Love and Lists

I look up after a few minutes when she hasn’t answered me and see her standing there pressing buttons on her iPad, concentrating furiously.

“Ava, did you hear me?”

She sighs in annoyance but still doesn’t look up from the screen. “Yes, I heard you. Book the fifteenth floor and make notes about massages.”

Ava is the worst assistant on the face of the earth. And I can’t even say she means well because she doesn’t. She couldn’t care less about this job.

“Ava, you have an iPad in your hand for notes. Did you even type anything I said?” I ask her in annoyance.

I don’t have time for this crap. I have a ton of work to do and an illness to fake before seven o’clock tonight.

“Oh my GOD this is so hard. I just can’t do this,” Ava whines and stomps her foot just like her sister. Except when Charlotte does it, I don’t want to hurl myself across my desk and strangle her.

“It’s okay, I know it’s a lot to take in at once. Just take good notes and you’ll be fine,” I reassure her.

“Uuuughhhh! I don’t understand how anyone passes level thirty-five of Candy Crush,” she complains, still tapping away at her iPad.

I don’t even bother replying to her. I just lean forward and bang my head against the top of my desk.

I’m still banging it a few minutes later when my phone starts ringing. After five rings, I lift my head and stare at Ava.

“Are you going to answer that phone or what?” she asks in annoyance.

I will not strangle her. I will not strangle her.

“Creative Development, this is Gavin,” I say into the phone as Ava turns and walks out of my office without ever looking up from her iPad.

“You sound like a douche bag. Don’t answer the phone like that,” Tyler tells me.

“Shut up. What do you want?”

“Seriously, you should answer it ‘Dicks for Chicks, how can I help you?’”

I ignore Tyler’s suggestion and quickly close out my email when I see a customer comment about how “Claire can be taken up the ass.”

“I’m bringing your girlfriend to the bar at six-thirty. We’ll meet you in the parking lot so make sure you wear something pretty,” he tells me.

“Actually, I think I’m coming down with something. I’m not feeling so hot.”

I cough a few times into the phone to make it sound real.

“Suck it, dick nose. You’re going tonight,” Tyler states.

He doesn’t even give me a chance to plead my case before he hangs up on me and I hear the dial tone in my ear.

“Son of a bitch,” I mutter as I put the receiver back.

“Hey, Gavin, you want some coffee?” Ava yells from her desk right outside my door.

All right, maybe I’ve been too hard on her. I start to feel a little bad about getting irritated a few minutes ago. I’m nervous and frustrated about tonight. And what the hell am I supposed to do with a fake girlfriend? I’m probably taking it out on Ava just a little bit.

“Coffee sounds great,” I yell back to her as I pull up my search engine and type in twenty-four-hour illnesses that aren’t contagious or make people think you’re a leper.

“Awesome. Can you get me a Venti nonfat double shot espresso while you’re out?” Ava replies.

Abandoning my Google search, I smack my head against top of my desk and pray to God that tonight is better than today.

“I cannot BELIEVE you set me up with her. Of all the women in all the world, you had to pick her.”

I’m standing in the parking lot of Wolfey’s, the bar we all frequent when we have something to celebrate. I had pulled in at the same time as Tyler and my “girlfriend” and watched in horror as she stepped out of his mom’s car that he borrowed for the evening.

Right now she’s checking out her reflection in my passenger side window while I rip into Tyler.

“Dude, do you have any idea how hard it was to find a chick willing to pretend to be your girlfriend for the evening? This was the best I could do on short notice. What’s wrong with her? She’s hot,” Tyler says as we both look over the hood of the car to find her staring at us.

“What’s wrong with her is that I used to date her. And she’s psychotic. Plus, my mom hates her. If she finds out I spent a night with her, even if it’s pretend, she is going to lose her shit.”

The her in question is Brooklyn Daniels. We went to school together from kindergarten through high school, and I dated her for exactly two weeks in eleventh grade. By day three I had met everyone in her family, including an aunt and uncle who flew in from Turks and Caicos just to meet me. By day ten she’d given me three photo albums filled with pictures of herself. No, not her and I together, just her. Pictures that to this day still burn my retinas when I think about them. Where was I? Oh, yes. By day eleven she’d tattooed my initials on her lower back, by day twelve she’d given me a wedding scrapbook filled with bridal magazine clippings of what she wanted our wedding to look like, and by day fourteen she’d suggested that we go to couple’s counseling because she thought I didn’t value her. By day sixty-eight she was history.

Yes, we only dated for two weeks, but it took fifty-two days after that for her to get the memo. Brooklyn Daniels is a stage five clinger. I almost had to move to get her to leave me alone. The only thing that worked was having my mom show up at her job at the local ice cream shop where she told Brooklyn that if she didn’t leave me alone, she’d shove so many sugar cones up her ass that she’d be burping up chocolate and vanilla twist for the rest of her life.