sporty little REI numbers with spaghetti straps and a built-in bra—and loose-fitting, wide-legged yoga pants that hung just low enough on her slender hips to reveal an inch of brown belly and a pierced navel. Flip-flops on her feet, sunglasses propped in her hair, a few fleamarket silver bracelets on her arm, a string of jade beads around her neck and a tiny diamond stud in her nose; those were the accessories that set off her features with the irritating minimalism of an all-natural hippie bombshell.
Her fashion choices are diametrically opposed to my own. She’s Zen simplicity, I’m Catholic excess. She’s flip-flops, I’m kitten heels. She’s hemp and organic cotton, I’m wool gabardine and cashmere. She’s green tea lip balm, I’m candy-apple-red lipstick.
I wish I could feel disdain for her aesthetic, but let’s face it: the look works for her. And then some.
The moment I laid eyes on her, I could feel the ugly tide of envy and insecurity poisoning my blood. She just stood there, beaming at me. She took a step toward me and before I knew what was happening, she had me wrapped up in a hug that smelled of some heady essential-oil mixture—maybe jasmine cut with ylang-ylang. When she pulled away, I could see her lips moving, but I couldn’t quite make out the words. I was in shock, I guess. Somehow I managed to mumble a generic response that I hoped would match her greeting in some vaguely logical way. She went back to beaming at me, so I guess I succeeded.
When she saw my luggage, her big, radiant, white-toothed smile died on her lips.
“You taking…all this?”
I nodded. “It is a wedding, right? I couldn’t very well go to a wedding without a hat or two.” I patted my hatbox affectionately.
“Well, it’s a…casual wedding,” she said, looking worried. “Are you sure you’ll need this many suitcases? Phil and Joni are pretty low-key. They live in the woods.”
“I brought casual, too. I like to be prepared for every circumstance.”
“Yeah,” she said, still eyeing my cases uneasily. “Right. Well, let’s just drag it all out to the car and see what we can do.”
You know how I’ve always wanted a convertible—obviously an enormous, gas-guzzling beast from the late ’50s? Of course, the fact that I can’t drive and have no desire to learn puts a slight damper on this yearning, but occasionally I peruse eBay’s classic car pages anyway, just for fun. Well, when I saw Dannika’s car, my heart, already dangerously close to failure, dropped two stories and bounced hard in the pit of my stomach. It was the most beautiful vehicle you could possibly imagine: a ’57 Mercury convertible, fire-engine red, totally cherry. Propped up in the backseat with its fins in the air was a slightly battered lemon-yellow surfboard. The whole tableau was achingly California, right down to the chrome hubcaps glittering in the sun like precious gems.
I should have been excited. Here I was, about to ride shotgun in the car of my dreams. In a matter of minutes we’d be heading up the coast to spend the weekend in a rugged seaside village, where I’d bond with my new beau and his incredibly hip, glamorous friends. Dannika’s car should have filled me with hope. I should have been thinking about how great my leopard-print car coat and oversized glasses were going to look peeking out of that Mercury with the top down.
But that’s not what was running through my brain. The single, white-hot, stomach-churning thought that was tearing through my consciousness was this: if you like the same car, you like the same guy.
Period.
Dannika had popped the trunk by now and was wrestling with my suitcases. Her shoulders were pure, sculpted muscle and they rippled as she heaved the largest case into the cavernous trunk. I could see no problem; the boot on that Mercury was so enormous, we could have fit five times as much luggage. All she’d brought besides the surfboard, as far as I could tell, was an old, weather-beaten backpack and a wet suit. Seeing all that room, I was tempted to run inside for my mink, since I know it can get chilly in Mendocino. But I could tell by the way Dannika was huffing that she wouldn’t appreciate an additional item added to the cargo.
“Wow,” she said, loading the medium suitcase. “What have you got in here? Cement?”
“Mostly toiletries.”
That’s when I remembered the trunk of shoes I’d left in the hallway.
“Oh, just one more thing,” I said, handing her the hat box. “I’ll be right back.” I was tempted to ask if she could get it, but I didn’t want to admit she was in better shape than me and I didn’t want her smile, which was already getting tight around the edges, to go completely rigid. I wished she’d picked Coop up first so he could load everything and smooth the tension with his warm, contagious laughter. Somehow, he’d find a way to spin it so he was the butt of the joke, not me.
I came back out with my trunk and, let me tell you, getting it to the sidewalk was no easy task. Guess I never realized just how heavy shoes can be. To my horror, I was starting to sweat by the time I finally made it back to the car.
When Dannika saw me standing there proudly with my trunk of shoes (which was, by the way, hardly any bigger than the mini-fridge we had in college, so what was the big deal?) she folded her arms across her chest and raised an eyebrow.
As you can imagine, that look filled me with a fresh surge of resentment. First, the cocked eyebrow is my signature look. No one can pull it off like me, as I’m sure you’ll agree. But beyond that, she was using it out of context, which is never acceptable. The raised eyebrow is a form of punctuation and to use it without due cause renders it as offensive and sloppy as a random comma or semicolon dropped into the middle of a perfectly good sentence. To think that my innocent little trunk of shoes caused a raised eyebrow was, simply put, insulting. Not to mention stupid.
“Everything okay?” I asked coolly.
She slammed the trunk shut with more force than was absolutely required and jutted her chin at my final piece of luggage. “Why don’t you just shove that in the backseat?”
“Oh, there’s room in the trunk, isn’t there?”
“Coop needs some space, too.”
I nodded. “Yeah, but he won’t bring much. You know boys—just a couple T-shirts and a toothbrush, I bet.”
“Unlike some people,” she said under her breath. “Anyway, it’s fine, just throw it in the backseat.”
I did, but not without tweaking a muscle between my shoulder blades as I tried to display how effortlessly I could haul it up off the sidewalk and into the convertible without even bothering to open the door. I don’t recommend it. The pain was unbearable and even now I can feel a dull, throbbing ache near my spine. Of course, my pride had more power than my chiropractic issues, so I slapped a smile on and settled into the passenger seat, reaching instinctively for my seat belt. There was nothing there.
“Oh, no seat belts in this baby,” she said, throwing the Mercury into gear and lurching away from the curb roughly. “Sorry ’bout that. I never wear them, anyway. Just feels too restrictive, you know what I mean?”
Marla, I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this, so please don’t think I’m weird, but I love seat belts. Death by highway is one of my more potent fears and the feel of that strap creating a band of resistance across my chest is, to me, delicious and comforting. I mean, statistically, the 405 is about a thousand times more likely to get us than cancer or terrorists or psycho killers. Most people are in denial about this,
