Twice Shy by Sarah Hogle (i am malala young readers edition .TXT) 📗

Gemma, naturally. Gemma could be holding a chain saw dangling human innards and Christine would find a way to praise her for it.

“I stole her away for a second,” Gemma replies, fixing on an angel’s smile. “Blame me, not Maybell.”

Christine holds my stare. “If you have time to waste, you have time to work. There’s vomit on the ice machine and all over the walls on floor two.”

It’s on the walls, too? Good lord. “But—”

As she turns away, I gather up the courage to call out, “Have you finished reading my proposal for the scavenger hunt?”

“We tried a scavenger hunt in 2018,” she says without turning. “Nobody was into it.”

“I think the pirate theme would be fun for kids.”

She claps her hands three times. “Get! To! Work!”

Gemma waits until she’s out of earshot and pats my shoulder. “Ugh, I hate her, too. I think she’s having an affair with my dad.”

“I don’t hate her,” I’m quick to say, simultaneously imagining pushing Christine into the lazy river. Gemma probably waits until I’m out of earshot to whisper, Ugh, I hate her, too, about me to other people. At least now I have an excuse to leave. “Gotta go clean up, I guess.” Two hours. Two more hours and then I can go home.

She slides away to a game called Ticket Jackpot. “Wish me luck!”

Padding down the dark green hall, I replay Christine’s words and am strongly tempted to rip off my “Event Coordinator” badge. After changing trash bags, making beds, and bleaching Jacuzzis from the time I turned eighteen, I’d moved out of housekeeping just before hitting thirty and into an arena where I could finally flex my creative skills. Now I’m told the events I want to produce are too big, too niche, or too much. No matter what I do, I’m perpetually ending up alone in a room with a roll of paper towels under my arm and cleaning supplies to take care of somebody else’s mess.

“I’m going to quit,” I grumble. It’s my personal anthem, which I sing every day. “Job is in title only. This is stupid. It’s stupid!”

Caleb Ramirez nods in greeting as he walks by, likely on his way to Sunrise in the Smokies, where he works. Seeing him is like being stabbed with a very small pin, because he was the unwitting catalyst for Everything That Happened. Unfortunate, because Caleb’s such a great guy. The only bad thing about him is that once, several months ago, we shared a bag of popcorn together in the break room and he mentioned he liked my sneakers. I’m bad at receiving compliments, habitually reciprocating with a compliment of my own to erase the one given to me, and I said I liked his car. He grinned. I’ll take you for a ride sometime.

Gemma, who falls in love about a dozen times a year and falls hard, had a huge crush on Caleb. As I came to find out, on a deceptively ordinary Wednesday evening two months afterward, with Gemma snotting all over my shirt as she wrapped her arms around me and wouldn’t let me squirm away, she’d simply done what she thought she had to do. She was sorry. She was insecure and desperately in love. People who are in love can’t think straight, don’t act normally. Please don’t hate me. I couldn’t keep it going any longer, my hair’s starting to fall out and I’m losing sleep.

Gemma had catfished me with a fake Tinder profile.

I’m nursing some conflicted feelings over this because I wasn’t the victim of a personal vendetta; I was collateral damage in Gemma’s quest to keep the object of her affections single and available. Now that it’s over, I’m less surprised—a couple months before it happened, a guy loafing about the lobby asked me where the ATM was. While leading him there, we got to talking a little bit, just innocent chitchat, which culminated in his asking for my number. I was doing my job. Being friendly. I did not flirt with him.

But it definitely looked like flirting to Gemma, who, as it transpired, was casually dating him at the time. He claimed that she’d misheard him, that when he asked for my number he meant “what number of the month it was, like, on a calendar.” I told her I never gave him any of my contact information, and she said that she believed me, but if Caleb’s offering me a ride in his car was enough to make her pull some pictures of a random hot guy off the Internet and trick me into a long-distance relationship, maybe she still had some trust issues.

In Gemma’s defense (literally, she used this as a defense), she tried really hard to be a considerate fake boyfriend. Jack would “just know” when I was having a bad day and could benefit from a surprise delivery from my favorite takeout place. He played the ukulele, which I thought was so cute, and he was drop. Dead. Gorgeous. A giant who could probably crush pebbles between his fingers if he wanted, but he wore the sweetest smile and softest expression. My favorite picture “Jack” sent was a black-and-white one of him in formal wear, and when I envision my imaginary ex-boyfriend I still see him without color sometimes, like he belongs to a different era.

The longer our relationship went on, the more I wanted from Jack, and the harder it became for Gemma to keep the ruse up. I wanted to meet in person. I wanted more selfies of him. I wanted concrete plans. After a while it didn’t matter how gorgeous or supernaturally insightful he was (Gemma’s advantage of knowing me as well as she does was an awful, lovely, double-edged blade); I didn’t like that he wasn’t putting in as much effort as me. Didn’t he want to meet up, too?

Then Gemma met someone else, lost all interest in Caleb, and was tired of expending energy on this. She had to come clean. I