24
“What happened up there?” Kirsten asked.
Teddy shook her head and held on to her glass of water. Seeing Everett in the crowd had immediately sobered her up. What was worse, he was looking directly at her, directly into her soul, as if he knew she was the one he’d been emailing all this time.
But he couldn’t know. So why had he been staring at her like that?
“I told you guys I was scared,” Teddy muttered into her drink.
“But it was going so well!” Eleanor said, putting an arm around her. “You were killing it up there!”
“Wuthering Heights Brian was loving the energy,” Kirsten agreed.
“I think maybe we should go home,” Teddy said.
“Can we wait a minute?” Kirsten asked. “I put an order in for fried pickles.”
Eleanor clapped. “Fried pickles!”
Teddy wrinkled her nose. “Why does a pickle need to be fried?”
For a moment, all she could hear was a woman maiming an Adele song.
“Teddy,” Kirsten said, placing a hand on her arm gently as if she were asking a delicate question, “have you . . . never had a deep-fried pickle?”
Teddy shook her head. “I mean, fried food upsets Richard’s stomach, so . . .”
Kirsten shot a look at Eleanor, then exhaled with determination. “Okay. This is fine. We’re gonna fix this.”
As if they sensed their moment, the fried pickles appeared on the bar. They each grabbed one, but before Teddy could take a bite, Kirsten said, “Wait! A toast.”
“A toast!” Eleanor agreed.
“To what?” Teddy asked.
“To . . . new things! Doing what scares us! Obliterating comfort zones! Deep-fried foods!”
“To deep-fried foods!” Teddy and Eleanor repeated, and then they all took a bite.
“Oh, no,” Eleanor said, opening her mouth.
“Hot,” Teddy said, sucking in a breath.
“Burning!” Kirsten shouted.
Teddy downed her water.
“Okay,” Kirsten said, fanning her mouth. “I forgot how hot those suckers get.”
“I think I burned the roof of my mouth,” Eleanor said sadly.
“But it was worth it,” Teddy said, grabbing another fried pickle and staring at it in wonder. “This is so good.”
A few slow piano notes played through the bar, and the girls turned to see who was onstage. Teddy dropped her pickle.
“Five-second rule!” Kirsten said.
“Kirsten, no!” Eleanor shouted. “No more eating things off bar floors.”
“Oh, no,” Teddy said.
Everett St. James was onstage and he was singing “The Beautiful Ones” by Prince, also known as one of the classic slow jams from the Purple Rain soundtrack.
“That’s the guy from the TV show!” Eleanor said, following Teddy’s gaze. “My kids love him.”
“He’s rocking the hell out of that falsetto,” Kirsten said with admiration. “But can I say that this is a supremely weird choice for karaoke? It’s, like, slow but . . . also strangely sexual?”
“I love it,” Teddy said, her voice coming out low. She coughed. “I mean . . . I love this song.”
“Really?” Kirsten asked. “Because I have never once heard you talk about Prince.”
Teddy shook her head. “We listen to this album all the time at the store. It’s Josie’s favorite. She especially loves the track about the woman masturbating in a hotel lobby, which I always tell her is inappropriate to play when there are children in the store.”
“Huh,” Eleanor said, nodding in appreciation. “Oh, he’s doing the spoken-word breakdown. He has a very soothing voice!”
“The crowd is loving this,” Kirsten said approvingly, and she was right. The crowd was loving it. People were waving their hands, and while no one would ever confuse a tall white puppeteer with Prince, the fact remained that Everett had really committed to this song.
Teddy bit her lip as Everett got down on his knees to screech out a particularly intense part of the song.
“Okay, I get it,” Kirsten said. “This guy has something about him.”
“A certain . . . je ne sais quoi, you might say,” Eleanor agreed.
“And he has nice hands,” Kirsten said. “Look at him up there gripping that microphone. Have I ever told you that the first thing that attracted me to the Viking was his hands?”
“You have told me this,” Eleanor said, sipping her drink. “Often and at length.”
Kirsten sighed fondly. “Sometimes I watch him holding a glass and I’m like, damn. Wish I was that glass.”
“Everett has very nice hands,” Teddy said, but so quiet that neither of her friends heard her.
The song ended, and Everett dropped the mic and jumped off the stage. People patted him on the back, and Teddy assumed this was it; he’d go back to his group of friends and head off into the night, and she would be able to continue her crush on him from afar.
But he didn’t head back to his table. In fact, he locked eyes with Teddy and moved straight toward her. The rest of the crowd turned blurry and faded and Everett was the only thing she could see. He was the color in a black-and-white room and he was headed right toward her.
“Holy crap,” Teddy muttered.
And then he was there. She’d known he was tall, and she knew from a lifetime of being in her own body that she was relatively short, but she was unprepared for the physical feeling of him standing directly in front of her. He took up all the space in the room, swallowed up all her attention and still asked for more, blocked the sun and was the sun all at the same time. He was Everett St. James, and he was looking at her.
“Hi,” he said, his wide, guileless smile, the same one he used for puppets and children, on his face.
“Mmmph,” Teddy said.
“I loved the song,” he said. “Pat Benatar rules.”
There were several things Teddy could have said. Maybe I loved your song, too. Or I like your show. Or even, if she was feeling bold, We’ve been sharing our innermost thoughts via email for a while now.
But what she actually said was “I’m sorry, I have to go throw up.”
And then she turned and fled.
“PLEASE TELL US what happened back there.”
Teddy was in the backseat of the Viking’s car with Eleanor, while Kirsten twisted around in the front seat to talk to them. The Viking had been kind enough to pick them up after Kirsten and Eleanor decided Teddy was too much of a puke risk for an Uber.
He turned up the local metal station, and Kirsten reached over to turn it down. “Not now, babe,” she said gently. “Teddy’s having a crisis.”
“Sometimes Pantera helps,” the Viking muttered, but he didn’t turn the radio back up.
“I’m not having a crisis,” Teddy said to her lap.
“Teddy, a man talked to you, and you said you had to puke and then ran away. That sounds like a crisis to me,” Kirsten said.
“In her defense, she did have to puke,” Eleanor said.
“I really did,” Teddy mumbled.
“Oh, I know. I was there,” Kirsten said. “But, like . . . what was up with you and that guy?”
Teddy sighed, looked out the window, then glanced back and forth between her two best friends (and also the Viking, who occasionally looked at her with concern in the rearview mirror). If she couldn’t tell the two people she loved most in the world and also one of their boyfriends about her bizarre, secret Internet pen pal relationship, then who could she tell?
So she told them.
She told them the whole story, about how she had emailed Everett in a fit of despair and it had scared her, but over time emailing a strange man she knew only from TV became less scary and more . . . comforting. Easier. Like talking to a friend. Like he was a friend now.
“Huh.” Eleanor tapped her chin. “Well, this is an interesting development.”
“This is great,” Kirsten said. “He’s cute. And he’s tall. And he seems nice.”
“Caring,” Eleanor added.
“Good with kids,” Kirsten said.
“Gentle,” the Viking added.
They all looked at him. “What?” he asked. “I watch TV, too.”
If tonight hadn’t happened, maybe Teddy never would have told everyone about Everett. It wasn’t that she thought they’d make fun of her, but . . . Well, okay, she kind of thought they might. After all, there was a part of it that was odd or at least unexpected. But she should’ve known her friends would never make her feel bad about something that mattered to her, even if the night did end with her vomiting in an alley.
“But he would never be into me. I mean, not me, me. The me in email, maybe. But ME?”
Eleanor scrutinized her. “You’re still drunk. How? You puked so much.”
“I mean . . .” Teddy sighed and looked out the window at the lights of the restaurants and shops as the Viking’s Honda Accord inched down the crowded street. A lit-up plastic jack-o’-lantern winked back at her from a bar window. “He was there with someone. With a girl. With four girls. He’s probably in a polygamous relationship. And he’s probably happy in his polygamous relationship with his four girlfriends. I bet he doesn’t even have time for a fifth girlfriend. Not that I want to be his fifth girlfriend. I want to be his only girlfriend. Or wait. I don’t wait to be his girlfriend at all! I just . . . Oh, forget it.”
She slumped against the side of the car, the window cold against her cheek, the slight bounce of the car rocking her to sleep.
“Wait!” Kirsten screeched so suddenly that everyone jumped, except for the Viking, who was apparently used to Kirsten yelling while he drove.
“What’s wrong?” Teddy asked, panicked.
“Pull in over there!” Kirsten frantically gestured across the street.
“Taco Bell?” Eleanor asked.
Kirsten smiled back at them. “This calls for Crunchwrap Supremes. Teddy, this dude is smoking. And he’s good with kids. And he’s gonna be so into you as soon as you tell him who you are.”
“Celebratory Crunchwrap Supremes!” Eleanor cheered. “The perfect drunchies!”
Teddy wrinkled her nose. “What’s a drunchie?”
“You sweet, innocent child,” Kirsten said with a headshake. “Drunk munchies. Drunchies. Something to shove down the ol’ gullet and soak up all the alcohol and questionable decisions. And trust me, the Taco Bell menu is scientifically designed to be perfect drunchies.”
As the Viking pulled into the drive-thru, Teddy couldn’t help but smile, even as she wondered if Taco Bell was actually the wisest decision right now. But whatever. Her friends remembered her ideal Taco Bell order and didn’t flinch when she puked and were happy when she was happy.
She might have mortally embarrassed herself in front of Everett St. James, but things weren’t so bad after all.