Psychic Junkie Read Free Page B

limited space, so I was very limited with furniture, and hence my bed served as just about everything: couch, chairs, coffee table, dining room table, et cetera. This tended to make dates difficult, as at the end of the evening my inviting a guy inside was the same as saying, “Please, welcome to my bed.”
    “I deserved it,” I told Gina. “I should’ve known.”
    “Don’t beat yourself up. We all get delusional. Actors look good. That’s their job. They’re like pretty shiny toys—they’re hard to resist.”
    “You make us sound so bad. Remember, I’m an actor too.”
    “I know. And you couldn’t pay me to date you, either.”
    “Thanks.”
    “No problem. Oh,” she said as she lit a cigarette, “and I told you so.”
    Ah, there it was. I smiled. “Did you? I don’t remember. Maybe that was the same day I told you not to take that job you know is going nowhere.”
    “Huh. Could’ve been.”
    I sniffled. “I hate Baywatch .”
    “ Baywatch sucks. And Candy—”
    “Cindy.”
    “Sorry, Cindy, whatever; she looks like a Candy. Fake boobs. And bad fake boobs. They’re like shelves, they—”
    “I hate fake boobs.”
    “I know you do. We all do.”
    “Tom doesn’t.”
    Gina took a deep drag of her cigarette, her words smoky. “Tom sucks.”
    It was another night of reveling in our misery. I’d stopped crying and was now looking out my dark window at pretty much nothing. One solitary tear skittered down my cheek and rested on my lower lip. It dangled there, but I made no move to brush it away, as somewhere in my grief I was still a twisted actress aware that the combination of my pained silence and puffy eyes and that one single tear must have been heart-breakingly beautiful. So impressed was I with the vision I’d created of myself that I actually forgot about Tom long enough to wish Gina had a camera.
    “It’s seriously for the best,” she continued. “Think ‘normal person.’ Wouldn’t it be nice to be with someone responsible? Someone with a savings account? With a 401(k) ? That accountant I dated—granted he was a tad boringish, but shit—he had a 401(k). A 401(k). I don’t even know what those are really, something to do with retirement, but I know normal people have them. God, what would it be like to retire? I wanna retire.”
    Recently Gina had been promoted to manager at a clothing store she’d worked at during college, a job that had been fine during her student years but was now a reminder that she’d amassed tons of student loan debt to graduate and fold sweaters. Ever since then, she’d been obsessed with the idea of fleeing the country, running off to some place where people didn’t use the phrase “career path”—a place where her high school newsletters, with their maddening updates on all her successful past friends, would never find her. Her dream, as she called it, was to move to Europe, live on an Alp, and make cheese. She really loved cheese—and I don’t mean that she just loved eating it; she actually loved looking at it. How weird is that?
    “You know,” she continued, “that water stain on your ceiling is pretty bad. You should tell your fat landlord about that.”
    With the mention of my fat landlord the tears were no longer silently beautiful but full-force heaving ugly. I wasn’t crying because I didn’t have Tom; I was crying because I had no one. Again. Once more I’d be reduced to eating frozen dinners. (The only thing more depressing than cooking for just yourself is sitting down, alone, to eat the meal—so why fight it? Frozen meals are the answer. They say, “I’m single but still deserve a meal!”) Once more I’d be doomed to sleep and wake in a bed that was just too tragically big. Saturday nights would again involve Gina and parties that always slightly horrified us, or evenings in sweatpants watching Grease for the hundredth time and eating blocks and blocks of Brie. (Some girls binge on ice cream. I binge on Brie. It’s the