look for the girl with the broken smile

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 02:20:06 GMT

“Four years ago I was just a guy who had a crush on a girl who had a boyfriend. And I had to do the hardest thing I ever had to do, which was just to wait. Don’t get me wrong I flirted with her. Pam, I can now admit in front of friends and family that I do know how to make a photocopy. I didn’t need your help that many times. And do you remember how long it took you to teach me to drive stick? (Pam: Like a year). I’ve been driving stick since high school. For a really long time that’s all I had. Little moments with a girl who saw me as a friend. And a lot of people told me I was crazy to wait this long for a date with a girl who I worked with, but I think, even then I knew, I was waiting for my wife.”

You said it Jim.
Jim & Pam Halpert <3 October 8, 2009 --> my role models in love and life

Sun, 17 May 2009 23:56:26 GMT

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

I was born with a full head of hair, thanks to my Italian father’s side of the family. Every one of his seven older sisters had what could only be described as horse’s hair and I was cursed and blessed to inherit it. Before I was even one year old, my mother was able to work my curls into an elaborate bouffant that wasn’t suitable for any baby. But it was the 1970s, after all. Need I say more? My mother grew away from that bouffant as my hair grew longer. She decided that braids were a hairstyle with more staying power.

Every school picture until the 7th grade displayed the two thick braids that I wore on either side of my head every day. In my 1st grade school picture the braids were looped back up to my head, loosely fashioned in what could only be considered a Princess Leia sort of way. That was a popular hairstyle for me that year. It made many appearances at church and family functions that required dressing up. Since I was six years old, I didn’t realize the potential this hairstyle had for ridicule, but thankfully it was retired by the time I reached the 2nd grade. After that, it was strictly the two long braids, and every once in a while one single braid that ran down the length of my back. Each morning was a battle as my mother worked the brush through my tangled curls to make those braids.

By the time I was 12 years old, my preteen self felt I was too old to wear such childish things as braids. And that’s when I discovered that my hair wasn’t like any of my friends’. While Tiffni, Heather and Kellie all used Aqua Net hairspray to help their teased out bangs reach new heights, I was fighting a losing battle for my own newly acquired bangs not to curl the wrong way. My hair clearly had a mind of its own and countless tubs of Dippity Do hair gel weren’t going to change that.

By high school, my inability to manage my hair or maintain an acceptable hairstyle earned myself the status of a social pariah. As Jennifer, Amanda and all of their friends were modeling their short, shiny bob haircuts in the hallways, I was left standing by my locker, just trying to make my own sad attempt at a bob lay flat, all the while wishing I could shave all of my hair off. I acquired nicknames like “Fro Girl”, “Mushroom Head”, and probably the most memorable for me, “Peppermint Patty”. After all of these years, that is the nickname that, while I still don’t understand why it was given to me, I remember exactly when I got it.

I was in the 9th grade and as a new freshman; I was already feeling insecure about so much more than my hair. The school was bigger, the kids were cooler, and I was just wondering how I was going to survive, let alone fit in.

I was walking across campus with my friends, Diana and Delena, when we had to walk through a group of upperclassmen. Usually this wasn’t an issue. We knew our place as freshmen and as long as we kept to ourselves, no one bothered us. Unfortunately, a rather bullish senior named Pat was in this group of upperclassmen and apparently he was feeling a little puckish that day.

While up until then, I’d never had to deal with Pat, I knew of him. He was loud, he was a weight lifter, he wore a bandana over what I still believe was a bald head, and it was rumored that he was on steroids. He was a bully in every sense of the word. You were better off just keeping out of his line of vision, but my helmet of frizzy hair must have been a beacon of light for him because at that moment, he set his sights on me.

When he walked into our path, it was like he was a giant, looming over us, when in all actuality he was probably only 5’5”.

“Where do you think you’re going Peppermint Patty?” he demanded with his hands on his hips. I realized then that he was looking directly at me and not at my friends. It dawned on me that this muscle bound creep was calling me a very unfeminine “Peanuts” character and I had no idea why. The only reason I could think of was because of my hair. At that stage in my life, anything wrong that happened to me was because of my hair.

I never answered his question and simply turned around and walked in the same direction I had come from, determined to find an alternate route rather than be subjected to more abuse. But I could still hear his voice as I walked away, chanting my new nickname, over and over.

Through the rest of my high school years I developed a deep hatred for that “Peanuts” character and would ridicule her any chance that I could. I believed that if she hadn’t had the same hairstyle as me, maybe Pat would’ve left me alone. Maybe I would’ve been spared that taunting nickname. But in the years after high school, I overcame my vendetta against a girl who might have had the same hair misfortune that I had suffered from. And maybe Charles Schultz just didn’t know how to deal with her hair, either.

After high school, thanks to various fashion and beauty sources, I made some incredible discoveries. Always believing that I was destined to forever have hair that rivaled “Saturday Night Live’s” Rosanne Roseannadanna, it came as a complete shock to me when I read in a fashion magazine that I was in fact not supposed to comb or brush my hair when it was dry because that’s what made it frizz.

“A diffuser? What the heck is a diffuser?” I asked as I watched an old rerun of “Who’s The Boss?” where Alyssa Milano’s character was extolling the virtues of hers as she modeled her own curly hair. After buying my own diffuser attachment for my blow dryer, I realized that I too could look like “Felicity’s” Keri Russell, and I didn’t look half bad. I still hated the unmanageability of those curls, but at least I finally knew how to deal with them.

Then the news came. “You have cancer,” my doctor told me as I stared at the X-rays of my humerus without blinking. I was 21 years old and there was a tumor growing in my freaking funny bone. I heard the words, “surgery,” “bone graft,” “transplant,” and finally “chemotherapy.” Chemotherapy? Underneath the fear of the journey I was about to take, there was a sort of sick pleasure at the thought of losing all of my hair. This was it. It was what I had been waiting for. It was my chance to start over.

I remember the day I decided it was time to shave it all off. It was May in the desolate Texas panhandle and my cosmetologist friend, Tanya and I were eating ice cream at our local Braum’s fast food restaurant because summer was starting and it was the only way to beat the heat. A few weeks earlier, she had already cut my unruly and multicolored mop in a cute boy cut in anticipation of my future hairlessness so I could start to ease into what lay ahead for me and my locks. Never having my hair that short, except for at birth, I had been apprehensive about the cut at first.

“I’m going to look like a boy!” I moaned, clearly thinking about the various boys I was casually dating at the time and how they would react to my loss of femininity.

“No you won’t, you goof,” Tanya reassured me, “It’s going to be really cute.”

And as much as I didn’t want to admit to it, she was right. The shorter my hair got, the curlier it got, and the closer to my roots, the more of my many dye jobs became noticeable. By the time Tanya was finished, I was a disheveled pixie punk with a head full of blondes and blacks and reds. And I was definitely cute.

A few weeks later, we sat at the crowded Braum’s and the unusual shortness of my hair helped keep me cool against those warm temperatures. I ignored the stares of the small-minded townspeople that didn’t quite approve of the girl with the weird haircut and crazy colors. Little did I know that the same day I would be receiving a haircut that would give me even more air conditioning and stares.

My scalp had been itching uncontrollably for the past few days and even though I was a month into my chemotherapy treatments, I didn’t think that the itch could be a precursor for what was to come. I didn’t know what dying hair follicles felt like. I was a newbie to this whole “cancer thing.” Sometimes I wish I could go back to being that young woman who, in the early stages of her treatment, hadn’t really come to terms with how real this whole thing had become.

I gave my head a good scratch right before I stood up from the table to throw the contents of my tray away when a lock of my hair fell onto the floor. Tanya and I both looked down at it in shock. I had expected my hair to fall out, obviously, but for some reason I thought it would just magically end up on my pillow while I was sleeping. I didn’t think it would randomly fall out wherever I was!

“Um, what the hell?” Tanya whispered, as she stared down at the floor with wide eyes.

“I think,” I began slowly, “My hair just fell out.” I sat back down and continued to stare at it.

“Did you know this was going to happen?” Tanya asked, the surprise still evident in her voice.

“Do you think I would’ve been scratching all of this time if I had known it would make my damn hair fall out?” I frantically whispered back to her, trying not to draw attention to our corner of the restaurant. The last thing I needed was someone I knew witnessing what was going on and the gossip beginning.

“What are you going to do?” Tanya asked, as it became evident that we couldn’t sit there all day, staring at my hair on the floor.

So I did the only thing I could think to do. I reached down and picked up that lone lock of hair and put it on my tray to throw in the garbage bin.

“We have to shave it off,” I told Tanya as we walked out of Braum’s and headed to her car, “I can’t have pieces of my hair just randomly fall out of my head whenever it wants to.” And it was in that moment that I realized that maybe I didn’t want to lose my hair after all. But it was inevitable now.

As we drove to my apartment so Tanya could give me my final haircut for a very long time, I realized that all of that talk I did over the years about shaving my head was exactly that. Just talk. When the opportunity finally presented itself and it wasn’t voluntary, I suddenly wasn’t so adamant about going bald anymore. When I had no other choice, the choice I wanted wasn’t available to me.

I brought the chair into the tiny bathroom of my one bedroom apartment, and I sat down without turning the lights on. There was enough sunlight coming through my bedroom window that we could still see. Besides, this was a funeral. Who has fluorescent lights blazing at a funeral?

“You don’t want to face the mirror?” Tanya asked when she noticed I was sitting with my back to it.

I didn’t answer her question. Instead I clutched the towel around my shoulders and closed my eyes.

“Let’s just get this over with,” I said behind clenched teeth, trying not to reveal any of the fear that was brewing inside of me. It had finally set in that I was going to be bald and I was having a hard time keeping my cool. I remember thinking that I was being punished for the often wild lifestyle I was leading. Or, now that I had finally come to enjoy my life, it was being taken away like some cruel joke because I was never allowed to actually be happy. I remember so many thoughts that were running through my head, but the one thought that was the loudest was that I was going to be bald.

I heard the buzz of Tanya’s hair clippers cut through the silence and suddenly they were the loudest thing I had ever heard. I jumped a little when I felt the vibrating blades make their first pass over my head, easily dislodging the hair from my scalp since it was already dead at the roots. I could feel strands land on my nose and cheeks as she tried to work quickly.

Before I knew it, the buzzing had stopped and the towel she was using to clean my head felt strangely too close to my scalp. I finally opened my eyes and the look on her face read somewhere between pity and fake positivity.

“I think you look really cool,” she said, trying to keep her voice upbeat, “Edgy, even.”

Getting up, I slowly turned around to meet my new reflection. Even in the half-darkness of that tiny bathroom, I could make out everything perfectly. I could see the patches of dark brown stubble that were still caught in the roots. They would eventually fall out, too. I could see exactly how my head was shaped. At the time, I didn’t give much importance to the fact that it was perfectly round and without dents. Looking back on a year without hair, I’m thankful for that little gift.

What I mainly saw was a bald stranger staring back at me. And the terrified look in her wide eyes mirrored the panic I was feeling. Up until that point, the severity of my situation hadn’t really sunk in. I was still working. I was still having a good time with my friends. I was still acting like everything was normal. Not until I was staring at my pale, hairless head did I realize that my life was changing for the worse.

I started to cry then. I cried for the first time since I’d been diagnosed. I cried for my ill-health. I cried for the loss of my normal life. But mainly, I cried for the death of that frizzy mop that I had despised for so many years. Right in that moment, I would have taken it back in any way I could’ve had it.

I look back on that year spent under hats, scarves, and itchy wigs and I realize that the girl who had wished to shave her head out of frustration with her hair was naïve and misguided. When I was in the hospital for a treatment and someone mistakenly thought my bald head meant I was a boy, I would’ve given anything for that boy haircut Tanya had given me. When the menopausal hot flashes brought on by chemotherapy caused me to stick my head in the freezer in the middle of winter, I longed for the puffball of frizz that had driven me insane during the summers.

When chemotherapy was over and I was finally in remission, that first feeling of stubble popped up on my scalp a month later and it was enough to make me weep for joy. I celebrated my 23rd birthday with hair. Not enough hair to be seen without a hat, but hair, nonetheless. As it kept growing and those unruly curls started to resurface, thicker this time, I welcomed them back in appreciation, even if I did look like a brunette Justine Timberlake.

Ten years later, there are days that I still curse my hair when it is particularly humid outside and it grows to be twice its normal size. When my hair product bill rivals that of my grocery bill, I don’t get angry. I accept it and am grateful that I have hair to style. When having it straightened for the rare special occasion means spending an arm and a leg at a salon and sitting in a chair for 2 hours, I thank my ancestors for blessing me with hair that a lot of women envy and very few actually have. I’ve embraced my nicknames of “Fro Girl” (said with fondness by friends this time around) or the oh-so-creative “Hair”. Through many hair products and styling methods I’ve finally mastered a way to make myself look more Bohemian Hippie than Crazy Bag Lady. But never again will anyone hear me say that I want to shave my head. Been there. Done that. And hope to never go back there again.

Sun, 17 May 2009 23:48:57 GMT

Now that my Creative Writing class is over, I wanted to post my 2 biggest assignments.

Little Buddy

Standing in the hallway outside of Matt’s apartment door, Gretchen played with the hem of her T-shirt. She was suddenly too nervous to walk inside. Staring menacingly at the door across the hall from his, she wondered how this meeting was going to go. Would she make a good first impression? Would she come off as jealous and rude? Would Matt even notice, let alone, care?

Earlier that day, those ominous thoughts were the farthest from her mind as she walked the six city blocks that made up the distance between her office and the office of her good friend, Matt. It usually took a little longer, being that they were city blocks in downtown Los Angeles and she wasn’t exactly wearing shoes designed for walking long distances. But she was excited - and with that excitement, brought speed.

As she rode up the elevator to his floor, she stared at the Lakers tickets in her hand, still not believing her eyes. Their favorite professional basketball team, not to mention they were killer seats. She couldn’t wait to see the look on his face.

Walking into the reception area, she waved at Ingrid, the receptionist, who instantly recognized her. Gretchen had been a familiar face at Matt’s accounting firm for many years. First, as a friend, then as a girlfriend, and then, after a short absence, as a friend again. Ingrid went through the formalities of informing Matt of his visitor, even though everyone knew that Gretchen was more than welcome to just walk right into the office area. But they had to keep some semblance of professionalism.

When she walked to his cubicle in the back area, she noticed he was squinting at his computer screen through his wire-framed glasses. The glasses that he’d had for far too long to be of any use anymore. But he insisted that he could see through them just fine and that he only needed them for work, anyway. Gretchen knew that the real reason he didn’t want to get new eyeglasses was because he was afraid of the eye doctor. Some people are afraid of the dentist. Matt was afraid of the eye doctor.

“Whatcha doing?” Gretchen said casually leaning against one of the walls framing his cubicle.

“Crunching numbers, as usual,” he said tilting back in his chair and taking his glasses off to rub the bridge of his nose to release some of the tension.

“Well, how about you take a little bit of a break from being Mr. Super Accountant because I’ve got a surprise for you,” she couldn’t hide the smile out of her voice as she held the tickets behind her back.

Matt rolled his eyes and grinned at his friend’s enthusiasm, “OK, hit me with it, kiddo.”

She grimaced a little at one of the nicknames he had for her that made her seem more like his teenaged little sister, Caitlin, instead of his ex-girlfriend. There was a time when he wouldn’t have dreamt of calling her such a generic, unisex name.

They’d first met when they worked in the same building, five years prior. In the beginning, Gretchen wasn’t sure if it was a coincidence that Matt was taking the elevator at the same time as she was, or if he planned their daily run-ins, but he was there, every morning, waiting for the same elevator to take him up to his office. She found out later that he had planned the whole thing as a way of trying to introduce himself to the cute girl who just happened to work in his building. And the plan worked. After a few days, the small talk turned into actual talk and pretty soon the two were exchanging funny emails to get each other through the long days of office drudgery.

When a mutual love for basketball and the Los Angeles Lakers was discovered, their friendship was cemented as they began spending time together out of the office, watching games at each other’s apartments. When Gretchen’s friends teased her about her new “boyfriend” Matt, she always denied it and said that they were “just friends,” but she could tell something was going on between them. She wasn’t going to push it, though, because she was having too good of a time being friends.

That was before the kiss. They were at Matt’s apartment, watching their team lose horribly to their arch rivals, the Boston Celtics. The living room was tense and even Matt’s friends, who were there for the game as well, were uncharacteristically quiet. Then something happened. Lakers shooting guard Kobe Bryant scored a three point basket that seemed to wake up his team and put them back in the game. They spent the rest of the game catching up and eventually ended up winning by a mere two points. When the buzzer sounded to signal the end of the game, the living room erupted with everyone’s relieved shouts and high fives. Without even thinking about it, Matt turned to Gretchen and grabbed her face in a jubilant kiss. And once again the living room went silent as everyone watched, stunned.

When he pulled away from her, she knew she was red from embarrassment and her eyes were wide with shock, but all she saw was the grin on his face that instantly made her feel at ease, just as it always did. And when he turned to his friends and nonchalantly said, “Do you guys mind not staring while I kiss my girl?” she knew he had been sensing the same things between them, too.

Their romance wasn’t epic, by any means. No grand gestures. No flowers. Just best friends who happened to feel more than friendship towards each other. But as casual as they were, not once in their relationship did Matt ever call her “kiddo.”

Not wanting those ancient memories to cloud her good mood, Gretchen smiled that fake smile that she’d grown so accustomed to using around Matt lately, and brought her thoughts back to the basketball game.

“How would you like to be sitting practically courtside at the Lakers game tonight?” she said, whipping the tickets from behind her back and waving them in front of Matt’s stunned face.

“Lakers tickets? How did you score Lakers tickets?” he snatched them out of her hand and stared at them with wide eyes.

“My boss couldn’t go, so guess who he gives them to?” she batted her eyelashes at him in such a way that used to make him want more than just basketball tickets from her, “Why, his favorite employee, of course!”

Gretchen couldn’t help but jump up and down a little bit in her excitement. “Maybe we’ll be in like, spitting distance of Jack Nicholson.”
“Not that we’ll want to spit on him, of course,” Matt corrected her in a mocking tone regarding the actor who happened to be one of the Lakers’ most famous fans and had season tickets since the 1970s.

“Oh, of course not,” she deadpanned.

They grinned at each other.

“Well that’s awesome, buddy,” he scooted his chair closer to his desk, which was Gretchen’s cue that he needed to get back to work and she should probably head back to her office, as well. She winced at once again, the use of one of his many nicknames for her that made her seem almost like a boy. She wanted to scream at him and demand why he insisted on acting as if their relationship never happened. Why he had to reduce her to being his “little buddy” when they were so much more than that.

“Be cool, Gretch. Be cool,” she thought to herself, pulling her face back into its grin and playfully grabbed the tickets off of his desk in a possessive manner and slipped them back in her pants pocket, “I’ll call you later, and we’ll figure out a plan, alright?” she said to him instead.

“Right on,” he answered and raised his hand to her for a high five. She returned it, grudgingly, but with that same smile plastered on her face.

Walking out of Matt’s office, she couldn’t help but grumble to herself, out loud this time, “I love that boy, but sometimes, it’s all I can do not to smack him.”

Although Matt and Gretchen hadn’t been a couple for a few years, it was hard for her to ever get rid of all of her feelings for him. And it was during those instances of longing that she had to remind herself why exactly they broke up in the first place. Because although it was an amicable split that allowed them to remain good friends, it was still a split. A year into their relationship, what used to be Gretchen taking care of Matt, turned into her nagging him. And his constant video game playing wasn’t cute anymore. It was immature. When they started fighting over the littlest things, they knew it was time to call it quits in order to save their friendship.

For the most part, they were fine. They both dated other people through the years and still managed to maintain their friendship, including their ritual of watching games together when it was basketball season. But there were times, usually when she was single and he wasn’t, that Matt would look at her a certain way, or he’d hug her right when she needed it, that Gretchen would miss being his girlfriend. She’d miss the freedom of grabbing his hand as they walked down the street, or resting her head on his shoulder as they watched television. She missed knowing that when he wasn’t with her, he was thinking about her. But she kept those feelings to herself. As far as she knew, Matt couldn’t tell that she looked at him as more than a friend, or he just had a really good way of hiding it to so as to avoid any unnecessary embarrassment and discomfort for the two of them.

They had made plans to meet at his apartment for a little pre-game hangout since he lived closest to the Staples Center arena. She was excited to spend time with his roommate, Doug, and to play around with his Labrador retriever, Daisy, but she wasn’t looking forward to the person she knew would undoubtedly be there.

Matt’s new girlfriend, Lorelei lived across the hall from him. In fact, they met the day she and her roommate, Olivia moved in. They instantly hit it off, and the rest was history. Gretchen hadn’t met Lorelei yet. That’s how new the relationship was. She’d only heard stories about her and immediately formed a negative opinion. Half of it was out of pure jealousy, of course. But the other half was because after hearing some of the details, Gretchen just knew she wasn’t the right girl for Matt. Not to say that Gretchen was right for him, either, but she cared enough about him to at least want him to end up with the right girl. Even if that right girl wasn’t her.

That evening, she found herself standing in the hallway outside of Matt’s apartment door. The door that she had walked through effortlessly thousands of times suddenly seemed like the door on a game show that either opened to reveal the grand prize or the gag gift. In this instance, Gretchen wondered if she was going to walk into the usual scene of Matt and Doug, hanging out in their apartment with Daisy, or if Lorelei would be there. She hated not knowing. And that fear of the unknown is what kept her rooted in her place, nervously playing with her T-shirt as her heart felt like it would beat out of her chest and knock on the door for her.

It was no secret that Gretchen was shy. Matt was the one who spoke first when they were meeting at the elevator, Matt made the first move for their first kiss, and that was just a small example of her shyness issues when it came to people she was fond of. When it came to strangers, especially strangers she didn’t even want to know in the first place, her shyness reached a whole new level. She didn’t want to meet Lorelei. She didn’t even want to know that she existed. So knowing that she was going to probably have to talk to her at some point in the next few hours made her feel like all of the air had left her lungs and that she needed to put her head in between her knees in order to get her breathing back.

“Oh, just get a hold of yourself, Gretch,” she reasoned with herself, trying to curb her anxiety attack “You can’t stand out here forever. And you have to show her that you’re not intimidated and that you’re not going anywhere.”

She told herself this only because Matt had told her how insecure Lorelei was about their friendship. She knew their history and knew how much Matt valued Gretchen. Lorelei felt just as threatened as Gretchen did, probably more so, since she was just getting to know Matt and couldn’t compete with their years together.

Finally feeling calm enough, she took a deep breath, opened the door and was instantly greeted by Daisy’s large, blonde body, walking towards her with a low bark. Gretchen stroked her back as the dog docilely walked next to her and they made their way to the living room. Doug, Matt’s roommate was sitting on the couch, with his bare feet resting on the coffee table while he watched the flat screen TV on the wall across from him.

“Gretchy!” Doug said in a good natured welcome, “How goes it girl?”

He tossed her a can of beer from the cooler on the floor and she had to dive to catch it. Tapping the top of the can to calm down the contents enough so she wouldn’t be sprayed with foam when she opened it, she sat down on the couch next to him.

“So Lakers tickets, huh?” he asked, throwing his arm on the back of the couch behind her head, “So how did Matt get so lucky that he gets to go with you and I don’t?”

He wiggled his eyebrows at her in an overly flirtatious manner that was just enough to show that he was kidding around.

Playing along with his game, Gretchen answered innocently after taking a drink of beer, “Well, he has seen me naked, so I guess that would give him a slight lead when it comes to scoring the perks.”

Doug chuckled and reached under his feet for a new can for himself.

“Speaking of naked,” he said in between sips, “Matty Boy is in the shower. He’s gotta get pretty for your big date.” Gretchen punched him in the shoulder just hard enough to show that he wasn’t funny.

“Who’s having a big date?” Matt asked walking into the living room, clad only in a bath towel that was wrapped around his waist. He was rubbing another towel through his hair in an effort to dry it.

“Apparently we are,” Gretchen answered him sarcastically trying not to focus on her half naked ex-boyfriend.

Doug sensed her discomfort and snickered, which brought another shoulder punch.

“Well I guess I better go get dressed then,” Matt said, winking at her before he went into his bedroom for clothes.

Throwing her head back on the couch, Gretchen closed her eyes in frustration while Doug once again, chuckled softly, but she still heard him.

“You’re going to lose all use of your shoulder soon, Dougie,” she said through gritted teeth.

Sensing that she was serious, he coughed uncomfortably and got up from the couch at the exact same time that the front door opened. Daisy barked louder this time and Gretchen could hear high pitched giggles and saw 2 small dogs run into the living room.

“This is it,” she told herself and tried to fix a believable smile on her face.

Lorelei had arrived. And she’d brought her roommate, Olivia, and their tiny dogs as backup.

Gretchen stayed seated on the couch. It was the only thing she could think to do. It’s not like she was going to run to greet them at the door, especially when Doug was already bringing them in the living room.

To say the girls matched their dogs was an understatement. The miniature Pinscher that was frantically running around the apartment, yapping a tiny bark and jumping on and off the furniture obviously belonged to Olivia. As soon as she had set foot inside the apartment, her mouth was going nonstop. She introduced herself to Gretchen and then immediately ran into Doug’s bedroom to see the new T-shirts he had been telling her about. Squeals could be heard and Gretchen could only imagine what was going on.

Lorelei’s Shi Tzu, on the other hand, had greeted Daisy and then jumped up on the couch Gretchen was sitting on and slowly walked over to her, sniffing the air and clearly checking her out. Lorelei had introduced herself to Gretchen as well and the two girls exchanged some forced pleasantries before Lorelei excused herself to the kitchen. She made a big to-do about opening a bottle of wine to waste some time while she obviously waited for Matt to finish getting ready.

“Definitely a little scared of me,” Gretchen thought to herself, absentmindedly petting the Shi Tzu, liking the dog in spite of its owner.
But she didn’t have a chance to worry about trying to make more conversation with the girl in an effort to be the “bigger person,” because Matt finally came out of his bedroom, fully dressed.

“There’s my girl,” he said with a grin and both girls looked up, thinking he was talking to them. Gretchen hid her disappointment with a smile when he walked towards the kitchen to give his girlfriend a hug.

“Why would he be talking to you, dummy” she scolded herself, watching as he wrapped his arms around Lorelei in a hug. She had to turn her head away when the two exchanged a kiss. Her stomach didn’t feel so great, all of a sudden.

“My two best girls have finally met,” Matt said happily, leading Lorelei back into the living room to sit down.

“Yeah, now we can be one big happy family,” Gretchen thought to herself in disgust.

“Welcome to the family, Lorelei,” she said out loud, trying to make a good first impression, as hard as it was not to just get up and walk out of the room, “I’ve heard so much about you.”

“Oh Matty’s told me so much about you, too,” Lorelei smiled widely, sitting down on his lap, “It’s so cute that you guys are such good friends and are going to a basketball game together.”

It seemed that Lorelei had gained some confidence with her boyfriend’s presence and wasn’t scared to make jibes at Gretchen’s expense.

“Cute?” Gretchen thought to herself, “I’ll show that little Barbie, cute.” Her smile lost some of its believability and the beer was making it hard for her not to say anything she would regret later.

“It is cute that we’re such good friends, isn’t it Matty?” Gretchen asked innocently, using the nickname for him that she hated and that it seemed Lorelei had adopted from Doug.

Matt cocked his eyebrow at her, knowing her dislike for that name, and probably not understanding why she was using it now. Gretchen smiled at him, sipping her beer in uncomfortable silence and watched as Lorelei contentedly sat on his lap blissfully unaware, and slowly rubbing one of his legs with her hand.

“Slut,” she thought to herself, finishing her beer and setting the can on the coffee table. With the beer giving her liquid courage, she felt like she was about to say something to add to the tension in the air, but Doug and Olivia entered the living room just in time.

“Alright, you ladies are coming out with me, tonight,” Doug said with the voice of someone who thought he’d come up with the best idea in the world, “While these two are out at a crappy basketball game, we’re going to party!”

Olivia giggled at Doug’s side and he reached around and put her in a head lock to which she squealed in a combination of enjoyment and annoyance.

“My hair, you idiot!” she yelled in between giggles.

Rolling her eyes at the scene, Gretchen had decided that Olivia wasn’t so bad and she’d almost forgotten about her discomfort when she spotted Matt and Lorelei cuddling and sharing a kiss out of the corner of her eye. Reaching into Doug’s cooler for another beer, she opened a can and took a long drink.

“I am clearly the 5th wheel here,” Gretchen thought, watching Matt and Lorelei’s blissful honeymoon stage and Doug and Olivia’s flirting. Taking her beer out on the apartment’s patio, the cell phone in her pocket vibrated. Her friend, Kelly, had sent her a text message to see how the meeting with “the girlfriend” was coming along.

Gretchen slid her phone open to expose its keyboard and typed a response.

“Totally sucks. The roommate is loud and obnoxious and the girlfriend makes little jabs at me. She’s sitting on his lap, for Christ sakes! I want to get out of here.”

She sent the message and a reply came back two minutes later.

“You have to show her that you’re not going anywhere. She’ll see that she can’t scare you and then maybe she’ll back off. Stand up for yourself, girl!”

She sighed and put her phone away, not even bothering with a reply. She knew that’s what kind of response she would get. But it was easier said than done. Knowing that she couldn’t stay out on the patio forever, she took a deep breath, forced that smile back on her face, and walked into the living room.

“You ready to go, Gretch?” Matt asked, making a move to get up, but Lorelei was still on his lap. It looked like she was taking Kelly’s advice of showing that she wasn’t going anywhere.

“So soon?” Lorelei said with a whine when Matt was finally able to disengage her from his body.

“Yeah, we can’t miss the pre-game warm up. It’s like missing the previews before a movie,” Gretchen said to Lorelei, truly excited about the game, but also relishing in the fact that soon she’d be leaving with Matt, and Lorelei wouldn’t be coming along. She genuinely smiled at the girl, in spite of herself.

It seemed that Lorelei took that smile to mean something else and Gretchen noticed the threatening squint of her eyes that surfaced for a brief second before her smile returned.

“Yep, definitely more than a little scared of me,” Gretchen confirmed to herself, reveling in the fact that maybe she did have a small amount of power in this whole situation, “And maybe not as secure in her relationship as she once thought.”

“Well, you guys have lots of fun tonight,” Lorelei said lightly and pulled down Matt’s face to hers for a kiss and whispered something in his ear before turning to Gretchen, “It was so great to finally meet you, Gretchen. I love meeting all of Matt’s little friends.”

Gretchen mirrored Lorelei’s plastic smile and watched as the couple said goodbye one last time before Lorelei walked back to Doug’s bedroom to see what was going on.

“We’re out of here dude!” Matt yelled in the direction of Doug’s bedroom and draped his arm across Gretchen’s shoulders to lead her towards the door, “Let’s go, kiddo.”

Walking down the hallway to the elevators, she suddenly felt better. It was just her and Matt and that’s how it was supposed to be. No Doug, no girlfriend, no girlfriend’s roommate. Finally at ease again, she let herself lean her head against his shoulder as they waited for the elevator.

Her ease was short lived.

“So, what do you think of Lorelei?” Matt asked, looking down at her with genuine concern in his eyes.

Gretchen tried to think of something to say that was truthful, but wouldn’t make her seem like she was jealous.

She shrugged her shoulders before answering him, “She seems nice, but I only just met her. I haven’t had a chance to get to know her yet. Her dog’s cute.”

Nodding his head, Matt answered, “We’re just going to have to all hang out together more often, then. I want my girls to get along.”

He grinned down at her and kissed the top of her head. She wrapped her arms around him in a hug as the ding of the elevator signaled her ongoing heartbreak.

During the cab ride to the arena, she made the decision that she wasn’t going to think about Lorelei during the game. She was just going to enjoy her alone time with Matt that would soon be hard to come by as his relationship deepened. The only way she was going to succeed with her plan was by drinking, a lot. She met Matt, beer for beer during the game and although she was never one to hold her alcohol, she never threw up, either. She just used the restroom a lot which helped in the sobering up process.

As they stumbled out of the arena, she realized that she wasn’t sure who won the game. She was pretty sure the Lakers did. At least the people cheering around her made it seem so. She remembered that their seats had been three rows from the court and amazing. She remembered that they were indeed within spitting distance of Jack Nicholson, but were too in awe to do anything but stare at him. She remembered just how much fun she and Matt had, people watching, drunkenly shouting at the referees every once in a while, and basically enjoying the whole courtside, live sports experience. But she couldn’t remember the score! “Oh well,” she shrugged to herself as she climbed into a waiting cab, “I’ll check the paper tomorrow.”

While Gretchen was a pretty respectable drunk, Matt, on the other hand, was not. He couldn’t hold his alcohol, either, but he also didn’t have the power to just pee it out of his system that Gretchen had. And because of this, he casually laid his head on her shoulder the whole cab ride back to his apartment and mumbled incomprehensibly, but she thought she heard a few, “I love you’s” connected to her name somewhere in the garbled speech. She couldn’t help but smile to herself as she leaned her head against his, wanting to stay in this moment forever and never have to deal with the harsh reality of Lorelei again.

They arrived at their destination all too quickly, and the noise from outside broke Gretchen’s happy bubble as soon as she opened the door of the cab. Paying the driver, she gave her shoulder to Matt for support as they walked up the steps to his building. Suddenly she felt herself to be in an all too familiar setting. Her just over five foot frame helping her drunken six foot tall boyfriend into his bed after a wild night was something that she’d done over and over during the year that they were a couple. And here she was, five years later, doing it again. Except this time, he was someone else’s boyfriend.

“Why am I putting myself through this?” she asked herself, removing his shoes as he lay on his bed, fully clothed and barely awake.

Filling a glass of water in the kitchen, she suddenly flashed back to every single fight they had ever had. She was tired of picking up his dirty clothes. He was frustrated with her constant questions. Why did he have to drink so much? Why was she around so much? Why couldn’t he just grow up and go to the eye doctor like a man and get rid of those ridiculous Harry Potter eyeglasses?

The sound of a key in the lock snapped her out of her memories and she turned to see Lorelei walk in, her Shi Tzu running in ahead of her. When she saw Gretchen in the kitchen, her face turned a little harder and her back stood up a little straighter. Now that Matt wasn’t around to hear it, she looked like she was ready for Round 2.

But Gretchen had something else on her mind. Lorelei had a key to Matt’s apartment that apparently she used on a regular basis. She hadn’t realized that they were that serious already. Between this sudden discovery and the overload of memories from just before, it all became clear to her. Lorelei was Matt’s future. Gretchen was his past.

She handed the glass of water to Lorelei, who was still staring at her, ready for any harsh word that was going to come her way. “He’s in his bedroom,” Gretchen said gently, pointing her head in that direction, “Dude never could hold his alcohol.” And she chuckled as she as she walked out the door, knowing that the gauntlet had passed to the new girlfriend to deal with the intoxicated mess in the bedroom.

And whether he and Lorelei had a long and fulfilling relationship, or not, Gretchen would always be there to lend an ear or a shoulder if Matt needed it. Because even though she couldn’t stand the name, she really was his “Little Buddy,” and she wasn’t going anywhere.