With a Little Luck: A Novel Page 2

  I didn’t know any of this until Jason explained it to me. He also explained that he never gets any credit on the movies, which seemed kind of unfair, but he assured me he was crying all the way to the bank. Personally, I cry at the bank, too, most often after viewing my account balance.

  But getting back to the party: Jason is wearing a bandana on his head, a sweatshirt, short shorts, and kneesocks—the kind with the colored bands at the top. He looks like a character from a Wes Anderson film, which presumably is what he was going for. Jason always encourages people to come to Game Night dressed as a recognizable character from a movie, and the best costume wins a prize. He’s not strictly recognizable, but the shamelessness wins in my book, anyway. I didn’t dress as anyone but me, because even that can be a challenge and it’s not Halloween. Then again, with my newly ripped sweater maybe I’m a homeless person or a survivor in one of those post-nuclear-holocaust movies. Or maybe I’m a Freddy Krueger victim. Or—even worse—I’m Freddy Krueger! He wears a sweater, right?

  I swallow my concerns and put on my game face as Jason kisses me on the cheek, takes the champagne, and subtly spins me around—forcing me into a face-to-face with, you guessed it: Everybody Eyes—I mean Dies. The (kinda adorable) bastard stands before me, smirking. I find myself glancing back and forth between his eyes and the gun on his chest.

  “Like my shirt?” he asks.

  “It’s quite uplifting,” I say.

  “Everybody dies,” he says, with a knowing nod.

  “Yes,” I reply. “I believe that was the original title of that R.E.M. song. But it seemed like a downer, so Michael Stipe went with ‘Everybody Hurts’ instead.”

  “We didn’t actually meet before,” he says, and extends his hand. “I’m Dustin.”

  “Hi, Justin,” I reply.

  “Dustin,” he says.

  “I’m sorry. I’m Berry.”

  “Well, which is it—you’re sorry, or you’re Berry?”

  “I’m Berry. With an e.”

  “She means she’s berry sorry,” Jason says.

  “Berry like the fruit,” I overexplain. “Not with an a, like Barry Williams from The Brady Bunch.” How many times have I said that? Enough to want to never hear myself say it again. Yet there it was. Does anyone even know who Barry Williams is? Do I watch too much Nick at Nite? While I’m lost in my thoughts, is Justin/Dustin saying something else?

  He is: “Or bury. Like, with a u.”

  I smile. “You know, everybody dies, but not everyone is buried.”

  He smiles. My, that’s a nice smile. “Berry.”

  “Berry,” I confirm.

  “Good,” Jason says. “Now that you both know her name so well, you can be on the same team.”

  “Great,” I say.

  “Berry’s single,” Jason adds, immediately walking away in a supreme act of assitude, leaving Justin (no … Dustin) and me to stew in that teeming vat of awkward.

  I’m going to ask that we pause for a moment here. Yes, I’m single. But was that necessary? Did Jason need to point it out like some yenta matchmaker? And on a scale of one to totally desperate, how did I just rate? So what if I haven’t had a boyfriend in … um … a very long time? It hasn’t been strictly my fault. I’ve had bad luck. Case in point: People are opening umbrellas indoors, right into me. How’s a person supposed to find love with that kind of thing going on all around her?

  “I don’t know why he said that,” I tell Dustin. (Yes. Dustin.) “That was … really unnecessary.”

  “Not necessarily unnecessary,” Dustin says, grinning. Dustin is undeniably good-looking. And charming. My mood lightens as together we move into Game Room One.

  “Hey, man!” some guy says to Dustin, raising a hand for a high-five. “Congrats on the Grammy!”

  I watch Dustin carefully in this moment—partially because I’m wondering what this Grammy business is (he won a Grammy?), but more important, I’m wondering how he’ll respond to a high-five. This is far more critical than it might sound. I myself am not a high-fiver. I suppose it’s sort of a “dude” thing, but still, it gives me pause.

  Dustin responds to the high-five in kind. I suppose it would be rude to leave the guy hanging … but anyway, what’s this Grammy business?

  “You won a Grammy?” I ask. “That’s huge.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” he says.

  “Should I know who you are? You’re not Kanye West, are you?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Wow. You’re all kinds of famous. And, well … occasionally hated.”

  “Only by friends, acquaintances, and immediate family,” he corrects. “I’m actually a record producer. And I haven’t ever worked with Kanye, but I’d love to.”

  “We all have our own crosses to bear,” I say, taking a sip from my drink.

  “That’s what Jesus said.”

  That’s when I spit on him. No, let me clarify: My drink suddenly came spraying out of my mouth, all over Dustin’s completely-ridiculous-but-man-it-sure-is-growing-on-me T-shirt.

  “Oh, my,” I say, attempting to dab his shirt dry.

  “You’re trying to get me back for ruining your sweater, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, that’s it,” I say. “I was locked and loaded. Thank God you cracked a joke. I was about to drown.” I look away in embarrassment.

  “So what do your days entail?” he asks, sensing that I’m horrified and generously trying to change the subject.

  “Eating, mostly,” I say. “Errands. Taking my dog to the dog park.”

  “Okay, let’s get back to the dog in a minute. No job, huh? Trust-fund baby? Wow, I knew I liked you. Come to Poppa.…”

  “Ha! I wish. I work nights. In radio, actually. KKCR.”

  Dustin steps backward and smacks himself on the head. I didn’t know people actually did that in real life. “Classic rock! Shit, you’re Berry Lambert!”

  “I am.” He’s heard of me? Wasn’t the “Berry” part a giveaway? How many Berrys does he know? Chuck Berry? Fred Berry? Franken Berry?

  “I should have recognized your voice,” he says, and I must admit, I never get tired of hearing that. And now we have even more to talk about, and it seems my luck is changing.

  Things progress famously from there. We’ve just won our seventh round of charades, with Dustin acting out the iconic scene in Saved by the Bell when Jessie gets hooked on caffeine pills and has a major meltdown: “I’m so excited, I’m so excited, I’m so, I’m so … scared!”

  I turn to Dustin: “Do you ever feel like a total fraud? Like you have no idea how you’ve even scraped by this far without the whole world finding out? Sometimes I can’t believe they pay me to do what I do.”

  “Every day,” he says.

  “Really?” I implore. Maybe it’s the fact that I drank a whole beer (don’t believe what you hear about radio folk—I’m a total lightweight), or maybe it’s because I really feel the need to connect, but it seems like I can really talk to this guy.

  “Shit, yes,” he says. “I get paid to turn knobs and listen to music all day. The truth is, it’s all the artist. Remember when Don Was hit the scene and everyone said he was a genius producer? Well, he produced Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones! Give me Kobe and Shaq, and I’ll be a Phil Jackson ‘genius,’ too. Half the time, I ask someone in the room, ‘How’s this?’ And they say, ‘It needs something—maybe more compression on the rhythm guitar or gate it a little.’ So I pretend to turn a knob and ask, ‘What about now?’ And they say, ‘Yeah, that’s better,’ even though nothing’s changed. So yeah, I hear ya. I’m in constant fear of being found out and forced to grow up.”

  “Oh my God,” I say and laugh. “You kinda jumped metaphors with Kobe and Shaq, but I get it. I so get it. That’s me. On the radio. Wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. Or when I’m gonna walk in and find out that they’ve hired someone even younger and cheaper than me, or someone with some kind of formal training, or even worse—our station’s gone completely sans DJs and the
y’re having everything done via computer. After all, it’s classic rock as in ‘classic.’ All the songs are good by definition, so how hard is it to pick ’em? I mean, if I was a DJ for a ‘mediocre rock’ station and everyone listened to my show, now that would be talent.”

  We talk like this the whole time we’re not acting out an animal, event, or movie title (Dustin would have been arrested in the Middle East for how he mimed Cocktail), and together we win first prize for our team. We decide to celebrate by going out for a drink, which turns into an all-night make-out session on my couch. I never take guys home with me—stop it, I know what you’re thinking; it’s true—but Dustin and I really seemed to click. We got each other’s jokes and seemed to have everything in common, from a love of churros (delicious) to almost identical scars on our right arms (his from a broken wrist, mine from an unruly toaster oven) to having the same favorite I Love Lucy episode (you know the one: “Slowly I turned …”).

  When you barely know a guy and you take him home with you, I guess it’s pretty much a given that you’re gonna sleep with him. So I don’t. I figure all the girls in the music industry probably just sleep with him at the drop of a hat. More specifically, the drop of his pants. (Or whatever. Something usually drops; that’s my point.) Regardless, I draw the line at not-so-heavy petting. I want to stand out. Not be like all the other girls.

  “This is super-fun and all,” I say, gently pushing him away and sliding his fingers out of the all-too-convenient hole in my sweater. I look into his now-most-definitely hazel eyes. “But I don’t want to give you the wrong idea.”

  “That you like me?”

  “That I’m a whore.”

  “Sweet. So I don’t have to pay you?”

  “I’m serious,” I say. “I kind of like you. And I never like anyone, so I don’t want to screw this up by being a total slutbag.”

  “What if I like slutbags?”

  He kisses me again, and it’s a major effort to pull away, but I do. My thinking is this: Maybe the umbrella wasn’t bad luck at all. Maybe it was good luck. Maybe all of my silly fears have been just that. You don’t know how big this could be for me. This could be huge. Maybe his umbrella was meant to snag my sweater just so we would meet. I am definitely not going to ruin this.

  I sigh and mentally dig in my heels. “I … think you should take off.”

  “My clothes?”

  He’s all smiles. It is increasingly hard to say no. So I don’t.

  “Yes,” I say. “Most definitely yes. But some other time.”

  “Okay …” he says, rising from my couch. The word “rising” sticks in my mind, and I almost reconsider. But no. I’m going to do this one the right way.

  I walk him to the door and store my number in his iPhone. He kisses me on my forehead and pulls me in for a hug. He says he’ll call me tomorrow, and I feel almost giddy as I close the door behind him.

  Oh, Dustin. Dustin. My adorable, hilarious, clumsy, poorly dressed Dustin.

  It was Dustin, right?

  It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.

  —ALICE, FROM ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND

  Chapter Two

  Five days have passed since the Night of the Dustin, and it’s painfully clear that my choosing to be “less easy” has inspired his choosing to “not call me again.”

  I’m disappointed but resigned to my fate. Such is life. “School” by Nirvana should be my theme song. “Won’t you believe it? It’s just my luck.”

  Who has time for relationships, anyway? (Is what people who aren’t in relationships tell themselves.) Honestly, though, my hours really do make it tough. And I have other kinds of relationships. For instance, the Chinese restaurant around the corner knows my order without me having to say word one. (Or #52.) I don’t even need to tell them my name most of the time. You know you’re a regular customer when they answer the phone and say, “Hi, Berry. Same thing?” The diner across the street? Same. Granted, I like things the way I like them, and I take comfort in rituals. You might even say that sometimes I feel like if I don’t order the exact same thing, the space-time continuum will be thrown off, and if I’m having a good week it will suddenly turn to shit. And of course, like all things, it could be a coincidence, but the proof is in the pudding. Especially if I order custard instead.

  One change in my routine can set off a bunch of reactive dominoes that start with there being nothing left in the perpetually stale pot of coffee at work and end with one of my usual unusual listeners threatening suicide if I don’t play “Sara Smile” by Hall & Oates. (I still think Oates got too much credit, but if he played a role in saving a life, I’m almost willing to forgive him anything. Except the mustache.) I only wish I was making that up. Regular radio listeners are a very special animal. They tend to call in, well, regularly. They tend to think they know you. They tend to be insane.

  Remember, these are not new songs. These people can buy and listen to the CD or download the songs from the Internet anytime they want. But I get it. There’s just something magical about requests on the radio. It brings back memories for “Mike from the Valley” of that night twenty years ago when he lost his virginity in the back of his parents’ Dodge Dart. You know the story. “Whole Lotta Love” by Led Zeppelin came on the radio right when he was getting a “whole lotta love,” and now he just needs to hear that song again tonight. But for every sad sack reliving his glory days and each crazy calling you from his tinfoil hat to tell you that his pet parakeet wants to warn the world that the end is near, there will be some nice person who heard you mention a pounded chicken dish three weeks earlier and will track down the recipe and send it in so you can try it out.

  Of course, then there are the people who will actually cook the chicken and bring it to you. Like I’m gonna eat that? Twenty percent of all listeners hate the DJs they listen to—it’s a fact; you can look it up—and nobody’s looking for a cyanide surprise to brighten up their day—or put an end to it. So you have to assume that these people know you won’t eat their food, as nice a gesture as it may be. And of course I feel bad when it’s some little old lady who bakes chocolate-chip cookies and you just know they’re not poisoned. But do you really know? Everyone has briefly, if mostly innocently, fantasized about killing someone at some point. I sure have. In fact, that little old lady is just like me. Except a lot older. And kinda shriveled up. Also, she smells kinda weird. And she has shifty wee old-lady eyes. Come to think of it, I’m calling the police.

  So like everything, my audience is a mixed bag. But I tend to think the good outweighs the bad. Then again, I try to be a glass-half-full person. Although I stand by my theory that if you measure your happiness by the amount of liquid you have in your glass, you are either a cliché or an alcoholic.

  Brace yourself: I’m going to come clean. My actual first name is Beryl. Quite possibly the ugliest name you’ve ever heard for a girl, right? Don’t be shy. It is. I accept it. (Well, I accept it to the point of never going by it, at least.) Nobody’s ever called me that—I’ve always gone by Berry—but it does say Beryl on my birth certificate. It’s pronounced like “barrel,” as in Cracker Barrel or Crate & Barrel or “barrel of monkeys.” The name is of Greek origin, and it means light green semiprecious stone. I’d argue that I am entirely precious as opposed to semi, but if I had any bargaining power to begin with, I would have chosen a different name altogether. The word “beryl” is actually taken from the Sanskrit term “verulia,” and the beryl was biblically considered a token of good luck.

  So now you are fully up to speed on the etymology of my first name. I hope you appreciate this little detour through ancient languages, but there is a point—the reason my dad was so insistent on my name. The minute someone told him Beryl meant “luck,” there was no changing his mind, because my dad, for better or worse (but almost always for worse), is a gambler. It’s what makes him who he is. It’s why my mom fell in love with him and why she ultimately left him.

  So the su
perstition thing—I know it’s kind of stupid. I know a lot of people don’t buy into it, and that’s fine for them. Or you, if you fall into that category. Me? If I hit two red lights in a row on my way to work I might as well just turn around and go home, because I know it’s going to be a bad day.

  Sadly, I can’t do that because I work at a radio station, and if I don’t show up two things will happen simultaneously: a) they’ll have dead air, and b) I’ll be fired. But the fact remains that it will be a bad day. That could mean that my board-op will be in a mood, and that happens more often than I’d like, or it could mean that my boss is on a tear because our competitor station is beating us in the ratings, or it could simply mean that I will have a bad hair day, fight with my mom, or get mayo on a sandwich after I expressly state “no mayo.” And really, what is with that? Why the seemingly compulsive need to force mayo, folks? When will it be universally banned unless being used to make something beginning and ending with tuna? Because that is the only acceptable use, and even then—please use sparingly.

  I wouldn’t buy into it if nine times out of ten my superstitions weren’t confirmed. But they are. They say that everything happens in threes.… It’s true. One famous person dies and two more will follow. You get a paper cut and stub your toe? Count on biting your lip the next time you eat a piece of fruit. But fear not, it works in the reverse as well. You meet a great guy and get a promotion at work.… You’re bound to find that pair of jeans that’s been missing since October of two years ago.