How to Marry Keanu Reeves in 90 Days Page 2

  True let out a groan, as Dawn and I swiveled toward him in unison.

  “Seriously? This is what your whole zone-out was about? Damned Keanu Reeves?” He took a step back. Lucky for him, just out of my arm’s reach.

  “Watch it with the blasphemy, mister.”

  He hit me with an eye roll and a sigh before rubbing his short nails over his close-cropped curls. “I can’t with you, Lu,” he said, before shifting to Dawn. “You either. The fact that you fall right in, entertaining her mess, makes you just as bad.”

  Dawn gasped. “Bad? The hell you say!” She scrunched up her nose and her mouth went wide with feigned shock. “I don’t know what you’re getting on me for, Truman Erickson, you giant soggy blanket.”

  “That part,” I added. “Just because you’re grown, don’t think you’re grown-grown.”

  True’s eyes went back and forth between the two of us in silent irritation. I could almost see words being swallowed back down his throat, and I opened my mouth to argue against them. But this wasn’t the time to fall into one of our bickering spirals. This was serious.

  The fear had my stomach knotting up. I reached for my phone, then paused. True was right. As much as I hated to admit it. Dammit, True was right.

  What the hell was I panicking for? And Dawn was right too. It had to be fake. Keanu would never be tied down. He was a free spirit. He was the free spirit.

  And so was I—grown-ass, forty-plus fangirl that I was. There was no reason to be afraid. I was fine. I smiled and fought to slow my heart rate.

  Quick Lu, think of something calming! But shit, the meditation app I’d sworn I’d listen to every day had lasted less than a week. The pressure of daily relaxation was too stressful. Now all I had was a monthly bill because I kept forgetting to cancel the stupid subscription in the app store. Besides, if I did cancel, that would mean giving up on meditating and therefore admitting defeat. And Carlisles don’t give up. We see things through. Till the end.

  I looked over to the far corner of the loft and sighed. I had set up the perfect tranquil space with a cool-ass altar and tufted pillow to get my meditation on. So what if Morphie had co-opted it?

  “Look, you’ve got to relax. There is no need for you to get all worked up over a bit of poorly placed celebrity gossip,” Dawn said.

  True let out a grunt as if agreeing to this as his phone buzzed low from his pocket, indicating a text.

  “Hey, tell your T and Ai-meeee, you’re busy. We have a crisis over here,” Dawn continued.

  “Is that what you’re calling it?” True quipped back.

  The inner twelve-year-old in me had to suppress a chuckle over Dawn’s jibe as I piled on top. “Yeah, isn’t the semester over, Professor Hottie McHottieson? Can’t she ease up a bit now?”

  True frowned at his phone, but I’m sure the face was really meant for me.

  His teacher’s assistant Aimee was into him big-time. Though he liked to annoyingly put on as if he didn’t know it. Fact was, True acted as if he didn’t know a good percentage of the students who took his economics and world studies class were into him. As if. For all his brilliance, at times the man didn’t have a clue about how sexy his “I don’t have the time to be concerned about mundane things like metro male grooming because I’m too busy thinking on higher pursuits” vibe made him.

  “I swear you two have a combined age of twenty-four,” he grit out as he tapped at his phone.

  Dawn and I looked at each other and shrugged. “I would have accepted anything under fifty combined, so this is a win in my book,” she said.

  True shook his head as he picked up his mug. It was the one he usually used at my place, simple white on which I’d painted a bent spoon and the words THERE IS NO SPOON in block letters. He knew good and well it was a homage to a scene from The Matrix, and if he had trouble with my fangirling or bouts of immaturity, he could have just as easily brought one of his own plain mugs up from his place.

  True took his Matrix mug and his text convo with Ai-meee and headed to the far side of the kitchen island. I guess out of firing distance of me and Dawn for a little privacy. I didn’t blame him, but still, it grated a bit. His nimble thumbs tapped along his screen before he paused, placed the phone down and picked up another bagel from the bag of leftovers on the island.

  Like Dawn, he always had at least two bagels, and with all his running he didn’t even have to worry about the carbs. And unlike me, True claimed his runs were a form of daily stress relief and enjoyment. The concept seemed ridiculous, no matter how many times he’d tried to explain it. He’d do better trying to get me to understand market conversions by country and rates of fluctuations. It didn’t matter, though. True’s tall, lanky but muscular frame could support one bagel or three.

  Still, by the almost beastly way he tore into the poor everything bagel, I had a feeling that he was stuffing his mouth to clamp down on comments to Dawn and me he thought were better left unsaid. It was one of the deflection tactics he’d honed after years of being caught in the crossfire of our mini rants. At least that was what my WHET app had taught me—aka Women’s Health Empowerment Therapy—which was the app I did more religiously keep up with, not only for its cutting-edge sex talk and vibrator discounts but the fact that they had certified therapists writing pretty solid takes on their blog. But here it was again; I was going off the rails and the topic. Maybe I needed to check in on the app a little more frequently.

  “Oh, let the soggy blanket sulk,” Dawn said, as if she could see inside my head.

  Dawn and I have been arm-in-arm BFFs since we first met as freshmen at Forresters Academy, an exclusive private high school just outside of Manhattan. Forresters was and still is a who’s who of New York’s second-tier rich progressives’ kids. Those who were not A-listers, old money, ultra-wealthy, library donor types. We were the class of new money, the start-ups or perhaps second cousins of the A-listers who had to work management that kept the old money moving.

  My father happened to be one of the new money movers. And he was so good as a private equity investor that the name Carlisle could just about open any A-list door. Money was funny like that.

  But lucky us—not—we were C-list all day. Sure, on a good day we could pull off B-list, on account of being upwardly mobile and, in many folks’ eyes, uppity Black and not where we belonged—a myth my mother loved to clap back on whenever she got the chance.

  That myth is part of how we’d ended up at Forresters. My mother getting “mistaken” for a nanny at my old school’s pickup one time too many. There were only so many straws before a camel’s back broke or a Black mother had had enough with the bullshit and went off. And that was what happened at my private middle school before I was sent to Forresters.

  I remember the day clearly, coming out of the exit on the quiet, tree-lined Upper East Side street just off Fifth Avenue where our school was. Right off Museum Mile. We were supposed to be the elites. Tourists even stopped to get glimpses of us looking so unbothered and upper-class New York chic in our navy, burgundy and tan uniforms. But there was my mother, blaring at Trishna Greenberg’s mom, “You think I’m the nanny? What nanny wears Patrick Kelly and Chanel to a pickup?”

  I was mortified. Though she had a point. Still, it didn’t stop me from wanting one of the sidewalk cracks to open up and devour me whole. All the kids were staring like we were some sort of aberration, a strange wonder to behold. They always looked at her like that. The same way they looked at me when they spared me a glance. Once again, I wondered why couldn’t she just blend. Why couldn’t she be inconspicuous like the other moms in the latest Ralph Lauren getup? Or better yet, not pick me up at all?

  God. I was a shit daughter even back then.

  But it wasn’t the slights to my mom or my secondhand embarrassment that got me to Forresters. It was the incident. The one where the new math teacher swore that I cheated off Felicity Mathis instead of the other way around. That was the final straw.

  My mother could take a lot, ex
plode and then move on, but my father wouldn’t give a penny to an institution that questioned our honor. Even though I was never a math whiz like my brother, Dad never questioned me or asked if I’d cheated. He never asked for an explanation. He only said that my overpriced school would miss our money and be sorry when another school had it.

  I was glad to be done of it, already on my four-year countdown to graduation and art school in Paris or London and all the things I dreamt about when I wasn’t trying to disappear into the wall cracks.

  But once I got to Forresters and after meeting Dawn, I lost that rush to fly away, and even the need to fade into the paint started to dissipate. Suddenly I wasn’t so alone. Finally, I wasn’t the only brown girl in my class. Of course, Forresters was still expensive (i.e., exclusive; i.e., pretty damned white), but the Forrester founders seemed to have had some sort of come-to-Jesus moment or maybe they were low-key class shaded too, so they liked to consider themselves woke before being woke was a thing. Ignore the fact that it still cost approximately $48K to give a kid their form of progressive wokeness.

  Still, they were highly philanthropic and had a 15 percent diversity rate, but made sure to show at least 30 percent of the students in all their promotional brochures and literature were people of color. But I wasn’t mad. I was happy to be out of my old school and even happier when I met Dawn on the first day.

  “Bobby Brown is sooo cute. Right, Bethany?” Kaitlyn Smith, the upperclassman assigned to giving us our tour of the campus chirped by way of bonding with the Black girls. My Spidey sense went up immediately and I was getting Felicity Mathis (I’ll use you till I abuse you) vibes out the gate with this one, but I stayed chill. Better to not rock the boat.

  “And you look a little like Whitney Houston, but way prettier. I think she’s great, but Madonna sings better,” Kaitlyn continued. Dawn and I gave each other immediate wide eyes because (a) blasphemy on that Whitney/Madonna comment, and (b) what the hell was with this chick?

  It went on from there—new school, same stupidity, but whatever. It was high school. At least now I had a friend to vibe with and one who understood when these not-so-micro aggressions came up. Dawn and I had something in common, and even better, we were equally silly in our immaturity and over-the-top love of ’80s punk and ’90s pop. B-boys were an obsession, and foreign romance drama heartthrobs were our ultimate crushes.

  Always a little quirky, I had done my quirking in relative quiet. Dawn, who was a bit bolder and innately perceptive, picked up on my inner wild child and coaxed her out. There were SoHo shopping trips, sunbathing layouts on her West Village rooftop when we were out of school on the weekends. The best were our long sessions of Fuck, Marry, Kill—Comic Edition. The fact that thirty years later we could still pass time pretty much doing the same things, playing the same games, well, I didn’t know if it was a good or a bad thing.

  If Keanu was getting his shit together and settling down, then what did that mean for me and my life?

  Chapter 3

  Between Two Ferns

  Bethany Lu

  It doesn’t mean shit,” Dawn said, surprising me by answering the question I thought I’d only asked silently. Maybe I was a touch too transparent.

  “Dawn’s right. Keanu getting married doesn’t mean anything. And you need to stop with the overthinking,” True chimed in from the kitchen. He was eyeing me with that worried expression again.

  Jeez, the two of them. And they were getting on me about overthinking? Part of me was starting to feel like these Saturday get-togethers were just excuses to check up on me, but I tried not to go there and just keep us in the friend zone where I was comfortable and not feel like I was being managed.

  I stuck out my tongue and True responded by taking a nonchalant sip of his coffee. Infuriating-ass man. “I’m not one of your students, True. You don’t have to worry about me. Maybe you’re the one who’s overthinking. Or overanalyzing as is the case when it comes to you.”

  “I highly doubt that,” he drawled out.

  Sure, this little spat seemed ridiculous for fully grown New Yorkers on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, and there was probably no reason I should have put up with it, but there was also no reason in the world I could see myself not.

  Dawn and True were pretty much the only constants I could count on after the world flipped and changed direction on me when I was eighteen.

  When our quartet had been suddenly downgraded to a trio.

  But I couldn’t bear to think about that. Not now. Not in conjunction with the almost, maybe very real, possibility of Keanu getting married.

  I looked back over at Dawn. She and I were opposite in many ways but statistically so similar. A couple of Black women staring down our midforties and successful-ish, thanks to being Black one-percenters with family funds to fall back on. We were both happily single and getting perhaps a little too content with being so after running over the river and through the city with dating. Still, anyone would tell us that because of our ages we should be looking for Mr. Right. Like real hard. Not blissfully binge-watching Netflix series, fangirling over our old crushes and drooling over the younger up-and-comers. We drove our parents nuts and our married friends even nuttier.

  Over forty, single AF and okay with it. It didn’t mesh for some.

  I remember the night our friend CeCe announced she was getting married to her longtime boyfriend, Bruce, over sangrias at our favorite Mexican restaurant. Icky Bruce is what we called him, on account of us always making the ick face whenever his name came up. But CeCe had been with him since college, and we were long over accompanying her on recon missions to see who Bruce was cheating on her with at the moment. And now there she was, telling us about some fantasy she had of seeing us squeeze into mauve bridesmaid dresses and traveling to a destination wedding in Grand Rapids. As if Grand Rapids was an actual destination for a wedding. But it was what Bruce had wanted.

  Of course, to hear her tell it, Bruce was no longer a philandering sonofabitch. Nope. According to CeCe, he’d transformed, or hell, was always the perfect sweep-you-off-your-feet type of boyfriend who bought flowers no less than once a week and served homemade breakfast in bed every Sunday after making you come four times and didn’t even expect a hand job in return. For her, that was worth putting her friends in mauve dresses, matching shoes and then asking them to pay hotel and travel on top of that to stay at an airport-adjacent hotel.

  After CeCe floated out of La Cantina, Dawn and I ordered up another pitcher of drinks and declared there was no way we were settling for a Kay Jewelers moment and revisionist history to tie us to a forever mistake.

  Better to stick with flying solo and loving the perfect and perfectly unattainable guys in our heads than get tied down in the real world.

  Sidebar: Bruce and CeCe were currently separated.

  “Stop with that look,” Dawn said. “You know I know what it means. That Gemini mind of yours is already off and running in some wayward direction. What you need to do is finish your coffee, eat your bagel and then get back to this piece, which looks like it’s going to be fabulous BTW.”

  She uncrossed her arms and slipped out of her blazer, revealing a sundress in an abstract fruit print with a shirred top that flowed to about midcalf. Her strappy sandals had the cutest back bow. Though her outfit was cute and held a bit of whimsy, Dawn was pointing at my unfinished project and had on her “so what do you have to say about this?” serious look.

  So that was that. Dawn was done with my games and now back to being a full-on adult career woman and my manager. Though she may have totally understood my immediate despair when it came to the shocking Keanu announcement, nothing came between Dawn and her business, and I had a show coming up in a few months at her gallery. Dawn liked what I had done so far, but I still wanted to add to the collection, so there’d be more options.

  I looked back at the unfinished work, trying hard to focus and get into adulting mode again. I stared. Not long before, the mixed-media piece had been on
its way to being a sublime postmodern representation of the missing stillness in the chaotic current domestic world, blah blah blah…Suddenly these were just words droning in my head. Yeah, I had the art speak down pat. But now the canvas—with its wash of blue and the delicate fabrics I’d painstakingly chosen and wanted to incorporate with black-and-white prints, color photographs and ripped newspaper clippings—all looked like it came straight out of a scene from Hoarders: HGTV Edition dumped in my space.

  I reached for my initial sketch and felt no connection there either. The two female figures now felt off, and the man in the photograph? What the hell was he representing? Nothing quite fit.

  I looked at Dawn again, busily tapping on her phone, then at True over in the kitchen doing the same. Even within our usual connected space, today there was a disconnect.

  Dammit. The stupid tweet kept flashing through my mind. Ninety days. It felt like a countdown to doom. How could Keanu—a public figure, a celebrity I’d never met—have that kind of power after all these years?

  Shaking my head, I tried to force myself to think objectively. It had to be the work. That was it. I just had to finish it. But even without the beads and paint I’d planned to add, I knew this one was a lost cause. The original lightness and harmony I’d wanted wasn’t there. The hope I had when I’d started it had faded away, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to get it back. Gone was gone.

  “This isn’t working,” I said. “It’s not going to work.”

  Dawn’s fingers stilled. “What? I mean, why?” she asked. “This is great. I mean I can already see it’s going to be amazing. Don’t give up now. You are the one who still insists on adding more pieces to the show, and your commissions are starting to line up too.”

  Great? Amazing? Commissions? All positive words that were giving me minor heart palpitations. Not that the idea of more work and paying customers at the ready wasn’t good. It’s just that I felt my potential for letting someone down in this case was disastrous.