Billie Girl

Chapter Thirteen

Waking up the next morning, I felt like so much in love with Blake even though he wasn't there in bed with me. This was the euphoria. I imagined this was how opium felt like to the poets and painters in Paris in the nineteen twenties, and this is what it felt like to be Bonnie of Bonnie and Clyde. This was the rush that Ethiopian marathon runners felt bursting through the finish line in the New York City marathon. Who knows? Maybe even anorexics feel this way from all those exquisite hunger pangs. This was the buzz that everyone wanted. This was how it felt when wearing a flowing cotton blouse in the summer (minus panties), with flowers in my hair while holding a white wine spritzer at a party (which my mother sometimes allowed me to have).

I checked to see if my cell phone was all charged up so that I could call Blake and tell him that my answer was an absolute "yes."

But he didn't pick up and I started to worry that maybe he got the wrong impression when I didn't call him back right away the night before. I worried that maybe he had already gone off the deep end and had done something rash.

Tova was still sleeping. She just loved to sleep late. I have known her to (with the help of NyQuil, her drug of choice) or with Vicodin (she had quite a stash since she was bit by her Poodle and its sharp puppy teeth) to sleep until as late as two or three o'clock. And the thing, is she never regretted sleeping late. She just snapped into consciousness, put on some coffee (yes, we were already coffee addicts), and she was ready to rock. She didn't even need to brush her hair since we both flaunted snaggy hair, and with the right earring accessory we looked positively windswept.

But when Tova left the bathroom, I secretly fussed with my hair so that yes, it had the fashionable street look which was kinky, tangled and frayed.

Tova told me that I must accept the fact that right now I was out of contact with my future husband and that there was a divine reason for this and the reason was because today we should both use her mother's credit card and have breakfast at the Omelette Shoppe where we ordered eggs sunny side up, sausage, pancakes, OJ, bagels with cream cheese and lox, two pots of coffee, and a side of fruit.

"To our road runner metabolisms," Tova said clinking her orange juice glass against mine.

"To our lunch at McDonald's later on today," I said.

"Here's to all the middle-aged ladies who just turned thirty today and have made resolutions where they have to starve themselves and live at the gym and yet still be stuck with rolls on their tummy."

I added, "And here's to Kendra who just lost forty pounds after her baby was born."

"Maybe life would be easier for us if we were one of Hugh Hefner's playmates."

"I have a feeling you have to sleep with him to do that."

"I wonder."

"I wonder too."

And yes everything is fun and silly, and girl time is definitely the bomb, but I also grew tired of frilly things, and it made me want to be around my melodramatic, mumbling, grumbling Montgomery Cliff boy.

Just as some pancake with rich syrup was sliding down my throat, I saw my phone light up and I knew it was the love of my life on the phone.

"Billie girl," He said with a voice as sappy as Aunt Jemima syrup.

"Blake, how are you? I thought you might have inflicted some atrocity upon yourself when you didn't hear from me, your damsel in distress, here in Grand Rapids."

"Well, my damsel," He said to me playfully as if we were two actors in one of those ridiculously pompous renaissance fairs, "I doth fear the worst, and yet held onto faith that you would be a good steed."

"I think you just called me a horse. But I am not sure."

We both started laughing, and so did Tova. Sometimes when she laughed she snorted kind of like a horse might. It was the only thing she did that wasn't enchanting to the opposite sex. I had heard through the grapevine that guys thought Tova's laugh was strange. One guy she dated thought it was a turn-off and actually stopped calling her because of it. I, for one, found it utterly charming, and sometimes it was catchy as a yawn and I would find myself laughing the same strange way, as I unconsciously I wished tobe more like her.

I would have loved to feel myself slip into Tova's body. She was tall and curvy like an Italian bronze sculpture of a Venus. Now, she was not Rubenesque, mind you. And nobody, and I mean nobody, would ever call her fat. Nor would she fit into the plus-sized model category. Yet there was something lager than life about her. Nature just made her that way.

OK so we were both were wonder women. That's why we were friends. Water attracts it own level. And right then, OJ was streaming down her nostrils from the hilarity.

She was punch drunk this morning. I guessed she was experiencing a contact high from my love affair. Tova was pretty fond of Blake. She found him peculiar yet engaging, strange but hot. Hot being the key element. And she was not alone in this assessment. Plenty of Tattooed girls, nose- pierced girls and girls with tongue rings, you know those sort; the skin-tight leather girls, the hot pants and high heel girls, well, they all thought Blake was the bomb. The sort of bomb that they would love to have explode all over them, if you know what I mean.

"So I guess you want the answer to the big question you popped on New Year's Eve?" I said to Blake, cupping the phone to my lips.

"Shit, you make it sound like a zit and not a marriage proposal."

"A zit...you're too much," I said.

"What are you guys talking about zits for?." Tova asked wiping tears of laughter from her eyes.

"Well do you want your answer or not?" I asked Blake.

"Would you fucking tell him already or forever hold your peace?" Tova asked raising her voice to a shrill high-pitch that would make a dog's ears stand up.

"I shall give my prince an answer in the flesh, so to speak," I said to Blake.