Page 9

9

The Girlfriend Removal Expert

Jake

“I’m sorry, Jake,” Aunt Laura says in a small voice. “We’ll get the bill. Will you call me? I really like her.”

I realize she thinks I’m going with Dolores, so I do just that, leaving Andrew practically smoking around the edges and Laura resigned to an evening spent placating him. I almost duck to give her a quick hug and kiss—it’s been years since I’ve done that. I’ve been trying to wean her off me.

I catch up to Dolores in the mezzanine just as she pulls the wine bottle out of her purse. She holds it out to me when she spots me.

“You need it more than me. Your dad—”

“He’s not my dad. They’re not my parents.”

Her face puckers in confusion. “You look like them.”

I do, and it’s been a source of irritation to my uncle since I went to live with them. They couldn’t have children of their own, and I was the disappointing consolation prize. The last thing he wants, ever, is for me to be mistaken for their son.

“I look like my aunt.”

“Yes. And you stone-face just like him.”

“He would stone-face at me and I had to stone-face right back. They raised me after my parents died.”

She doesn’t hand out the automatic apology. She just examines my face for tells of emotion and tucks away this bit of information in my case file.

“So that’s how you know so much about ghosts,” she says.

Her reference to our rooftop talk is random and confusing, and I don’t want to get into any of that. Dolores is like a wisp of smoke, and she could slip away into the night at any moment. In her red dress, with her tattoos on display, and truth serum running brightly in her veins, I feel like I have the real Dolores standing in front of me, not the one camouflaged in a monochrome corporate disguise playing an elaborate game of cloak-and-dagger from Monday to Friday. I need to make her linger. I need to hook her in, snag her interest. I need another stroke of brilliance, like I had with that doll.

She looks at me expectantly, and just as I open my mouth, my phone buzzes in my pocket. I send it to voicemail without looking at it. Then it starts buzzing again. I know who it is. There’s only one person in my life who feels this entitled to my attention.

“Will you wait for me?” I ask Dolores.

She tips her head to one side, like she’s listening to a little devil on her shoulder. “Sure. Why not.” She sits on the lip of the indoor fountain and pulls out her phone, and I step across the mezzanine, out of earshot, to return the missed calls.

The first was not Grant, after all. It was my uncle. He’s left a voicemail.

“How dare you tell her I’m your father—”

I delete it without finishing. The second was Grant, so I call him back.

“ Jake .”

We’re one syllable in and I can already feel a headache coming on. He cuts right to the chase in anguished tones.

“I need you to get Verity out of here for me. Right now. I can’t stand to look at her.”

And here we are. The sordid, ungodly things I get up to with my roommate that Uncle Andrew would never guess. I look over at Dolores, across the room. I squeeze my eyes shut.

“Does it have to be tonight?”

When Grant says, “Jump,” my job is to say, “How high?” It’s the main condition of our arrangement. He’s taken aback enough to be rendered mute for a moment.

“Yes, it does have to be tonight,” he snaps. A pause, and his voice becomes tragic again. “Verity’s not right for me. These feelings aren’t real. None of it is real . I’m so lonely , Jake.”

He gasps, close to a sob. He’s always like this when the honeymoon phase is over.

“They never stop me from feeling lonely . It’s like—an ache in a part of my body I can’t even identify. Maybe if she wasn’t so fake . It makes me feel like all of it’s fake. Is that all I deserve? A fake relationship? Because it doesn’t matter what I feel if she can’t love me back—”

“You deserve something real,” I say placatingly.

“I do,” he agrees, his tone less dramatic by degrees. “I found one of her nails in my bed. It broke off. She’s cheap. What do you think of her hair?”

I try to think what color this one’s hair is.

“It looks…”

“I can always tell the difference between real hair and fake. I want to meet a real, natural woman, Jake. But I work too much. So instead I do this. It’s a cycle.”

It’s a cycle he’s repeated two dozen times since I moved in: infatuation, creeping disenchantment, and then finally disgust, self-pity, and despair.

It floats up in front of my eyes, the sight of Grant up all night at his computer, desperately clicking away at photos of brunettes, blondes, tall, short, curvy, thin—and then charging his desires to a credit card. The oversized Barbie of a woman shows up, stays a while, and then is shown out, leaving Grant’s wallet significantly lighter. The idiot could just hit up a club like a normal person. He has the clothes and the money and the car for it.

I’ve suggested a psychiatrist. He’s told me he’s already seen them all.

“I need you to get her out of the apartment for me.”

I watch Dolores, sitting there, and I wonder how long until she loses patience and leaves.

“Where is she?”

“She’s in the shower right now. Shit. Jake. I feel so disgusted with myself. I’m going to leave. I’m just going to walk out. I’ll be back tomorrow. Just…just make sure she’s gone when I get back. Please.”

In four years he’s never once asked me what I do with them. He leaves that up to me. It’s not like I can just open the door, bow like a butler, and show them out. They won’t leave on their own. I wonder if we have another rug we can spare. Shower curtain? Tablecloth? I suppress a sigh.

And that’s when I catch sight of my reflection in a mirror panel across the room. I look so normal. Dull, even. Nondescript suit. Boring haircut. Glasses. It’s all part of my carefully curated mask. Don’t notice me. I wonder what Dolores sees. Not much. I know what Grant sees—a chump. The possibility of an evening with Dolores floats away.

“She’ll be gone when you get back,” I tell Grant. I end the call.

When I go back to her, Dolores is still perched on the edge of the fountain, wearing her black trench coat now. I hold my hand out to her, and after a moment’s hesitation she takes it and I pull her to her feet. We spill out onto the dark street, where the rain has petered out to a few random drops. It’s a gleaming, water-slicked night, all inky blackness and sparkling traffic lights. A car’s sound system vibrates in the background like a big creature’s heartbeat. It’s the sort of night I could walk for hours in. It’s the sort of night I have walked for hours in, when I couldn’t sleep. Dolores stands six feet in front of me in her spindly little shoes, her hair flecked with a handful of glittering raindrops, her eyes wide and dark.

“I have to go,” she says, preempting me. But she says it in a way that wants to be convinced otherwise.

“Not yet.”

I take her by the elbow and swing her into the darkened doorway of a storefront boarded up for renovations. The memory of that rooftop kiss sits between us like a third presence. What I wouldn’t give for a rooftop right now.

“Why did you kiss me?” she whispers. “On the roof.”

I look at her lips, then her eyes again. She smells like red wine and perfume and herself.

“ You kissed me .”

“You grabbed me,” she says.

“I was just trying to push you off.”

“Fair,” she breathes. “I was trying to strangle you.”

It’s a terrible idea to let anyone in, but it’s reassuring, the way she looks at me—even in moments like these—like she can barely stand me.

I’m someone else when I take her face in my hands and kiss her. At that moment a brisk wind blows in from the harbor, swirling her loose hair around us, but her lips are warm against mine. I imagine what we must look like—red dress, dark coats, a shaft of light from the streetlamp catching reflections in her chaotic hair—but then I stop all thinking, because after a moment’s hesitation, she kisses me back. She doesn’t kiss me like she thinks I’m boring, and dull, and forgettable. And when she parts her lips against mine, smooth and wet, a terrible idea forms.

We could end this evening on a kiss—or start it.

“Come out with me tonight,” I say when I pull away.

Her expression is perfectly blank, a masterful poker face.

“To do what?”

I glance between her eyes, back and forth. Dark brown, with scalpel-sharp eyeliner. My hand is still cupping the side of her face, and the black of my glove makes her skin look pale.

“Serial killer stuff?” she asks. “Or a cozy night at home in your footie pajamas dismembering Barbies?”

And when she says that, it’s all decided for me. She’s every bit as twisted and morbid as me. She’s been signaling this whole time, putting out feelers, testing me, and I’ve been doing it right back. Are we birds of a feather? Do we have matching stripes under our clothes? I want to outdo whatever expectations of crazy she has.

It’s impossible not to feel a spasm of nerves. It’s that moment before revealing a secret, or executing a prank, or delivering the punchline of a risqué joke. The moment of uncertainty, the fear that this person will not get it, after all. It’s that moment right before she opened the little green package I left on her keyboard. Do we laugh at the world in the same way?

“Yes,” I say.

She’s silent. “Yes to which?”

“I have a job to do.”

“A job? How boring.”

I’m not boring.

“I need to dispose of a body.”

It’s like someone tosses a pebble into the blank surface of her face. Her expression ripples, then settles back into blankness. Fear? Surely not. Amusement. Then, one eyebrow, elegantly arched. I’ve hooked her again. She’s mine for the time being.

“So you are a murderer? You keep getting more interesting, Jacob.”