What A Girl Wants (19 page)

Ten minutes later, Hayley was crawling around on the carpet in her cube, hammer in hand, her skirt hiked up to her thighs.

If she moved too far away from the phone, the headset yanked out of its socket and disconnected the call. But without full extension, it was hard to align the wood properly and still handle the receptionist duties.

Hayley had nothing against the great outdoors, but there was a reason she never had the urge to date a mountain man. As it stood, she was developing severe rug burn, two nails on her right hand were broken, and her arm ached from holding the hammer for so long.

At ten o'clock that evening, she declared the construction work finished. All of the supplied pieces of wood were connected in some way, which was good. Of course, the result more closely resembled sculpture than office furniture, which wasn't so good.

In fact, it was only after Hayley had taken her computer equipment off the chair and arranged it on her new desk that she realized there was a problem. She'd built the desk with a pretty severe southward lean that caused her laptop to slide toward the edge.

Finally she realized she'd have to place a couple extra nails sticking up halfway at the front edge of her computer to keep the equipment from falling off.

Driving in the last nail, Hayley missed and banged her thumb.

It seemed like things couldn't get any worse. But then again, it was only Wednesday.

“T
his is the nadir of my life.” Hayley stared at her giant bandaged thumb. She didn't really need a bandage by now, but she was so low she'd do just about anything at this point to get a little sympathy.

“Isn't ‘nadir' a little extreme?” Audra asked.

“It's meant to be extreme. It means the lowest point,” Suz snapped. “Right, Diane?”

Diane didn't answer. She was desperately trying to flag down a waiter with her empty water glass.

Audra turned to Suz. “I know what ‘nadir' means! Don't patronize me.”

Diane scored her water and chugged it.

Hayley looked at Diane. “I guess you're wondering what happened.”

Suz interrupted. “I'm not in the mood for this. My life is starting to suck, too.”

“We're working on Hayley.” Audra sniffed disdainfully.

“We're always working on Hayley!”

Diane slammed her fist down on the table. “Will someone please give me their glass of water?” She looked a little surprised by her own outburst.

Hayley handed hers over and looked around the table pointedly. “I took the job.”

“Yeah, we know that,” Suz said in a throwaway voice.

“It's a nightmare,” Hayley insisted.

The four of them just sat there blinking at each other.

Hayley started to panic a little. “You don't understand. I had to make my own desk! Do you understand that? Look at my hands. And look at this.” She lifted her skirt and stuck her leg out. “Look!”

“Why are you wearing stilettos at ten o'clock on Sunday morning?” Suz asked.

“She needs the extra confidence,” Audra said. “I just wear them because they make my legs look incredible.”

“No, my
knees
! Look at my knees. It's what they call teamwork. How fucked-up is that? I'm by myself getting rug burns and splinters and they call that teamwork. Audra, you're right. My people suck. And that's not all.” Hayley paused dramatically. “There's Grant. Or should I say, there
isn't
Grant.”

“Uh-oh,” Suz said.

“Oh, no,” Diane said grimly.

“Oh, yes. It's all gone to hell. The Grant thing imploded. I'm in the abyss. He never called.”

They probably had all figured it out by the time she'd actually said it, but a shock wave went through them nonetheless.

“He never called,” Diane said to Audra.

Suz leaned forward.

“He never called,” Diane and Audra chorused to Suz. Hayley winced.

“He never called,” Suz repeated incredulously, staring at her fork. “What a dick.”

Audra shook her head and looked up at Hayley in disbelief. “He
never
called?”

Hayley scrubbed at her head with her hands until her hair stood on end. Scowling, she admitted, “No, he never called. Um, I think we've established that fact now. Maybe we could move on to the solution phase.” To no one in particular, she repeated, “This is a nightmare.”

Audra looked at Suz. “I thought you were giving her relationship advice. What happened?”

“Her advice sucks,” Hayley muttered, thinking she'd done so under her breath.

“Hey, what the
hell
? My advice would work just fine for ninety-nine-point-nine percent of America's women.” Suz turned back to Audra. “Hayley is just an oddity, okay? It's not my fault. She's an exception to the American norm.”

“Maybe I should move to Sweden,” Hayley said. “Maybe they'll accept me there. Maybe Swedish men aren't complete jerks.”

“I slept with a Swede, once. He had the oddest—”

“Stop right there.” Diane put her hand over Suz's mouth. “We don't want to hear about
you
or
penises
or you
and
penises right now. You got that?”

Suz fought back and pushed Diane right off her chair when she couldn't dislodge her friend's hand.

Diane grabbed Suz behind the neck with her other hand and took her with her to the floor. The two started to grapple, half under the table, half in the aisle.

Hayley gawked at them and put her head in her hands. “Please, God, stop the pain.”

“Stop it!” Audra screamed, poking at Diane and Suz with her shoes. “This is gross embarrassment. . . and you have no idea where that floor has been!”

Both Suz and Diane stopped fighting immediately and said, “What?” in unison.

“Get off the floor. Right. Now.” Audra lifted her heel and poised her stiletto right up near Suz's eye. “Get up now, or one of you is going to lose an eye.”

Suz pressed her palm over the edge of Diane's sweatshirt cuff, so all Diane could do was lean back out of range.

“Yeah, Suz, let go of me,” Diane warned. “It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye.”

“Ha-ha. Then it's just fun you can't see,” Suz retorted, her eyes narrowed.

It appeared to be a standoff until Diane played her trump card. “I think I'm going to throw up,” she said weakly.

Suz got up immediately. She and Diane took their seats and Diane, who actually looked substantially green, grabbed Suz's water and proceeded to down it in one continuous swallow.

Hayley looked at her friends through her splayed fingers. “This is Armageddon.”

“Oh, stop being so dramatic, Hay. We'll get you out of this,” Audra said.

“You got me into this,” she mumbled, but was duly ignored. Then louder, “I refuse to take responsibility for my own actions!”

“What is she ranting about now?” Suz asked.

“I have no idea,” Audra said.

“Would you all please stop yelling!” Diane yelled. “I've got a serious hangover. You're all making me sick.”

Hayley shook her head. “It's like I prop up the one side and the other side flops over.”

“What the hell are you talking about? What's propping and what's flopping?” Suz was clearly at the end of her patience.

“I'm a Mr. Bean video. A bad slapstick comedy.” Hayley picked up her coffee mug and continued. “I might as well just dump my latte on my head, pull a fake string of snot out my ear, and learn to live with it! This is catastrophe.”

“Did she just say the S-word?” Audra asked. “Uch, that's so icky.”

“The S-word? Snot? I'm describing the end of the universe and you're objecting to the use of the word ‘snot'? Where are your priorities?”

“My God,” Audra said, now apparently quite alarmed. “Diane, don't you have any sedatives in your backpack?”

“Why does everyone assume I have drugs? You're the one with the therapist. It's vaguely insulting!”

“
You're
vaguely insulting!” Audra grabbed Diane's purse and rifled through it, pouncing on a bottle of pills that she ripped from a brown paper bag and held up with a triumphant shriek. “Ha! Uppers or downers? Which is it, Diane?”

“You don't even know the difference!” Furious, Diane grabbed Audra's wrist and slammed her arm to the table. “It's folic acid, you idiot.”

“Oh, my God, you're taking acid? Well, I guess that explains your belligerent behavior this morning. I don't think we should give Hayley any.”

“Folic! Folic!”

“Stop swearing at me!”

“Oh, my God, this is not happening.” Suz stared at Audra and Diane in disbelief. “Audra,
folic acid
. Women of childbearing age are supposed to take it. How can you not know this?”

“Maybe because I have no interest in childbearing at the moment.” Audra rubbed her wrist, most likely exaggerating the amount of pain she was actually feeling. Then she pointed at Diane. “And she's not even having sex. What are you expecting, Di, some sort of immaculate conception?”

Diane snarled. “If you weren't one of my best friends I'd tell you to go to hell.”

Audra gaped at Diane in disbelief.

“What are you all getting so upset about?” Hayley looked wildly among her friends. “I'm the one with the problem here! It's my problem! I need help! Somebody help me! Help!”

A silence fell over the diner.

“She's fallen and she can't get up,” Audra said snidely.

Hayley considered that.
My God, what an apt metaphor
. She was the proverbial old lady with the walker lying on the carpet. She heard an odd, high-pitched, panicky sound come out of her mouth.

“Mind your own business,” Suz snapped over her shoulder. The other diner customers instantly swiveled their heads back around to their own tables.

Suz turned back to Hayley. “Pull yourself together! You broke the dry spell. You had sex. You apparently had great sex. Isn't that something to be happy about?”

“I'm doomed.”

“Nobody said personal change was easy,” Suz noted. “I don't know. Maybe we should write to Oprah and get Hayley one of those Life Makeovers. Let's face it. We're mere amateurs. I think
it's clear to all of us Hayley needs a professional. A
really good
professional.”

“Oprah depresses me,” Diane said. “The only books she ever likes are about downtrodden people with horrible childhoods. And the fact that their current lives are incrementally less horrible than they were before is supposed to be uplifting in some way.”

“You're in an unusually foul mood this morning,” Suz said.

Diane ignored the comment. She must have been keeping her feelings about Oprah inside for a long time. “She's an angst peddler. We have plenty of angst of our own. Do we need to supplement it with other people's angst? Between the three of us plus this month's Doomsday Hayley special, there's more than enough angst to go around. . . .”

“Doomsday Hayley?” Hayley didn't like the sound of that.

Diane's voice was getting hoarse, so she started talking louder to compensate. “But the American public just follows Oprah's lead anyway, becoming collectively more and more depressed as a society while spending significant portions of their paychecks purchasing what Oprah tells them is good for them to read so that when they talk about the books to each other in their book clubs, they can pretend they're deep and literary individuals. . . .”

Hayley started to get alarmed. Diane was flushed bright red now and looked a little glazed. Still talking, she started to stand up, but Audra reached over and pushed her back down.

Suz started to hum the national anthem in the background.

“Secretly they hate these stories, but they read them anyway and bring them to their book club meetings, sitting on living room floors across the nation, getting fatter and fatter eating homemade cookies while they disappear to the bathroom in pairs to swap
prescriptions for antidepressants when they think the rest of the group members—whom they mistake for deep, literary individuals—aren't looking.”

Diane was breathing heavily now, the air whistling audibly through her raspy throat. “Oprah does not understand my problems. She doesn't understand Hayley's problems or Suz's problems or Audra's problems.”

There was a long, long pause; then Suz snorted. “Somebody woke up on the wrong side of bed this morning.”

“I woke up on the floor of the bathroom wearing just a bath mat, actually.” Diane swallowed, then winced and grabbed Audra's water.

Hayley watched her drink it down and said, “I don't think Oprah's even doing the book club anymore. She's doing classics now, so you're safe.”

“That doesn't make her safe. I thought all the classics were depressing. Or at least angry. Isn't that a requirement, or something?” Suz asked.

Audra waggled her index finger at Diane and said, “You're missing the point. You just don't understand Oprah's gestalt. The more depressing someone else's life is, the better you feel about your own.”

“That's pathetic,” Hayley said. Of course, pathetic was relative. She should know.

Audra sniffed disdainfully. “Just because you don't understand something or personally enjoy it doesn't mean it's stupid. I love Oprah books. And Oprah would love Hayley. I bet she'd devote two entire episodes to her.”

“Oprah would hate me,” Hayley said.

“She'd love you,” Suz said. “There's so much to work with.”

“I gave her a session with one of my therapists,” Audra grumbled.

“Great idea,” Suz said. “They've been so successful with you.”

“You're being such a bitch,” Audra snapped. “Sometimes you make me hate you.”

“I don't make you do anything.”

Audra and Suz were clearly busy, so Hayley turned to Diane. “What am I going to do?”

Diane lifted bleary eyes. “You need to look at the bright side,” she said in monotone.