“He’s a huge guy. Like you said, he could have turned on me any time. It wasn’t exactly fun.”
“I know,” I said. “And I can’t thank you enough.”
“Not nearly enough,” she said, whirling on me. “But I didn’t do it just for you, Dana. You never see the big picture, do you? You don’t read the forums or listen to the stories, so you don’t get it. The problem is so much bigger than what happened to you. These guys do the same thing, over and over again, until somebody finally stands up to them. You have to find a way to hurt them more than they can hurt you.”
I took it in silently. I’d said that what mattered to me was that it wouldn’t happen to anyone else. But what had brought me over to Amanda’s apartment tonight? What had filled me with joy on the bridge with Kim earlier today? Wasn’t it just that Neely wasn’t my problem anymore?
“Anyway, you got what you wanted,” Amanda said, as if she could read my guilty thoughts. “Buy me a drink sometime, I guess.”
“What do you want me to do?” I said, exasperated. “Go find your ex-boyfriend and get revenge? He’s kind of far away, isn’t he? Believe me, if I could be in Los Angeles right now, I already would be.”
“If he lived in Austin, you’d do it?” she said, looking out over the city.
“Probably,” I said. Then, struck by a sudden impulse to firm up the lie: “Yes. Yes, I would.”
“Doug Branchik, my old boss from Runnr.” She took another sip. “He lives here now.”
“In Austin?”
Amanda uncurled her index finger from around the bowl of the glass of wine and slowly extended her arm. “There. He lives right there.”
What?” I said, ducking instinctively. “Where?”
“Across the street. The balcony with the orange deck chairs.”
“Amanda—” The slender ledge of concrete we were standing on suddenly felt unbearably exposed.
“If you’re going to ask did I know he lived here—of course I knew,” she said, ignoring my discomfort. “After I got fired, they transferred him to Austin to help start up the new office here. You know, the well was poisoned for him at the home office. Or maybe it was damage control from on high. Either way, I wouldn’t waste too many tears on Doug Branchik.” She said his name so loudly that I winced, looking across at his balcony. “I’m the one who’s blacklisted. He’s doing fine.”
Unspoken: She knew how he was doing because she could watch him from her window. “Did you—”
“Come here because of him? No. Just a happy accident.” I must have looked skeptical, because she laughed, lightly annoyed. “Believe me or not, I don’t care. Tons of people move from L.A. to Austin every year. The way people complain about it here, you’d think we were a plague of locusts.” She whirled and went back inside, and I followed her, relieved. “Anyway, he’s not going to be there much longer. That’s a Runnr-owned crash pad. They’re just putting him up there until his wife finishes decorating the six-bedroom mansion on Lake Travis.”
I glanced over my shoulder at the window. “Aren’t there some blinds you could draw or something?”
“Come on, just listen. I’ve got it all worked out.” She cracked a grin. “And the beauty of it is, you’d never even have to see his face.”
I didn’t say yes, but I didn’t say no either.
The next day was the Funniest Person semifinals, but I couldn’t concentrate on prepping my set. Memories of the grainy, sordid video haunted me all day. When evening came, I walked through the door into Bat City with some trepidation, wondering if a guilty shadow would hang over my performance. In the waiting area, I kept my headphones on with the sound turned off, bopping my head to imaginary music while comics all around me gossiped about Neely’s absence. The replacement judge was rumored to be Cynthia Omari, one of my favorite comics and the host of a hugely popular podcast. As I stepped up onto the stage to start my set, I glanced toward the judges’ table, expecting—what?—dust motes where his shape had been? Ominous music?
Instead, there was only the exhilaration of relief. The set did not feel particularly inspired. It did not feel uninspired. It happened almost without me.
That was how light I felt, how free.
I remained in this floaty state of oblivion for the rest of the night, right up until the emcee announced my name as one of three comics moving on to the last round of the competition. As the crowd roared, I looked at my fellow contestants, and the words I made it to the finals ran through my mind. I felt my real life turning on with a click.
I stumbled through the bar, past the comics reaching out their hands to congratulate me, and into the women’s restroom, where I locked myself in a stall and pulled out my cell phone. The screen still showed Amanda’s last text from the night before.
Trust me now?
“Trust me, this is going to be epic.”
Our senior year in high school, Jason tried to get me to help him steal Mattie’s truck.
Mattie still scared the shit out of me, though I did my best to hide it from Jason. Kenny the German shepherd had run away and gotten hit by a car the year before, so at least I no longer had to worry that the giant dog would come bounding through the dog flap in the garage apartment and put his massive paws on my shoulders and growl, which was the way he’d been taught to greet everyone but Mattie. But Mattie himself had only grown more menacing. I felt him looking at me all the time now.
As practical jokes went, the truck caper seemed to me both incredibly juvenile and nowhere near what Mattie deserved. I never knew what exactly Mattie had done to inspire it, but whatever it was, Jason seemed to have snapped. Maybe he just couldn’t take Mattie’s ribbing about his manhood anymore, and with Kenny gone, he had no excuse not to try something. At any rate, Jason had decided that it would be hilarious to take the truck in the middle of the night while Matt was sleeping off a payday bender, drive it three counties over, and leave it in the middle of a field, roughed up, as if it had been stolen by a local kid for a joy ride.
“It has to look like something some methed-up punk would do,” he’d explained when he saw my expression. “He’ll get it back. The tires’ll be slashed and it’ll need a new paint job, that’s all. And I’ll rig up the steering column to make it look like it was hot-wired. I found a book at the library with instructions and everything.”
“Why don’t you just hot-wire it for real, then?” What I didn’t say out loud was that if he hot-wired the truck, he wouldn’t need me to get the keys. Mattie kept those keys on him at all times. As far as I could tell, the only two things he’d ever cared about were Kenny and the GMC. When Jason insisted I was the only one who could fit through the dog door in Mattie’s garage, I was flattered, but skeptical; Jason had filled out in the shoulders that year, but I’d been filling out more or less continuously since the third grade. Moreover, the idea of crawling through a dead dog’s door at night and stealing keys from the pocket of a drunk’s dirty jeans while he slept a few feet away nauseated me. I told myself that would be true even if that drunk were someone other than Mattie.
But Jason was getting defensive. “Because this is a prank, not a crime.” He snorted. “I’m not a criminal.”
“Oh yeah. Grand theft auto, totally legal.”
He’d started on an angry retort, then caught himself and laughed. “Okay, okay,” he said. He ran his hands through his hair, and I could see that his palms were sweating from the damp trail they left in his bangs. “Maybe I’m also a little worried I wouldn’t be able to pull it off. I nearly failed shop.”
“So