Page 5 of Fan Favorite
T he first thing Edie remembered when she woke up the next morning was tweeting at that Key producer.
She shot up in bed, startling Nacho Bell Grande, who jumped three feet into the air and took off yowling down the hall.
What kind of person sends mortifying high school photos across the internet to some glamorous Hollywood producer?
What the hell was wrong with her? Why would Lauren let her do that?
Edie’s yearbook was splayed open on the bed, a Sharpied heart freshly drawn around Charlie Bennett’s senior pic.
She was so stupid! Obviously there was no way Edie Pepper could reclaim the new and improved Charlie Bennett.
The wretched unfairness of not being born a supermodel or exceptional in any way really pissed her off, so she kicked the yearbook off the bed and it slammed to the floor.
Why-oh-why was it that every single time Edie thought she’d suffered enough, endured the ultimate embarrassment, there was more .
Edie looked at her phone warily, racking her brain-catalog of Super Soul episodes to guide her through this moment. There was something about everything in your life being a teacher. Sigh. Edie picked up the phone and began to cycle through her notifications.
Holy shit!
She had a DM.
“We’re talking at two,” Edie squealed over the phone to Lauren. “What do you think she wants?”
“I mean… probably she wants to talk about you joining the show?”
Edie almost passed out on the kitchen floor.
“But, Edie, seriously, don’t you think this is going too far? You’ve watched enough reality TV to know they probably just want to put you on for shock value, like ‘wocka-wocka, here’s your ex-girlfriend!’”
“You’re so cynical!” Edie was already envisioning her spring nuptials to Charlie Bennett. She would carry a bouquet of calla lilies and wear her hair down because wasn’t it true that her neck was too short and calla lilies were the most elegant wedding flower?
“They’ll make you look stupid. You know the kinds of girls who go on these shows, Edie.”
“Lauren! Why would they do that? The Key is all about love!”
“Alice will never approve.”
Well, that was definitely true. But Alice could be managed. “If I end up married, Alice won’t care how I got there. You think Alice is clinging to life to play bridge? She’s waiting for me to get married.”
“But what about your job? You have an actual life, Edie. You’re just gonna drop everything to date Charlie Bennett? On TV?”
“Drop everything? What’s there to drop?” Edie’s life suddenly slid into focus and she felt incredibly clear.
“You’ve got a career, Lolo. I’ve got a job.
And I couldn’t care less about being a copywriter for an insurance company—all these years I’ve just been going to work, waiting for my actual life to start.
Even this apartment, all the boxes. It’s like, here I am, ready to go .
Don’t you think it’s a sign? All I want is for my big love—for my life —to begin.
And if Charlie Bennett can transform himself into a Hemsworth brother on prime-time TV, why can’t I? ”
The more Edie thought about it, the more she realized this was exactly right.
She’d always understood Charlie, understood that they both had that thrumming thing inside, that constant not enough not enough , but he had battled it and won .
Edie felt a surge of confidence—maybe she would never be a model, or a fitness instructor, or a manic pixie dream girl, but adorable blast from the past ex-girlfriend, the one you were supposed to be with all along? That she could do.
She might even be great at it.
“Edie, you’re super talented in all sorts of ways. What about investing in yourself instead?”
“Love doesn’t just disappear. Charlie and I were in love before; why can’t we be in love again? And get engaged!”
“Marriage is oppression,” Lauren said with authority.
“You’re ridiculous. Who even says that?”
“Literally every feminist thinker ever.”
“Well, Nora Ephron didn’t say that, and I worship at the altar of Nora Ephron.”
“It might be helpful to stop internalizing fiction like it’s a template for real life.”
“Instead of When Harry Met Sally , it’ll be When Charlie Met Edie . Again!”
“I read this article that theorized that our mothers told us we could do anything,” Lauren continued, as if she hadn’t heard Edie.
“That we could have it all—careers, husbands, children. And then they told their sons to go out and find a nice girl to take care of them. It made me so grateful to be a lesbian. And unlocked why all the hetero marrieds we know can’t figure out who should unload the dishwasher. ”
“I don’t mind unloading the dishwasher,” Edie said, biting her lip and staring at yesterday’s dishes.
“Don’t get mad, but I’m gonna ask you again: Is this about Brian?”
Edie huffed. Just because the breakup with Brian had broken Edie into a million little pieces didn’t mean every decision Edie made now or in the future was about Brian!
And those million little pieces weren’t even really about Brian as much as they were about the existential crisis the breakup with Brian had caused.
Sure, Edie had been hurt many times before, but this was a thirty-five-year-old woman’s hurt.
A hurt that encompassed every disappointment, every broken dream, and every bad decision she’d ever made and knotted them up into one big blanket of despair that Edie had wrapped around herself like a shroud.
For two weeks after he’d broken things off, Edie had told her boss she had mono and laid in bed watching The Great British Bakeoff (when she needed to be soothed) or early seasons of Grey’s Anatomy (when she needed to sob).
Periodically the iPad would go black and demand to know “Are you still watching?” and Edie would watch the tears snake down her face in its murky reflection.
She looked like an old, sad person.
She was an old, sad person.
Eventually Edie had been forced from her bed when the movers started pounding at the door.
She’d stupidly given up her apartment and signed the lease and paid the deposit on the new place herself because Brian was mid-divorce and blah blah blah it would be easier that way.
And so, when he’d left her, she’d still had to move.
Move out of the little one-bedroom in Lakeview where she’d become an adult.
Edie suddenly felt nostalgic for every part of her old apartment, even though every spring it had ants, and the bathroom was tiled pea green, and it was on the third floor and hauling groceries up there was a real pain in the ass.
The day the movers arrived, Edie had done such a poor job of packing that they’d just started shoving her things into boxes while grumbling and exchanging angry looks.
Edie had stood in the kitchen, sort of wrapping dishes but mostly just standing there with a tape gun stuck uselessly in her hand, until Lauren had shown up and taken over.
It wasn’t that Edie didn’t know she was a mess. She did. She was just somehow helpless in the face of it.
The thing was, for the past thirteen years Edie Pepper had lived in a major city filled with men.
And for the past thirteen years, she’d been dated and dumped and dated and dumped, yet somehow, after every bad date or unreturned text or bad sexual encounter where some man tried to gag her with his dick, Edie had always been able to replenish her wellspring of hope.
Because facing the possibility that this might be it, that none of life’s big joys were meant for her—no husband, no house, no babies, no family vacations, no Disneyland!
—was even more painful than nursing her hope for a great big love back to health over and over again.
And then she’d met Brian.
Their first date was at Guthrie’s, a bar in Wrigleyville that had endless stacks of board games.
Edie thought it was perfect and adorable as they drank draft beers and played the game of Life.
At the end, instead of counting their individual monies and assets, he’d taken his little blue peg man and his little blue peg child out of his little blue car and put them in her little pink car with her little pink peg woman and said, “Life’s better together, dontcha think?
” And then he’d leaned over the board and kissed her.
Can you even imagine? He was smart and thoughtful and laughed at her jokes, and even though he preferred to have sex the exact same way every single time, she always came.
This is it , she’d thought. This is finally it.
On the day she moved to the too-big, too-expensive apartment in Roscoe Village, she’d told the movers somewhat hysterically not to put anything in the second bedroom that had been meant for Brian’s two-year-old son, Cayden.
After the movers left, she’d stood in there, running her fingers over the vintage built-in bookshelves she’d planned to fill with books about bears and frogs and pigeons finding their way in the world.
Losing Cayden, a little person she had absolutely no claim to, broke her heart.
For the love she felt for him, for the warm feeling of family she felt when the three of them were together, and for the ever present and suddenly screaming fear that because of all of her flaws, she would miss out on the fundamental human experience that was motherhood.
But that had been weeks ago, and Edie was basically all better now.