Don't Worry, It Gets Worse by Alida Nugent

Author:Alida Nugent [Nugent, Alida]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101613825
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

The Grilled Cheese That Changed My Life

It’s a Friday night, just late enough to be almost too late to leave the house, and I am running back and forth between my closet and the TV during the commercial breaks of the Sex and the City movie. I want to make sure I don’t miss the part where Carrie gets dumped minutes before her wedding. It’s my favorite part. She beats him with flowers while wearing a bird on her head and it’s some Lynchian-film-student-wore-some-stilettos kinda shit. I have a handful of my new best friend—chips that are baked, not fried, and which smell like feet—and I’m sipping gin through a straw.

“Girls’ night OUT,” I chirp to no one. I am staring sideways into the full-length mirror after doing a quick jump-thigh shimmy-jump into a cheap black dress, checking to see if you can see the Spanx line. A pound of hairspray and fifteen layers of one-dollar wet n wild lipstick later, and I am ready to go. I am a shrine to Victoria’s Secret fragrances. I am suck-your-stomach-in Barbie. I am tottering on high heels and hoping that nobody notices my love handles. I notice them, and I keep making dry CBS-approved jokes to the mirror about how they should call them hate handles. I am hoping nobody notices my muffin top. I notice it, and like an amateur female standup comic somewhere in Reno, I could go on for five to seven minutes about it.

I flip the channel to Mean Girls while I finish my drink.

“I want to lose three pounds,” Regina George says.

How funny, I think, as I walk outside of my apartment, trying not to catch glimpses of myself in car mirrors. So do I.

* * *

Girls have trouble simply hanging out. There’s always a reason for getting together, a declarative statement that ends with somebody saying, “We better just meet Friday for drinks…to DISCUSS.” We don’t just “meet for drinks” because it’s Tuesday. There’s always some terrifying underlying tone for the meet-up—perhaps your friend is passive-aggressively going to confront you for spending too much time with your boyfriend. Maybe you need to talk for six hours about your friends who aren’t there, or what kind of haircut you should get. Perhaps your friend needs to talk for three sangria carafes about how Blake, a guy who looks like he barrel-rolled straight out of his fraternity into her arms, didn’t call her this weekend (just say it: He hates her).

In this case, my friend Danielle and I decided to have one of those nights because we were sick and tired of spending hours on the Internet talking about how happy we were being single. It’s all we did, like old people love talking about how they used to be young. We were raving about it so much that we didn’t notice we had poured chocolate and hot sauce all over our pajamas and it had set in and we had become cemented to the floor. Like plants, we needed to be brought out into sunlight and watered and taken care of.

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