Let’s Not Go Overboard Here

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CHAPTER ONE

The call comes Thursday night at eleven forty-five while I’m snaking my shower drain, a task akin to, I don’t know, eating all the cigarette butts in the alley behind SUR or making out with the actual devil.

A familiar beloved face lights up my phone screen and cuts off my podcast episode, a deep dive into Jessica Simpson’s shoe empire. Chest heaving with exertion, sweaty hair plastered to my forehead like papier-mâché, I peel off one of the dishwashing gloves I’ve sacrificed to the cause and swipe to accept the call. I’m nearly choking on the humidity in my bathroom; even the tiles seem to be perspiring. My pathetic AC window unit never stood a chance against the powerhouse that is the Los Angeles late-July heat.

“Guess Jessica Simpson’s net worth,” I command into my AirPods without preamble. I can hear the whooshing and beeping of London morning street traffic on the other end of the line.

“Why are you awake?” Vish asks, sounding slightly out of breath from his walk to work. There’s that familiar undertone of concern there, too, a permanent fixture of the last fifteen months.

“I’m snaking my shower drain!” I respond with a chipperness I don’t feel, as if this is a perfectly normal task for me to be doing in the middle of the night on the hottest week of the year. I snap my glove back on and resume my cranking, feeling a grim satisfaction as the cord augers its way farther down the clogged pipe.

“Didn’t you do that last week?” “That was my sink.”

“But it’s almost midnight your time. Why are you doing it now?” “I only got home from work like an hour ago.”

“You did? Mel—”

“Okay, Mario, enough with the plumbing interrogation,” I cut him off, desperate to tamp down on the darkness that’s starting to pool in my gut like the inky gloop leaching from my shower drain.

“You called now because you knew I’d be awake. So how about we just cut the crap and face facts: You’re humiliated because you can’t guess Jessica Simpson’s net worth.”

“I barely know who Jessica Simpson is.”

“Vish!”

As reflexively as breathing, I think of Ari. I wouldn’t have to ask her to guess Jessica Simpson’s net worth because she’d already know it. She would have Jessica Simpson’s net worth tattooed on the backs of her eyelids.

Don’t think about that, Mel. Think only about snaking. You live to snake.

“Okay,” Vish acquiesces. “Um. She’s the Chicken of the Sea girl, right? I don’t know . . . fifty million?”

“More!”

“Five hundred million?” “Less!”

“Two hundred?”

“On the money. Literally right on the money.” “Hm. Not bad.”

“Two hundred million is not bad?”

“I’m fucked up, Mel.” Vish sighs. “These people I’m meeting through work . . . they make Jessica Simpson look small fry. Like the shrimp of the sea.”

Vishal Agarwal has risen to great heights since I first met him eight years ago at UCLA Law School. It wasn’t an instant friendship; despite living on the same floor in graduate student housing and sharing a few classes together, we weren’t particularly close in the first few weeks of school. Where Vish was preppy and even-keeled, I wore my middle school Paul Frank pajama pants to lectures. But then one fateful night we encountered each other in the bar line at Rocco’s Tavern and had a fifteen-minute drunken mind meld about Lewis Hamilton. In that moment I came to understand something: beneath that Patagonia vest beat the heart of a lunatic, just like mine.

Our vices don’t entirely overlap, of course. Vish inhales discourse around restaurants, Formula 1 racing, and air travel. I subsist on a diet of reality TV, celebrity culture, and millennial nostalgia. But what unites us is the fact that our psyches seem to contain an extra, frivolous circuit board dedicated entirely to inane, irrelevant, and inconsequential information. We have, as Ari loved to proclaim proudly, Broken Brains.

Those Broken Brains kept us close after graduation, even through the Dante’s Inferno of bar prep, even as the rest of our classmates were swal- lowed up by Big Law. We took turns choosing the locations for our weekly dinners, Vish prioritizing restaurants on Jonathan Gold’s list, me zeroing in on spots that promised the highest probability of clocking Bravolebs in the wild. All of that changed in January of this year, though, when Vish moved to London for a job working in IPO compliance at SWFT, a buzzy digital startup.

“Will you be okay?” Vish had asked me after he told me about the move, his brown eyes choked with worry. “I know it’s a shitty time for me to leave, but it’s just such an amazing opportunity.”

Of course I wouldn’t be okay. Because I already wasn’t okay. Okay

was an adjective that had been retired from my vocabulary. “Don’t even think about me,” I’d said. “I’ll be fine.” Fine was another word I’d parted ways with.

“Listen, I’m about to get to the office,” Vish says in the present. “But I wanted to ask you something, and please don’t say no right away. You know Seb, Ollie, and Freya?”

I nearly drop the snake. “Do I know Seb, Ollie, and Freya!”

Of course I know Seb, Ollie, and Freya. I barely understand what Vish’s company does, but boy oh boy could I write eerily detailed fan fiction about its glamorous three co-founders. I pump Vish for informa- tion about them every time we speak on the phone; it’s like having the love child of Made in Chelsea and Succession injected into my veins.

“Well, you know how I’ve been working like crazy on this IPO? The London Stock Exchange has approved our application, which is amazing. SWFT is slated to go public at the beginning of September. So now the three of them are going to spend the next couple weeks on the road, doing their whole song-and-dance to hype the company up for investors. They’re wrapping up the road show by chartering a yacht in Greece to celebrate. They invited me to come with.”

“Okay, Below Deck Med! Say hi to Captain Sandy for me.”

“Well . . . want to say hi yourself?”

“What do you mean?”

“They said I could have a plus-one. And I would have brought Tessa, but . . .”

Poor Vish. Beneath that Patagonia vest beats not only the heart of a lunatic, but a heart of such pure sweetness it would make angels weep. But for some reason his favorite pastime seems to be reaching into his own chest, ripping out that heart, and handing it over to the cruelest, most vicious woman in his vicinity.

Tessa was his inaugural British romance, and if I’d had any illusions that he’d have better luck in love across the pond, they were quickly dashed. Despite calling Vish her boyfriend on Instagram and eagerly joining him on a trip to Mallorca, Tessa apparently didn’t see the problem with also hooking up with a semi-professional footballer and a semi- professional DJ.

“Two semi-professionals do not a full professional make, Vish,” I console him, cranking away at the snake. My T-shirt is now more sweat than cotton. How long can this pipe be? “She’ll regret it.”

“If you say so.” He sounds a bit choked up. “But you’re not listening to me. I’m trying to invite you. To come with me. As my plus-one.”

I stop turning the crank. “Vish . . .”

“I told you not to say no right away! Come on, Mel. When was the last time you went on a vacation?”

I start cranking again, dodging his question. “Dude, this is nuts.

When did you say it would be? In a few weeks?”

“Uh-huh. After they finish the road show. Like the middle of August.” “Yeah, there’s no way that’s enough notice for work. And I’m sure plane tickets from LA to Greece are crazy expensive right now.”

“That’s the other thing. I have hella points. I’d get your ticket. You’d actually be doing me a favor because you’d help me maintain my gold status. It’s honestly genius. Basically, what I’d do is . . .”

As Vish waxes poetic about the ins and outs of his airline mileage rewards program, I let myself picture it, just for a moment. How many episodes of Below Deck did Ari and I watch together those last months, living vicariously through those hot, horny yacht professionals as they traveled the world and vigorously scrubbed toilets? And now that could become my real life? I can already feel the warmth of the sun, smell the salt of the sea, register the sexual tension between the chef and the chief stew . . .

But then I rocket back into reality. Into the lonely quiet of my Larchmont apartment. And the boat glides away.

“Look, that is so generous, and so nice, but aside from everything else, we both know I probably wouldn’t be very good company. I really appreciate the offer, I do. But someone else would be more fun than me.”

“Mel, what the hell are you talking about? You’re the most fun person I know.”

I scan back over the last year and a half of my life: work, watch TV, work, watch TV, repeat.

“Agree to disagree.”

“I’m about to walk in the door, and I’m not accepting a no from you right now. Just sleep on it.”

Telling Vish I haven’t been sleeping doesn’t seem like the best argu- ment at the moment, so I acquiesce.

“Fine. Alright. Thank you for thinking of me, seriously. And . . . thank you for guessing about Jessica,” I say quietly. “I know it’s not really your thing, I just . . .”

“I know,” he says, his voice heavy. “I know.”

Silence. I crank the snake, crank the snake, crank the snake, pitch- black poison oozing up the drain and spreading everywhere, and I pic- ture it filling up the bathroom, filling up my apartment, filling up the whole world, pulling me under.

“Seriously, just think about it, okay?” Vish breaks the silence. “It could be fun.”

I won’t, and it won’t. “You got it, dude.”

“Okay. Thank you. Now go to bed.”

“I will, as soon as I—” There’s a horrifying squelch. I feel the cord make contact with something deep in the bowels of the drain. “Oh God. Oh God. I think it’s happening. Vish. It’s happening.” I crank the snake backward, bringing the vile obstruction closer to me with each turn, eyes blurry from sweat, arms burning, a mixture of terror and sick fascination rising in my throat.

“Vish, this may be the last you ever hear from me. Let my family know I was brave and, more importantly, hot at the end. Tell the world I know who shot JFK but I’m taking it to the grave. Send my regards to Broadway. I am confronting my doom.”

I pull, and pull, and pull, and at last, with an almighty, stomach- turning sucking sound, tug the end of the cord out of the drain, which brings with it—

“Oh my God, Vish, it’s so gross! How does this exist?! How am I responsible for this?!”

“Goodbye, Melanie.”

I don’t even notice that he’s hung up. I’m too overcome with horror and disgust at the monstrosity hanging off the end of the snake, a drip- ping, hairy creature of the purest evil, a pox upon man, a missive from Hades himself.

I yank off my gloves and swipe open the camera on my phone. I need to send Ari a picture of this; she’ll die—

Suddenly, where seconds ago there was a clear roadway, there is now nothing but howling tires and screeching metal. Grief slams into me like an eighteen-wheeler, and I am sent flying like a ragdoll into the abyss.

Too late, Mel. She beat you to it.

In the silent emptiness of the night, I clean up the bathroom like a robot. I am here but not here, a magic trick, a mirage. I wrap up the shower monster in toilet paper and throw it in the trash. I rinse off the snake in the bathtub. I blast my hands with scalding water, scrubbing them until they’re red and raw.

Then I engage in my nightly self-care regimen, which consists of spiraling down a Real Housewives of Miami rabbit hole on Reddit and then crying face-first into my pillow until the sun comes up.

CHAPTER TWO

They say opposites attract, and that’s certainly true in the case of Ari and me.

Picture this: elementary school cafeteria, San Diego, the year 2000. Skechers platforms are breaking the ankles of any third grader with style, shiny Pokémon cards are the hottest commodity on the streets, and SUVs are belching out CO₂ like the ice caps have personally offended them.

Across a table littered with Lunchables residue, a battle royale is tak- ing place. On one side we have Melanie Hoffman: six butterfly clips in hair, Jewish, parents’ divorce imminent. On the other we have Ariana Goldwein: rainbow choker around neck, Jewish, parents’ divorce even more imminent. Similar, perhaps, to the undiscerning eye, but look a little closer and you’ll see that between them looms an unbreachable divide, the fiercest debate of the day—Backstreet Boys vs. NSYNC.

Mel is Team Backstreet. Stubborn by nature, she can very much relate to Wanting It That Way. Ari, on the other hand, is a dramaturg through and through and is therefore awestruck by the puppet dancing in the “Bye Bye Bye” music video. Cheeks red with indignation, they go back and forth, future lawyer facing off against future actress, which are the two most convincing professions, probably.

Despite this fundamental difference in values, however, they come to recognize in one another a quality they have identified in their own young selves: a relentless, nearly religious commitment to the trash pop culture of the day. Not so opposite after all, really. And so, a friendship is born.

And so, twenty-three years later, a friendship dies.

I am probably the only person on Earth besides Tom Sandoval him- self who found the Scandoval saga excruciating. Because as my Ariana was leaving the world, suddenly her name was everywhere: as Ariana Madix attended the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and went on Dancing with the Stars, and just generally made that worm with a mustache rue the day he ever cheated on her.

What’s in a name? Everything, it turns out.

“You look like shit,” Haeyoon observes, crunching away on her Sweet- green salad. She’s sitting on top of my desk, her heeled Labucq loafers swinging back and forth. Haeyoon is on a personal mission to reverse the casual office attire tide that washed in post-pandemic.

“Whatever happened to all those kind, friendly people who used to sexually harass their colleagues in the workplace?” I ask, eyes not leaving my computer screen, fingers flying across my keyboard. I feel like someone has left my corneas out to roast in the Palm Springs sun. I probably just need more coffee.

“They got sued.”

“Oh yeah. Lawyers are the worst.” I hit send on my email and then lean back in my chair, flexing my fingers and wincing. “I think my bones are disintegrating.”

“Speaking of bones,” Haeyoon says, popping a cucumber into her mouth, “I have one to pick with you. Please tell me why I logged on this morning to discover that the contract for the Chris deal had already been completely drafted?”

I lean toward my computer again and open up a new email draft, studiously ignoring her gaze.

“You’re going to have to be specific about which Chris.”

“The least buff one.”

I can feel her stare burning a hole in my cheek, but I fight the urge to look over. “Oh. Um. It’s no big deal. I finished work a little early yesterday, so I decided to wrap that up for you.”

“I had Randy show me the security logs when I came in this morning. You left at ten last night.”

Et tu, Randy? Unable to resist any longer, I face Haeyoon. As predicted, her stare has a nuclear intensity. My shoulders slump.

“Can’t you just let me be a psycho in peace?” I sigh.

“I can’t let anyone do anything in peace. It’s not in my nature.” Haeyoon Kim and I work in the legal department at ATA, a boutique talent agency in Los Angeles. We started within a few months of each other, and I was drawn to her like a chaotic, adrift moth to a polished, self-possessed flame. Her clothes: tailored. Her nails: pointy black acrylics. Her most-used expression: “This is horseshit.” Because it often is.

Working at a talent agency is my way of getting close to the pop culture I devour like breakfast cereal, even if it’s in the most boring capacity imaginable, drawing up contracts for talent deals and the like. Our office is on the twenty-sixth floor of a bulky skyscraper in Century City, a soulless corporate enclave brought to the world stage by Ken’s hijinks in the Barbie movie. Because tall buildings are in short supply in Los Angeles, on a smog-free day the views from our floor are almost hysteria- inducing: vast ocean twinkling to the west, airplanes lifting off to the south, Santa Monica Mountains crouching to the north, Downtown jutting up to the east. Ari visited me here one time when I was working late and flashed her tits in every cardinal direction.

Today, no one’s topless, which is probably for the best. People stride importantly into glass-encased conference rooms; people murmur importantly into phones; people tip tap away importantly at their keyboards. Important, important, important. This is all so important! Luck- ily, I’ve discovered a pretty cool hack in the last year: If there are enough people in our open floor plan office, no one will even notice me crying, so all this important business can continue unaffected. You’re welcome, shareholders!

I abruptly push my chair back.

“I’m gonna go make coffee.” I flee, but she pursues.

As the machine bubbles and spurts, Haeyoon clacks her fingernails on the kitchen countertop.

“You know,” she says, “I also asked around, and it turns out that you’ve been taking on other people’s work, too. Even Lazy Carl. We can’t prop up Lazy Carl, Melanie. It’s an affront to evolution.”

Where do I work? WikiLeaks? “Haeyoon—”

“This is horseshit,” she says evenly.

“I could use the distraction right now,” I protest weakly.

“It’s been more than a year, Mel.” Her voice is uncharacteristically soft. “You’re going to have to start living again eventually.”

How to explain to her the betrayal of wanting more now, the impos- sibility?

“Um. Melanie?”

Haeyoon and I turn. Bobby Simmons, head of HR, is hovering in the kitchen doorway. His symmetrical face carries the panicked expression of a tiny dog during a fireworks bonanza. I’ve never in my life met another man so nervous, yet so handsome, yet so nervous.

“Hey, Bobby,” Haeyoon coos sweetly, and I swear he breaks out in hives on the spot.

Haeyoon has treated Bobby like a cat playing with its food ever since he started working here two years ago.

“That scared, buff man contains multitudes,” she’d informed me eagerly a few weeks into his tenure. “Sabrina saw him at a Melissa Etheridge concert last weekend and I’m pretty sure he does Legos. I also heard he used to be some, like, Wolf of Wall Street–type day trader before he had a crisis of conscience and went into HR. God. I must bring out the freak within. It is my calling.”

“Oh, hi, hi, Haeyoon,” he sputters now. “Um. Melanie. Can I talk to you for a second? But only if you have time. Tomorrow works, too.”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” Haeyoon pipes up helpfully. Bobby looks like he’s about to start crying.

“Now’s fine,” I say, grabbing my coffee. I turn to Haeyoon. “I’ll cool it. I promise.”

She snorts. “I’ll believe it when I see it, Hoffman.”

Bobby’s office faces northwest. In the warm glow of the afternoon sun, the Getty glints golden on its mountain ridge. I used to love the long, drawn-out days of summer. Now, I’ve become someone jealous of people in other time zones, people who have less of the day to get through than I do.

“I always forget what a nice view you have from your office,” I say as I sit down, trying to hide my melancholy.

Bobby drops into his desk chair. “Oh. Thanks. Do you want it? You can probably have it. I can ask.”

“You want to give me . . . your office?” I try to sound kind instead of like I’m questioning why he is in charge of employee relations. Which I often am.

“Sorry. No. I probably can’t do that. Sorry.” His thick legs are jig- gling a mile a minute. “So, um, I had something I wanted to talk to you about. It’s nothing big. You’re not in trouble or anything. It’s just . . . You know how the agency is really making it a point to prioritize employee well-being? For reasons completely unrelated to any current ongoing lawsuits?”

My heart starts to knock on the inside of my chest. “Uh-huh.”

“Well . . . and seriously, this is not a big thing. But. We did an internal audit, and uh, your name popped up. It seems like you . . . you haven’t taken any PTO in over a year.”

The knocking gets stronger.

“Oh. Are you sure? That can’t be right.”

He nods vigorously. “I know. For sure. Totally. I hear what you’re saying. The only thing is, it is right.” He does a few nervous clicks on his mouse and then leans toward his monitor, reading something. “It looks like the last time you took any time off at all was in April of last year. For . . .” The color drains out of his face. “Bereavement leave.”

Bereavement leave. Such an efficient, tidy concept, as if grief is something you simply need some downtime to recover from, like a muscle tear or the stomach flu. As if you haven’t just been deposited on an alien planet with no spacesuit and no escape pod.

I can perceive several things at once: Bobby’s desperate discomfort fizzing off his body like radio static. Cold sweat springing to life in my armpits. And the dread, the dread, the dread rising in me like puke because I know what’s coming.

“The thing is, Melanie . . .” Bobby continues valiantly, his voice vibrating with stress, “You’ve been flagged to upper management. And I know, it’s so dumb, but they’ve got this new policy, and . . . you have to take PTO by the end of the summer, or I have to write up a formal report. But, it’s no big deal, right? Because who doesn’t want to take time off!”

Me! I want to scream. I very much do not want to take time off!

Time off means time. Time with my thoughts, time with my vacant life, time with the tsunami of pain that is barely, barely being held at bay by a makeshift dam of late nights at the office, home improvement projects, and the high-camp antics of Bravolebrities. Remove one piece from the equation, and I’ll be washed out to sea.

“I can’t” is all I manage to croak out.

“Right, right, I know it’s too short notice to book a trip anywhere or anything. But what about somewhere driving distance? Actually, my friends have a place up in Mammoth, if you want to stay there? I mean, sorry, I should probably ask them first. And we’re not actually that close. Sorry. Is it just me or is it really warm in here?”

I can barely take in what he’s saying. “It’s not that. I actually just got invited on a yacht trip in Greece . . .”

As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I realize what I’ve done.

Bobby looks lit up from within. “Oh! That’s perfect! When is it?”

No no no no no no no. “The middle of August, but—”

“Excellent! Wow. Yacht trip! That’s sick. That’s super fun. That is very conducive to well-being. Nothing bad has ever happened on a yacht trip!”

I feel like I’ve completely lost the plot now. “What about . . . what about all those yacht-sinking orcas?”

“Are there orcas in Greece?”

“I don’t . . . think so.”

“Well, there you go! Two weeks off in August. Approved! What an awesome meeting. Thanks, Melanie!” Beaming, Bobby leaps up from his chair, in the process banging into his desk and sending what is definitely a container of Lego bricks flying. “Shit! Shit! Sorry! Shit!”

As he scrambles around after rogue Legos on the carpet like a Hungry Hungry Hippo, I stumble out of his office.

Two weeks off? What have I done?

The thought of joining Vish and his posh coworkers on a yacht in Greece is so ludicrous it feels like a piece of abstract, absurdist comedy. I have no place among those happy, shiny people, brushing their teeth with Veuve and tossing pound notes like confetti into the sea.

But. The idea of two weeks alone in my apartment, the relentless heat of the sun trying to break in through the walls, the long summer days stretching out empty and infinite in front of me like a conveyor belt to nowhere, is almost too painful to fathom.

I’m out of drains to snake, I realize with horror, and the thought thuds through my mind like a hysterical drumbeat as I stumble over to Haeyoon’s desk. I’m out of drains I’m out of drains I’m out of drains.

At the sight of my shell-shocked face, Haeyoon’s eyes flash with concern.

“What happened? What did he say to you?” She springs out of her seat. “I’m going to go rip him a new one! This is horseshit!”

“No,” I say in a voice that doesn’t sound like mine. “No. He didn’t do anything wrong. It’s just . . .”

My eyes find the window. Outside, the sun taunts me, stubbornly fixed at its apex. Another endless summer day. Another day without Ari in it. I make a decision.

“I . . . I need your help.” I take a deep breath. “I think I need to go shopping.”