I awoke with an all-drum band going to town in my head, improvising alternatively between meringue, salsa, and a little-known genre of drum music I like to call ‘fuck you, Lacey, fuck you so hard for drinking that much, are you a fucking idiot, oh God I want to die, let me just die if it will only end this pain.’ It’s kind of obscure, but I myself am well-acquainted with its many fascinating variations.
“Fuuuuuuuuuck,”I moaned, and rolled over to blink blearily at the alarm clock. The fuzzy red numerals informed me that it was noon. Noon—there was something important about noon. Work? My heart seized up in a moment of panic before I remembered that it was my weekend off; I wasn’t scheduled to go in till Monday. So, not work then. Oh well. It would come to me.
I let my head fall back into the pillow. Pillows were great. The whole world should be made of great big fleecy pillows, and darkness, and silence. Oh God. That had definitely been too much champagne last night. Was it possible to actually die of a hangover? I would definitely be testing that theory to its limit this morning—er, afternoon. Oh God. Why me? Couldn’t this hangover and its pounding headache have gone to someone who deserved it, like a terrorist or an embezzler or Grant Fucking Devlin? There was no justice in the world. Just blaring noonday light, and that endless pounding drumming sound— Bam, bam, bam. BAM.
Wait a minute.
BAM.
That drumming was not coming from inside my head. It was coming from…my front door? How long had whoever it was been knocking there? Someone was really fucking determined.
If it was Grant, he better have brought an entire year’s production of aspirin and the annual coffee crop of a random Latin American country if he wanted me to refrain from ripping his head off.
“Hold on a damn minute!” I yelled, and immediately regretted it as the sound waves of my own voice crashed through my head. Wincing and muttering every curse word I could think of, I stood up.
The frantic pounding at the door, if anything, intensified.
“I swear to God,”I muttered, as softly as I could to keep pain from lancing through my head as I shuffled to the door,“I will cut his balls off and mail them to China first class and send him the bill. I will carve him like sliced ham and feed him to that witch Portia on an artisan sandwich.”
Something about this last sentence made me pause as it rang a mental bell, something familiar about what I had said, something I was supposed to remember—it was gone. Ah well. The ridiculous threats were making me feel marginally better, so I continued them as I advanced across my apartment towards the cacophony that was currently my front door, shuffling as slowly as I could both to avoid stepping on anything small and painful, and because I was feeling a perverse pleasure in taking as long as possible to answer whatever entitled jackass was at the door—like I didn’t already know it was Grant, the asshole, probably back to mock me some more.
“I will call a press conference and tell the world that he has a tiny dick and a crippling addiction to reality television.”I remembered Grant’s distaste at the state of modern television, and allowed myself a wicked smirk at the thought of twisting that particular knife.
I tried to look through the peephole, but it was dark; damn teenagers kept sticking gum over it as a joke. I called through the door:“Who the hell is it?”
“It’s noon, Lacey, for heaven’s sake,”Kate’s voice shrilled through the keyhole. I winced; I love that girl, but that particular tone was cutting through my skull like a buzz-saw.“Open up, open up, open up!”
My hand was barely finished pulling up the latch when Kate barreled through the doorway like a tornado that had been through a printing house. The San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, the SF Weekly, the San Francisco Bay Guardian…she could have opened up a newsstand with just what she had in her left hand.
She promptly dumped them on the floor in front of me.
“What the hell—” I shrieked, my surprise triumphing over my short-term memory, and once again instantly regretted raising my voice.
“Don’t‘what the hell’me, Lacey Newman,” Kate said.
She grabbed a first page at random, and I cringed at the full color photo of me in the sleek little black dress—considerably sleeker in the photo than on me now, rumpled with a full night’s sleep and speckled with green mattress lint from my futon bed—gasping in surprise and apparent delight as I looked down at my hand and a diamond so big it looked like it had been chipped from the idol of some forgotten god in an Indiana Jones movie.