As Pablo Picasso once said (according to Google, anyway, which I can only assume would never lie to me): “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once they grow up.”
On the other hand, maybe you and Keegan both need to take flute lessons. Only time will tell.
Yours eternally,
Everett
PS: I asked my producer to explain the concept of the breakup bob, but I still don’t fully understand. Is it bad? Is it good? Should I get one?
Teddy put her hand over her mouth to stifle a laugh (the walls in the house were thin, as she knew all too well, and she didn’t want Kirsten to ask what she was laughing at, lest she have to explain she was emailing a children’s TV host). Everett was funny. She knew that, of course, but now she knew he was funny in a nonpuppet context. Not everyone could send a good email, after all. It took skill to be charming in such a flat medium.
Teddy had heard the rule that you weren’t supposed to text a man back immediately if you were dating. You know, to suffuse yourself with an air of mystery and all that.
But this was a situation she didn’t know the rules for. When attempting to develop an email friendship with a cute stranger whom you’d watched for hours upon hours, how soon was too soon?
She put her phone down. She didn’t need to respond right away, and anyway, this wasn’t her most pressing concern. Teddy had enough self-awareness to realize that she was using Everett’s email as a distraction from her real-life circumstances: recently dumped, no career trajectory, passionless, and living in a room that might have recently been peed in.
It didn’t sound great when she laid out all the details like that.
But today was a new day, and she was out here having potentially awkward conversations with her roommate! She would trust Future Teddy to craft a perfectly composed, perfectly charming, perfectly witty, perfectly perfect email to Everett tonight after work.
15
Dear Everett,
When I was a kid, I loved riding my bike as fast as it could go, until I broke my arm, ended my parents’ marriage, and became the outcast of my middle school.
Scratch that. Too pathetic.
Dear Everett,
When I was a kid, I loved watching gory movies because it was fun to be scared. But then I realized that life itself is terrifying, and why should I voluntarily put myself into a scary situation?
Nope. Way too honest.
Dear Everett,
Sometimes when I watch your show, I feel like you would truly understand me, if we knew each other in real life. Like you would let me be myself, or find myself, instead of pushing me to be the person you think I should be. Also, you have extremely attractive hands and they’ve been the subject of several erotic daydreams.
Wow, no. Too “Call the authorities. This woman’s going to appear outside your front door.”
“Are you okay, dear?”
Teddy blinked a few times and stood up straight. “What’s that?”
Josie peered at her over her glasses. “You were staring into space and muttering to yourself.”
Teddy shook her head a few times, like a dog shaking off water. “Sorry. I’m . . .”
Well, she’d been mentally composing an email to Everett St. James, which wasn’t something she could explain to Josie right now. Not without a lot of backstory, anyway.
Josie patted her on the shoulder. “Scares the customers, you know. The muttering.”
Teddy smiled. “Right.”
Carlos was in the back corner talking about LEGO with a customer. Josie and Teddy watched him as he smiled, gestured wildly, and nodded in agreement at something the customer said.
“Why doesn’t Carlos talk to me like that?” Teddy asked, frowning. “I’m always asking him how his weekend went and all I get are monosyllabic responses. I think he hates me.”
Or maybe, she wondered, Carlos was just like her. Maybe he had someone telling him that his life was small, someone who made him feel like what he had to say didn’t matter. Maybe, Teddy thought, she should try to be Carlos’s friend.
Josie waved her off. “I think you’d have to take an original Darth Vader action figure out of the packaging to make Carlos hate you. Carlos and I talk all the time. He just takes a little time to warm up to people, and he mostly likes to talk about toys—no one knows about this stuff like him.”
“Hey,” Teddy said, mock-offended, “I know quite a bit about the world of vintage toys, thank you very much.”
Josie lightly swatted her on the arm. “Yeah, but you’re here for the paycheck and the sparkling conversation with yours truly. Carlos lives and breathes this stuff. Look at him over there, convincing that customer that they simply have to buy a LEGO pirate ship.”
Teddy knew this was meant to be a compliment to Carlos, not a dig at her, but it still smarted. Of course it wasn’t her passion. She didn’t even have a passion. Not vintage toys or metalworking or Jazzercise or . . .
“Josie,” Teddy said, turning to face Josie with such intensity that Josie stumbled backward and bumped into the register. “Can I come with you to Jazzercise some time?”
Josie stared at her, confused. “But I’ve been asking you to come to Jazzercise for years.”
“I know,” Teddy acknowledged.
“And you always say no, on account of you ‘don’t like to move your body in front of people.’”
Teddy nodded.
“That was a direct quote,” Josie reminded her.
“True.”
“You also said, ‘I have the coordination of a college girl wearing one high heel at one a.m. on High Street.’”
Teddy frowned. She didn’t remember saying that, but she must have, because that was the description of a real girl she’d seen once, years ago, leaning on her girlfriends. She often wondered about her. Did she ever find her other shoe, or was it still missing, waiting for its owner to sober up and come back for it? It made her feel sad to think about, like when she saw a lonely, waterlogged stuffed animal on the side of the street.
“Okay, okay, okay, I said a lot of things about Jazzercise and my disinterest in it,” Teddy said with a wave of her hands, wiping the chalkboard clean. “But I may have reacted too hastily. Because now I would very much like to try it.”
Teddy didn’t really want to try Jazzercise. In fact, she was terrified of entering a room full of women in workout gear and dancing to popular music. It all sounded horrifying and embarrassing and a situation in which there might be a hidden camera recording her for the express purpose of putting the video on Twitter, after which it would go viral and spawn a bunch of news stories and Halloween costumes (“Jazzercise Girl,” they’d call her).