Looking to Score(15)
Oakley snorted with laughter. “Yeah, I bet you were the life of the party,” he teased. “Did you follow everybody around, telling them shit like ‘the things you put on the internet last forever’ and ‘make good choices’? Is that how you got interested in being a publicist?”
His assumption of me was exactly why I moved to Texas and started over. I didn’t want to be the party girl anymore. He might have been my first official job as a publicist, but my first true image overhaul was myself.
I debated on letting him continue to think of me that way, but maybe we could connect a little more if he understood that I wasn’t just trying to cramp his style. I was a living, breathing example of what could happen if you took things too far, and I had to live with the consequences of my actions for the rest of my life. I let out an exhale and pulled out my phone to find a video I should have deleted ages ago. I honestly kept it in a secret file on my phone to remind myself how sloppy I used to be.
“This was me,” I replied with a cringe before sliding my phone over to him. He grabbed it and positioned the screen so that we could both see what was happening. I took a deep breath and hit play.
The video started off out of focus and jerky but then stopped on a very, very drunk me wearing only a red lacy bra and jeans, sitting in a bathtub, my muffin top on full display. There were towels lining the inside of the tub and dried vomit in my hair. There was a lot of giggling from my “friend” Legacy who was taking the video. “Giiirrrrrrllllll,” drunk me slurred. “I just wanna dance. NO! I gotta daaance. WOOOOO!” The tiny me on the phone screen then stood up in the tub and started gyrating her hips.
I could hear Legacy calling to some other friends who were at the party. “Guys. Amanda is TRASHED. Get in here!” Soon there were at least three more people crammed in that bathroom.
My new audience was just in time to see me try to twerk and then start violently throwing up. All over myself. Again. I managed to stumble out of the tub and sit on the bathroom floor. I aimed for the toilet but went in a little too hard and slammed my head on the toilet seat. When I was finally done puking, I turned my head to the side on the toilet seat and looked up at one of the guys in the bathroom. “Hey, baby. Wanna a blowie?” trashed me called out to a chorus of laughter as the video stopped.
I locked my phone screen and couldn’t bring myself to look at Oakley quite yet. He wasn’t saying anything, so to break the tension I said, “I learned later that I bruised my face and broke the toilet seat.” I snuck a quick glance at Oakley to try to see what he was thinking. To my surprise, he wasn’t laughing and he didn’t look disgusted with me either.
“So that’s why,” he mused while scratching his jaw. I watched him think over the very embarrassing video before prodding him to continue.
“Why what?” I asked.
He smiled a bit as he wrapped his large, veiny hand around his drink. “Why you’re so anal.”
My nose scrunched up at that term. “I’m not anal,” I spat.
“No? You send me a daily email of everything I need to do at exactly seven in the morning. Even on the weekends.” I pursed my lips. He wasn’t wrong. But that didn’t mean I was anal. Did he not just see the awful video I’d shown him? “You also coordinate your purse to your outfits. You try really hard to look like you threw your clothes together, but we both know you have designer sneakers on with laces color-coordinated with your yoga pants.”
I didn’t have to look down at my Nike shoes to know that he was absolutely right. “So what’s your point then?”
“My point is, you were such a mess that you went in the extreme opposite direction. You must have really fucked up to have gone to such extremes, and something tells me it wasn’t this video that made you move across the country.”
My mouth dropped open. How did he know that I moved? The sly look on his face made me feel like I was a math problem he wanted to figure out, and I didn’t like it one bit. My father might have paid a lot of money to keep my discretions out of the media, but that didn’t mean they were impossible to find. Anyone at my old school would happily supply the evidence of what I’d done. I needed to deflect.
“I could say the same about you,” I began as he took another bite of his meal. His eyes remained trained on me as I spoke, and I had to pause and lick my lips.
“Oh?” he finally replied, with his mouth full of burger. He lost hot points when he spoke with his mouth full. Maybe I should just keep feeding him every time we were together. He was absolutely disgusting while stuffing his face, and it helped keep me sane and my panties dry.
“People don’t party as hard as you do unless they’re trying to escape something. I mean, yeah, it’s college and we’re all stressed to hell and want to drink the anxiety away, but you take it a step further. Why?”
This question hit close to home, mostly because I felt its truth in my soul. I wasn’t running from anything too traumatizing, I was just overcompensating for my low self-esteem. Drunk Amanda liked to have fun. She didn’t care what anyone thought. She ate her feelings and knew that if she couldn’t be the prettiest girl in the room, then she’d be the loudest, drunkest, sloppiest, and funniest.
He set down his burger and eyed me for another long moment, then wiped his greasy hands on his chest. “I’m not running from anything,” he argued and then nodded at the waitress, asking for our check.