I’m the only one freaked out, though. My followers immediately start liking it.
Ooooh!!! Tell me.
I wonder if someone is trying to blackmail me. I feel like I’m about to receive a text asking for a million dollars or they’ll announce some dirty secret I don’t want the world to know. On the flip side, if they reveal my dirty secret at least I’ll know something about myself. That’d be nice for a change.
But I’m practical, and I don’t like being a sitting duck. After I share the post with Max via text with an appropriate WTF! message (because this is the kind of news you need to share with your BFF), I go about figuring out how to solve the problem. After finding Report Something and then Hacked Accounts in my app, which feels like a Veronica Mars—like accomplishment in and of itself, I explain the issue: I’VE BEEN HACKED! SAVE ME! Et cetera, et cetera. It’s so satisfying fixing problems without talking to people.
I’m crossing things off my to-do list like one of those women who answers emails while on the treadmill.
* * *
The Long Beach Museum of Art is housed in a decaying million-dollar beach house. It looks like a house flipper’s wet dream, like you could buy it for one million, fix all the chipped paint, and then sell it for ten. Never mind the fact that a good chunk of California’s 109,000 homeless people camp out on the beach below.
A ticket is going to cost me too much of JP’s sock drawer money. The dude at the admissions counter looks exactly like who you’d expect to work in an art museum: underfed and pale.15 He doesn’t look like a reliable witness, unless you want to know where to score dope, but I give him a chance. “Do you remember a party here on Tuesday?”
He gives me a snooty look and says, “Would you like admission to our special exhibit as well?” He proceeds to tell me about the exhibit, something about the evolution of self-portraiture, blah blah blah. It’s called MySelfie.16
I’m pretty sure I could tell him a few things about selfies.
“So about Tuesday,” I say. “Were you working?”
“Tuesday…” He taps his pen and squints. “Tuesday…hmmm, I wasn’t working. I can check to see who was, though.” He pauses to think. “Maybe Ben, I don’t know. Are you asking about that thing that happened?”
“What thing?” My pulse quickens. Maybe this derelict will help me before I even have to pay the admission fee.
“There was a fancy party for the opening of MySelfie. Some mystery chick left the party in an ambulance.”
Me.
A little girl starts screaming like I would if I were to express how excited I am about the clue. Her plight to get another juice box—I’m not feeling that. Her parents are urgently digging through a diaper bag as if the world will end if they don’t pop a Capri Sun in her mouth. As soon as she stops screaming, I’m going to find out what happened to me.
The mom, thank God, finally solves the problem by handing the kid her phone—thank you forever and ever, Steve Jobs—and my guy starts talking again. “My boss was all freaked out. He thought she might sue the museum for whatever happened.”
“What happened?”
He shrugs. “At first the story was that she slipped and fell, but now there’s a rumor circulating about the executive director’s mistress and his wife getting into a fistfight at the sushi table. Last I heard, they were both pregnant.”
When he catches the look of shock on my face (Mistress? PREGNANT?), he says, “Who knows what really happened. Might have just been performance art. Really, that’s probably what it was.” He smiles.
I touch my stomach, which does not feel pregnant. There’s no way this Prada gown would fit me if I were pregnant. Not to mention, Dr. Patel definitely would have mentioned a pregnancy. I am decidedly Not. Pregnant.
He makes eye contact with me, as if he’s going to say something important. “I wish someone had invited me to the party. I’m a bit of an actor.”
I have to stop myself from rolling my eyes. “You don’t have a guest or donor list, do you?”
“I was in a commercial last year. Maybe you’ve seen it…”
OMG. “What was the commercial for?” I ask through clenched teeth.
“It was for this surf shop in Huntington Beach.” He pulls up the party guest list on his computer while telling me about how he was “in the commercial, but not the star of it.” I stare at him with a frozen smile. “Who do you want me to look up?” he asks.
Obviously I was there, but I ask anyway. “Are there any Mias on the list?” I bet I’m a regular on guest and donor lists around here.
“What’s the last name?”
“Um, not sure. I don’t know her that well.” Understatement of the year.
“Uhhh…” He scans the list and announces, “No Mias.”
Frustration threatens to cloud my optimism but I square my shoulders and literally put my chin up. I’ve only been out of this coma for a little over twenty-four hours. I’m gonna get there.
“How about JP Howard?”
He scans the list again. “Oh, he’s always on the list. He donated a Rembrandt or something last year. I don’t know how much it’s worth, but it’s a lot.” Then a big lopsided smile takes over his face. “And here’s my duuuude.” He nods with appreciation and I see the name Frederick Montcalm.
“Your dude?”
“My boss, as in knocked-up two chicks and caused a fist fight. I want to be him when I grow up.”
I channel Veronica Mars17 again and sidle up next to him. I need to see that address.
“Umm…” he says. “What are you doing over here?”
I get it. I’m on the wrong side of the desk, but if he wants to be a ladies’ man like that boss he thinks is so cool, this is his chance. While he tries to figure out if my flirty smile and proximity mean that I’m into him, I sidle up even closer and scan the list. Frederick Montcalm lives on Balboa Avenue in Laguna Beach.
Before he can pull out his phone to show me his commercial on YouTube, I sneak away, leaving him to watch himself not starring in a commercial. A “hey” echoes unanswered in the cavernous lobby when he realizes that I am definitely not that into him. I’ve already moved on to the exhibits.
I should be sort of happy—I mean, I’m closer to finding out more about myself, but a feeling of existential dread is eating at the frayed edges of my tentative happiness. I’m just a nameless woman who got her head smashed in at some party where I wasn’t even a guest. I was probably JP’s plus one. No big deal, but…who am I? It’s not like I’m some 1950s housewife who goes by Mrs. JP Howard and lives in the shadow of my husband. I’m a Millennial with a decent Insta following and an undercut.