Page 8 of Just Not That Into Billionaires

“How can anyone hate your weird T-shirts?” Kelsey asks.

“You’ll have to ask Benny. Or maybe not.” I smile, remembering it all. “He hated nonsensical T-shirts the most. He’d be like, ‘What does that even mean?’ And I’d be like, ‘I know you want this T-shirt so bad.’ Whatever he hated, I’d pretend he wanted it so much.”

“I bet you did,” Tabitha says.

“The only time we really related was when he would say annoyed things to me. Well, we also had these fake humblebrag children that would compete.”

“Wait, what?” Kelsey asks.

I’m not sure if I should try to explain, but everyone’s staring at me now.

“One of our really mean stage managers would humblebrag all the time, so then I started humblebragging about my daughter, Monique, that I pretended to have. ‘Oh, I stayed up all night knitting while Monique translated the works of Balzac into Chinese for her third-grade project. She just wasn’t happy with the current translations on the market. She’s such a picky child!’”

“Seriously can’t imagine you doing that,” Noelle says—sarcastically.

“I’m lucky I didn’t get fired. But it was totally hilarious and people would always ask me about Monique whenever they were mad at this jackhole stage manager. Of course, Benny would just glare. It’s not that he liked this guy any better than the rest of us liked him, it was just annoyance. And then one day, Benny seemed so angry with me when I was humblebragging…” I’m grinning thinking about it. “I was going on like, ‘it’s so hard to know what to do with a child as brilliant as Monique—people don’t understand how problematic a gifted child can be. The French studies alone…’ And suddenly Benny goes, ‘My boy, Igor, is so creative he doesn’t want to have anything to do with French so I have enrolled him in Klingon language studies. It is so tedious, though, to have such a precocious child who doesn’t care to follow the herd.’ We were all totally shocked because he never engaged with us. And suddenly he’s humblebragging back to me. And it was good humblebragging, too.”

“And he never talked to you before that?” Kelsey asks.

“Not much! We were all stunned, like, does Mister Socially Awkward have a sense of humor? And it went on from there. We’d humblebrag-compete. I thought it was fun, but for him, I think it was more like an extension of his extreme displeasure with me.”

“Huh,” Antonio says.

“Sometimes, like if Benny was glowering at me, I’d do this fake concern about Igor having Victorian diseases. Like I’d ask about Igor’s scurvy, and he’d be like, ‘We were only grateful that Igor’s very mild condition didn’t become a case as tragic as Monique’s rickets. No offence, of course, we were all very concerned.’ I was stunned,” I say. “Chronically annoyed Benny Stearnes joining in on the joke!”

Noelle narrows her eyes. “So the main communication between you two was that you had imaginary children that would compete with each other?”

I nod.

Mia flops back on the couch. “So basically you were both weirdos with a weird sense of humor. That’s what I’m getting here.”

“Pretty much the only communication! Though there were also glowers and grumbles,” I say. “And I asked him to coffee this one time and he was like, ‘Huh?’”

Mia widens her eyes. “You asked him to coffee?”

“I just liked him, I don’t know. We had that quirky Igor and Monique thing going. Considering that he was the opposite of my type who found me annoying, I don’t know what I was thinking. I blurted it out one day. I was like, ‘That coffee place is having a two-for-one, you wanna go?’ and he was stammering out his no. He couldn’t say no fast enough.”

“So you asked him out even though he was the opposite of your type,” Mia clarifies.

“Yeah, I couldn’t help it, and then I felt like an idiot. My attraction to him was weird, anyway. And of course it would’ve deprived him of being able to criticize my dates when they came to pick me up.”

I explain how Beau Cirque had this cheap-rent deal with this apartment complex for the workers, so we all lived there. Benny liked to do work out in the courtyard, escaping a building full of loud theater people.

“I could always count on him to roll his eyes when guys picked me up,” I add.

I have everybody’s attention. I never talk about my Beau Cirque days, mostly because of how they ended: shamelessly glomming on Benny.

“You think he was jealous of your other dates?” Tabitha asks.

“No, it’s just how he was. He’d make these little comments like, ‘Somebody needs to check the hair product factories for recent robberies!’ Or, ‘Nice douchebag shirt.’ And I’d be like, ‘I love that shirt, and we’re going to have a fabulous night on the town.’”

“You goaded each other,” Tabitha observes.

“I guess.” I shove at the half-melted ice in my drink. “Or he’d be especially scathing if they came in limos. He’d be like, ‘Oh, look, you’re getting picked up in a low-self-esteem mobile…I mean a limo.’ He definitely ruined a few dates with his jackass opinions.”

“Record scratch!” Lizzie says.

“What?”

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