Page 24 of Fun at Parties
That’s right, my mom girlbossed her way straight into chapter 7. Maybe Equifax can forget, but I never will.
That’s harsh, I know. My mom made mistakes, and she paid for them. But I’mstillpaying for them. There’s the loan my parents took out in my name when everything started going south, and the regular requests for money that started when I entered a higher tax bracket.
Last year, I tried to put a stop to it. I have my own financial mess to clean up. When she asked me to pay for thousands of dollars of dental work, I said no, figuring it was cosmetic. She ended up needing an emergency root canal. I’ve paid for everything she’s asked for since.
It’s always been easier not to talk about Jolee, but I spilled the whole story to Nate the weekend I met him, when we were sitting on Bailey’s porch after the party. All thanks to the girls.
There were three of them walking past the house, led by a brunette in a bodycon minidress. Talking about a guy who was supposed to show up at the bar but didn’t, eating floppy slices of pizza off paper plates. The brunette stopped when she reached my car, which I’d reluctantly parked out front after a trip to the party supply store.
“Not this bullshit,” she hollered, and my stomach dropped. “Fuck Jolee!” She kicked the tire.
“What the hell?” Nate whipped his head around. “Isn’t that your car?”
I tucked up my knees and pressed myself into the back of the chair. A queasy sense of shame rolled over me in awave, the same feeling I’d lived with all year while Jolee was falling apart, until I left for college. Mom had aggressively recruited people—including my friends’ mothers—to join her downline, and they all lost big chunks of money. By the end, my parents couldn’t afford the McMansion, Mom’s Louis Vuitton bags, or the cold, dirty looks anymore, so we moved to a smaller house in a new town. My old friends were relieved they could stop hanging out with me, and I spent the summer helping Mom offload inventory until it was time to leave for school, where I could start fresh, weighed down only by a metric ton of student loans.
The girl leaned over the hood of the car and slapped her pizza on the windshield, cheese side down. “I spent five thousand dollars on this crappy makeup and sold nothing!”
“You’re not going to say anything?” Nate stood. “Hey!”
“Shh.” I lunged out of my chair and pulled him back by the hand. “Don’t.”
Something in my voice must have convinced him to let the rest of this bizarre situation play out, because he sat back down. We watched her rub the cheesy, saucy mess back and forth, and then lift her leg as if she were going to pee on the driver’s-side door like a dog, before her laughing friends dragged her away.
Nate stood and walked into the house without saying a word. I buried my face in my hands until I heard the door again. He was back with a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle. After cleaning off the windshield, he leaned against the porch railing. “Tell me about it.”
“It’s my mom’s car.” My voice shook. “That purple, andthe metal emblem on the back—you have to make it to a high level in Jolee to get one.”
“Jolee?”
“It’s a pyramid scheme,” I said. Out loud. For the first time ever. The rest of the story poured out of me, and Nate just listened. His eyes were impossibly soft, for a guy who otherwise carried himself like he was made of barbed wire. “You probably think my family is horrible.”
He snorted. “No judgment. We’ve all got shit to deal with. And this sounds like it’s your mom’s shit, not yours.” He plucked a leaf from the potted plant next to him. Twirled it between his fingers. “Hey, do you want to go for a swim?”
I couldn’t have guessed where that swim would lead. In the end, it took me here, to the passenger seat of this Hyundai, thirty minutes outside Vegas.
The tip we need finally comes in when one of my three surveillance targets invites fan questions on Instagram.What are you doing tonight and can I come?someone asks.
Putting my swimmies on,Logan’s friend responds, over a photo of the Bellagio fountains taken from a balcony at a neighboring hotel. His outstretched feet are visible at the bottom of the frame. At first I think it’s a joke about jumping into the fountains, but then I notice there’s an account tagged in the corner, a “@DJCOLLIDEascope.” It doesn’t take long to confirm that DJ COLLIDEascope is playing the Cosmopolitan’s nighttime pool party.
Looks like we’ve got plans.
“How do we get in?” Nate asks after I tell him. “Do we have to wait in line, or do…bottle service?” He lists both options like they’re words in a foreign language. He issonot a Vegas person. Nate barely tolerated the beach bars in Seapoint, hanging back against the wall with a beer while the rest of us zoomed around like out-of-control bumper cars. I don’t consider myself a Vegas person either, but I’ve been a couple times, once for a bachelorette party and once with—
“Caleb,” I say. “He’ll know.”
Nate shoots me a horrified look. “You don’t have to ask him. We’ll figure it out ourselves.”
I’m already typing out a request for help. Caleb owes me one, after everything. “It’s fine,” I say, but my voice is feeble. Our last text exchange is on my screen, from the afternoon before our breakup. The me who wrote these messages about lentil soup didn’t have a clue she was about to be blindsided.
Nate shakes his head, apparently skeptical. “It’s easier to get over someone if you cut off all communication.”
My stomach clenches. “Were you seeing someone?”
“Uh.” He blinks in surprise. “Not recently. Nothing serious.”
This is one topic we’ve never discussed. We were both single when we moved to L.A., and before that, I was never with anyone important enough to invite to Seapoint. Sometimes I heard bits and pieces about his relationship status from Bailey. Once, in our early twenties, she told me he was bringing someone to her birthday party, and my palms went clammy. But he came alone, and when Bailey asked about it, his eyes flicked to mine before he said, “Oh, yeah. We’re not hanging out anymore.”
To me, at least, it’s always felt like a loaded subject. As evidenced by the fact that I’m fighting an impulse to askhim to expand on every nuance of the phrase “nothing serious.”
