me in the weird position of being both anxious and mad at myself at the same time.

Anyway, enough dithering. I must get to work.

Opening Belinda's official e-mail—[email protected]—I find there are ten pages of letters, only three of which I choose to answer. The rest I will reply to semipersonally, in that I thank them for writing and advise them to find a real counselor to help them solve their problems. OK, so I'm a bit cautious these days. Perfectly understandable, considering how I went a bit over the top, you might say, with that business about losing massive amounts of weight by walking five miles and holding off on that extra chocolate-chip cookie.

In preparation for writing my responses, I put on the Beatles' “Across the Universe” and focus on being beautiful and fabulously serene. I become Belinda, even rereading the first letter out loud in a British accent.

 
I'd like to tell her that as a sister of Eileen Devlin I can relate—big-time—but I don't. Instead I answer with this:

 
I get chills seeing Belinda's name, knowing that each month 500,000 readers believe she is real and strolling through London in pink cowboy boots when, actually, she's reeking of Bengay in sweats on a Saturday night in Central New Jersey. Which reminds me—the lid on the spaghetti pot is banging in the kitchen. I rush in, dump half the box of whole-wheat spaghetti into the boiling water, and give it a quick stir before running back to the next letter.

 
Oh, brother. Dear Shoot Yourself Now Whydontcha is what I want to say.

 
I check my watch. Two more minutes until the spaghetti is done. I take a swig of bottled water and scan the next one quickly.