LOST AND FOUND, Chapter 1
I didn't realise my life had gotten so dull until tonight. I mean, decent job, nice apartment, great friends.
But here I am, 30 years old, on a friday night, it's 10 o'clock and I'm yawning like a grand-mother after indulging in a late bingo night.
I'm bored.
Alexis and Pen (Penelope, but don't call her that, if you value your life) are having a good time on the dance floor. Nathan is somewhere in here, probably flirting his ass off.
And I'm baby-sitting. As one does on a Friday night, in the biggest and fanciest disco in our capital. Pen's kid sister is in town, and Pen begged me to take them out, VIP couch and a bottle of champagne on ice, the whole shebang. It's Melody's first time in Paris and Pen really wanted her to have a great time. The company I work for being a pretty big name in the business world, I can score VIP admissions for about anything in town.
Problem is, Melody is a little spoiled brat. Granted, she is still young, the golden child of two retirees who found out they were pregnant again when Pen was 14, and now completely out of their depths on raising a teenager.
The girl is 16 and pretty, I'll give her that, but my god what a brat. Day one, VIP tour in Le Louvre, with a private guide no less, the little shit has been glued on her phone and rolling her eyes every ten seconds, according to a hissing Pen, furious, fed up, ready to smack the girl silly and send her back home in the first train heading south. She thought a fancy evening would please the princess, but so far, no cigar.
She pouted in the car, because Nathan refused to flirt with her, reminding her kindly and with his typical elephant-in-a-china-shop diplomacy that he was not, indeed, a pedophile. She pouted from the first minute at the disco because we did not, ladies and gentleman, opt for a bottle of vodka. She is sixteen, for heaven's sake.
And now she was pouting because... hell, I don't know. I don't even care at that point. I just want to go home and sleep.
"HEY, YOU". I don't even have to look up. Only Nathan thinks everybody's deaf when he's drunk. The volume coming out of this guy's mouth would make Pavarotti jealous. He throws himself on the couch next to me, fans himself with the menu. "It's fucking hot in here", he screams, his hand in the ice bucket. Nathan is at home everywhere he goes, and sees no problem in opening his black button-up all the way and sliding an ice cube on his chest and stomach.
Melody can't keep her eyes from him and I snort. "Yeah, super hot".
I can't even blame the girl. I mean, look at him:1m89 of pure muscle, celtic tattoos, blond curls and blue eyes. He was a gymnast in our youth, until an injury stopped him on his olympic path. Now he is 30, models for a sports magazine once in a while, and owns a gym where he trains kids. If Chris Hemworth hadn't made the casting, Nathan would have been the next Thor. A great guy all in all, the only one who could call us three ‘babygirl’ and still live. The only inconvenience of going out with the guy is the amount of drooling he left in his trace: not him. His... fans. Women, men, young and old, there are actual flocks slobbering the ground he walks on.
Said demi-god still ignoring her, Melody tries to alleviate her pout to the next level. Give her five minutes and she'll look like a baboon.
"Nathan, what a great idea". Limbs flying around to cool off, here come the two last terrors of our little quartet. Alexis, blond, green eyes, the body of Jessica Rabbit and a mouth foul enough to make a sailor faint. Kind, sweet Pen, as smallish as I am, but slim to the point of skinny, doe eyes, her auburn hair always falling fancily on her shoulders like a L'Oreal model.
And then there's me, Jaimie. Also short, curly and curvy, and feeling like the gang's gramma right now.
"What's up with you?". That's Al, always looking out for us. If she wasn't golden blond and sexy as a Tex Avery's cartoon, she would be a perfect stereotype Italian mother: hawkeyed, missing nothing and caring to the point of overbearing.
"Nothing, I guess I'm just tired". I can't shake this feeling, something is amiss and I don't know what, but I won't go into that tonight and spoil the fun. Hell, if they let me, I won't go into that, period. I love my friends to bits, but opening up is not one of my talents. With the walls I built, I'm living in fucking Alcatraz.
But anyhoo, back to our disco evening. We, well at least the sweaty bunch, take the time to cool down, we finish our drinks and talk vaguely about taking a vacation together in a few weeks. Miss pouty goes on... well, you know, and we decide to call it a night.
Pen's studio being too small, she had asked me beforehand if her sister could stay at my place: the rented apartment, well, penthouse, is part of my job's contract, and compared to her place, it's Versailles, without all the gold and lights. Knowing the brat, I suggested they both should stay with me for the duration of miss spoiled's week in Paris. Nate and Al don't live in the center, so on week-ends they sleep at my place more often than not. So it's as a quartet plus one moody child that we all fall through my front door at 2 in the morning. Pen drags her sister in one room, Nathan, being the king he is, gets one for himself, and Alexis sleeps with me.
And sleep she does.
Only poor me is lying next to her, staring at the ceiling, exhausted but restless.
What is wrong with me? Everything is well in my life, I haven't heard anything from Paul, or, as Al calls him, the crazy shithead, who finally seems to understand that after two years, no, I won't come back to him and yes, I can live without him, thank you very much.
Is 30 years old the correct age for a middle age crisis?
Al mumbles in her sleep and turns. Funny, even in her sleep she can't shut up. She kept talking about taking that vacation, this evening...
Maybe we all need one. I work long hours, driven by an American boss who considers a day without meeting a day not lived, and talks quotas in his sleep, I'm sure of it. I get it, as the head of an office specialised in audits and customer satisfaction evaluations, it's his wine and bread. His, not mine. I just happen to work there.
Nathan works hard too, and I think he didn't take any time off since last summer when we all went on a vacation together, as our crazy quartet does every year.
I smile at that. Crazy quartet indeed... We all met ages ago, when the 4 of us landed in the same class in high school. I knew Pen because we had some classes in common in middle school, Pen knew Al because they were taking the bus together. Nathan and I were friends, in the same class since middle school, and I was the only girl not fawning over him. He was gorgeous, even then, but he's blond and I like guys with brown hair, don't judge me.
First day of high school, he automatically came to sit next to me, we were already great friends by then. Pen, seeing a familiar face, chose the table before ours, and Al simply followed her. The rest is history. Mischief, school, long evening studying together, our friendship survived everything. Different studies and universities, different locations. Al's studying to be a physiotherapist meant we barely saw her for a few years, she disappeared with her nose in the books and internship. Then her change of education and new career as a journalist. Pen at La Sorbonne to become a teacher, Nathan's olympic dream crumbling, my father's death...
Crazy enough, we all landed in Paris within a year. More crazy, we're all 30 now and still single. Dates have come and gone. After a few years with the same guy and six epic months of living together, Pen sent him back to his mother. She says she can't live with someone, and that she never will. King Nathan flirts a lot, but he is too used to people fawning over his looks and relative fame, and despite his easy going nature, does not trust anyone enough to open up. And Al... oh Al. For years, she was a hopeless romantic. Every guy was the one because "Jaimie I swear I love him". But she fell out of love as quickly "I mean, after 4 months together, I discover that he wakes up at 5 every morning and start his day by making a fucking smoothie, Jaimie, can you blame me for not seeing a future with the guy?". And after a few years of that diet, she decided that no guy was better than the wrong one.
Then, there's little me. Only one noticeable flirt in my youth. Then I met Paul when I came to live in Paris. My first job was in the marketing department of a big warehouse. I was shy, unsure this job was the right one, and he swept me right off my feet. Charming, helpful, tall, with brown hair and brown eyes. He offered to show me the job's ropes, and all went well for a while, before he got a promotion, and climbing the ladder higher made him feel bigger than me. Slowly, but surely, he worked on sabotaging me, step by step. He was subtle, at first, questioning if I was sure the word I used was the right one, or if this blouse was really fancy enough for our dinner out. The questions made place for critics, "for my sake". I shouldn't eat that, I shouldn't go out tonight. I should do more sports… It took him giving me an order, one evening, to realise that one, he was controlling my whole life, and that two, little independent me had disappeared in his web of rules and fear to disappoint him. Of course, it was my gang that saved me: he had forbidden me to go out for Pen's birthday. He knew: our birthdays are sacred. We are our own family, and since we were sixteen, we have never, ever missed each other's birthday. And still, he chose this evening to turn the screws on my mental shackles even tighter, with a death grip on my wrist and his other hand lifted up to strike me, and I snapped. For the first time in my life, I screamed, yelled, and, when he tried to lock the door, I threw a bottle of wine at his head. I lived with Al for a while after that, quit my job, then lived with Nathan, before being hired where I am now.
And finally, after 2 years of calling, texting, even begging, Paul has been silent for the last 2 months. So I should be happy now, right?
Right.
But I don't sleep at all, that night.
The following days are an exhausting circus at my place. We spend the whole weekend together, as we often do, and go on the touristic path to entertain the un-entertainable Melody. Melody is the Titanic of entertainment. You throw her a nice museum, a meal in one of the most exclusive restaurants in the world, a private tour of Paris' catacombes, but all ideas sink in a sea of sights, rolling eyes, and yes, pouts. We're all very happy to push her in a train, wave her goodbye, wish her parents luck, and go on with our merry life.
Only in my case, not so merry. I still don't sleep well and nothing seems to break the gray of routine and simple things anymore. I've even tried exercising, for heaven's sake. Oh, only once! After an hour of wheezing, sweating and praying for an early death at Nathan's gym, followed by a week of walking on creaky knees and crampy calves, I threw my sneakers in the Seine... and ... Naaah, just kidding, I gave them to a thrift shop, I'm not a monster. Anyway, this was the end of my 'sport is healthy' madness.
But it didn't help my sleep problem. At all.
Of course, Auntie Carole is following my case closely, our weekly calls now a long series of explanations of the moon cycles, which hour is the best to drink herbal tea, and would not a cristal under my pillow be the solution. 68, and Auntie Carol is still the free spirited hippie she was at 20. But I love her to bits, and despite her dreamy ideas, she actually knows shit and she loves me as if I were her own daughter.
