Page 626 of Deep Pockets

“Fine. I won’t say the word po–you know, P-O-R-N, if you promise to take Will’s job offer.”

“That’s the weakest blackmail attempt I’ve ever heard. I have the power here, Fiona. Not you.”

“But I have something more powerful.”

“What’s that?”

“Concern. I’m worried about you, Mal. We all are.”

“All?”

“Me. Perky. Your mom. Hastings is even concerned.” Hastings is my older sister. She lives in the Bay Area, where she works for a financial services tech start-up as director of business development and accumulates money the way I collect website hits on images of my humiliation.

You know. Gotta have a hobby.

“Hasty doesn’t give a crap about what’s happened to me. She’s the golden child and always has been. The only time Hasty thinks about me is when she’s looking at pictures from our childhood and an unexpected wind makes my hair cover her perfect face in a photo on Cape Cod from 2003,” I remind her.

“Your parents don’t have a golden child. You’re both golden. You know you hit the jackpot in the wonderful-parents lottery.”

“I did,” I admit. “But don’t try to claim Hasty cares. That’s overplaying your hand.”

We eat in silence for a moment.

“Why won’t you work for Will?” Fi finally asks softly, serious and concerned.

I assemble another bite and chomp down. Suddenly, Taco Heaven has turned into the second half of Law & Order, complete with an interrogation that tastes like cilantro and 2008.

A very unsatisfactory bite gets swallowed. I look her right in the eye and blurt out the truth.

“If I work for him, I’ll fall for him again. I can’t do that to myself.”

“Mal,” she says in a compassionate voice. “You’re ten years older. So is he. You’ve moved on.”

“He never had anything to move on from. All those years. Lockers next to each other. A handful of conversations. Decoding his every look and move like I was a Navajo code talker. He had no idea. It’s–it’s humiliating. Maybe even more than the porn pics.”

“That’s… a lot of humiliation.”

“See? That’s why I don’t want to work for him.”

Fiona wipes her mouth, balls up the napkin, and pushes it inside the guac container, eyeing me. “I think you need to do it.”

“Need to humiliate myself?”

“No. You need to get over him. For good. It’s like scary horror films.”

“My crush on Will is as bad as that?”

“Your resistance to taking a job that you desperately need just because you’re afraid you’ll revert to your high school self kind of is. Not the horror movie itself, but do you remember when I saw The Ring when I was thirteen, and it scared the hell out of me?”

“Sure. You were whacked.”

“Right. And remember what Dale did?” Dale is one of Fiona’s older brothers. We all crushed on him when we were in eighth grade and he was a senior. And by we, I mean me, Perky, and every other junior high girl (and probably a few guys) aside from Fiona.

“Dale made you watch it five or six times, right? Over and over.”

“Yes. Five. He said it would desensitize me to the fear.”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

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