Mike, Mike & Me Read Free Page A

neon-blue spandex bicycle shorts she was wearing with an oversize neon-orange T-shirt, but I was at a loss. Spandex wasn’t the most flattering trend if you weren’t built like a pencil. Which, fortunately, I was. And which, unfortunately, Valerie wasn’t.
    “My toes are never going to dry with this humidity. Wouldn’t you kill for a window air conditioner?” Valerie asked, still waving her legs around in the air.
    “Maybe we can scrape up enough money to buy one.”
    “Yeah, right.” She snorted.
    So did I. Naturally, we were both broke. She made eight bucks an hour as an office temp and had yet to land a full-time job with benefits. I had the full-time job and the benefits, but I made a mere seventeen thousand dollars a year. Back in my small hometown, that would have been a fortune. Here, it barely covered the absolutely vital three Cs in every girl’s life: cocktails, cigarettes and chimichangas. At least, those were the things that were vital in mine.
    “I suppose you want me to clear out of here tonight,” Valerie said, getting off her bed to join me in the mirror, wielding a tall pink and black can of Aqua Net. She sprayed her towering blond hair liberally, then offered me the can.
    I misted my head and handed it back. “Is that all that’s left? Didn’t you just buy that yesterday?”
    She shrugged. “I’ll pick up more during lunch hour tomorrow.”
    Ugh. Between the hair spray and the sweat, everything north of my neck felt sticky. I stripped off the black dress and stepped back into my own bike shorts—neon pink, with fluorescent green stripes up the thighs—and oversize neon-green T-shirt, which I knotted over my left hip.
    “So, like, do you want me to see if I can sleep at Gordy’s tomorrow night?” Valerie asked, taking a cigarette from the open pale green box of Salem Slim Lights on her dresser and offering the pack to me.
    Gordy had been our friend since the three of us met at college upstate freshman year. He moved to New York after graduation, same as we did. He was the ultimate cliché: an aspiring actor/waiter who came out of the closet only after his staunchly Roman Catholic parents finished putting him through college. They promptly disowned him, leaving me and Valerie as his only “family.” He had a studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, a scary neighborhood we ventured into only in pairs, and only in broad daylight.
    “You don’t have to stay there,” I said around the cigarette in my mouth as I held a lighter to it. I took a deep drag, then told Valerie, “I mean, it’s a work night and everything.”
    Naturally, I was hoping she would protest.
    She did. Sort of. “Well, don’t you want to be alone with Mike on his first night here?”
    “Yeah, I do, but…”
    I waited for her to say that it was no problem; that she was absolutely going to Gordy’s. She didn’t say it. She just blew a smoke ring and shrugged.
    Dammit.
    Don’t get me wrong. Valerie was a great roommate. She didn’t snore, she washed her own dishes, she ogled Officer Tom Hanson aka Johnny Depp on 21 Jump Street with me religiously every Sunday night.
    But she didn’t have much of a social life, which meant that unless she was at work—currently a temp job at a textbook publishing house—she was pretty much always home.
    That wasn’t a problem when my boyfriend wasn’t coming to visit me for the first time since he’d finished grad school in Los Angeles in May.
    Mike, who now had a master’s degree in computer science, had set up a bunch of interviews in Manhattan. I was praying he’d land a job and move back East, because I was starting to realize that the alternative was me giving up my dream job as a production assistant on a television talk show and moving out West. I had been born and bred in New York State, and I had no desire to move to southern California.
    I sensed that Mike was going to try to convince me that I should, though. He was from Long Island, but he had fallen in love with