My senior year of college, I got skinny off raw food. Soaked almonds, sprouted buckwheat, cucumber soup. The first time I flew out to LA, a friend of a friend invited me to an office party at Hustler. I sat behind Larry Flynt’s desk on a dare. Accountants slithered around gift tables, asking if I was a model. I kept my mouth shut and swiped as many grab bags as I could. I spent the rest of the week on a cloud: men chased me onto patios, invited me on their motorcycles, asked if I’d jet off to Fiji with them for the weekend. I met a boy who looked like a vampire. We spent a night together, decided we were soulmates and, in the morning, we ate pancakes at House of Pies. We said goodbye with a blood-rich kiss on a hilly street. I flew home; in love.
I flew out again in the spring. By then, I had regained all the weight I lost on the raw food diet. About ten pounds, enough that I squeezed out of my jeans and sweaters. I blew off the midterm essay for my World War One class to catch a discount flight. My vampire boyfriend picked me up from the airport and frowned. “I’m sorry,” he said, pulling away from me on the curb. “It’s the weight, it’s not my thing.”
I didn’t eat for three days straight. I borrowed a friend’s car and drove up the coast, blaring The Decemberists,imagining my real soulmate was off in a distant war, crawling beneath barbed wire. When I went out drinking that weekend, my stomach was an empty trench. A bouncer stopped my friends and I from entering a club and so we had to hit a dive bar across the street. I downed a dozen shots and asked a guy in leather chaps to be my husband. He said, “No,” and so I asked another. And another. The next morning, a friend of a friend wrote about me on his LiveJournal. He called me a horny trainwreck from flyover country.
My friend was so embarrassed she took her car back and dropped me off outside a bar in Los Feliz. I met an Australian paparazzi who said he’d been out all day looking for Ray Liotta. I asked if he’d be my husband. He offered me his arm. We crashed a party filled with friends of friends and bragged about our upcoming honeymoon in Fiji. Later, we went back to his apartment in Koreatown. I searched his DVDs and asked if we could watch Paths of Glory. He put Goodfellas on instead. We blew lines off a Peter Lindbergh book and fucked on the couch. In the morning, he made coffee and stepped onto the balcony with a cordless phone to prank call Ray Liotta. I sat in my underwear, flipping through his giant photography books.
He let me tag along with him in the Hollywood Hills. I wore giant sunglasses, an off the shoulder sweater, and white high heels. My jeans fell off my hips. We climbed dusty backyards filled with sage, buckwheat, and big berry shrubs. Stars popped before my eyes. It wasn’t until later, when we were making out on the hood of his Camaro, that I realized he could have murdered me back in the hills, back by the buckwheat and big berry shrubs. Decades later, they’d talk about me on true-crime podcasts. They’d bring up LiveJournal blogs from the mid-2000’s, they’d say, “Friends of friends called her a horny trainwreck.”
Instead, the paparazzi took me back to his apartment. While he was in the shower, I borrowed his laptop to email my history professor about my World War One essay. As I tried to come up with meaningful excuses for fleeing Cleveland in the middle of the semester, a message from my vampire boyfriend popped up. He said he heard I married an Australian paparazzi, that we ran off to Fiji. He just wanted to let me know he was sorry how things worked out and wished they could be different. Thing was, he was still processing emotional abuse from his childhood. His mother, his father, his older brother, the narcissist. We both have things we regret, he wrote, don’t we? I meant to reply with something witty about emotional shrapnel and mustard gas, but I pressed the wrong keys, freezing the home screen.
By night time, the paparazzi and I had become an old married couple. I went to bed early while he remained in the living room, fiddling with the laptop. “What exactly did you do, love?” he asked, standing in the doorway, holding the computer like a pizza box. “I don’t know,” I said, “it just froze,” and he stomped his foot and said, “Well you had to do something,” and, once again, I said I didn’t know, and he stormed back to the living room. Later, through the walls, I heard him on the phone, affecting an American accent, asking where Mr. Liotta wanted his dry cleaning delivered.
In the morning, he drove me to the airport. We stopped for breakfast at a sidewalk café in Santa Monica. As I skimmed the drink list, he said he couldn’t imbibe since he was seeing his girlfriend after he dropped me off at LAX.
I took my sunglasses off and said, “You have a girlfriend?”
He spun the dial on his digital camera. “Yeah, she’s a bit of an old broad.”
“An old broad?”
“It’s been nice with you, though,” he said. “I’ve enjoyed being around someone so young.”
I put my sunglasses back on. “I’m gonna try the blueberry pancakes.”
He tsked. “No,” he said, “you’ll give yourself diabetes.”
I ordered them anyway—with extra syrup and a side of eggs—and when I flew back to Ohio, my stomach still growled the whole way.
And when I was home again, I was home.
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This story appears in print in Cleveland Review of Books, Vol. 01.
Meghan Louise Wagner
Meghan Louise Wagner is a writer and teacher from Northeast Ohio. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2022, AGNI, Nashville Review, STORY, Cutleaf, Autofocus, Okay Donkey, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at the Cleveland Institute of Art and Cleveland State University.