Idiot - Laura Clery Page 0,21

wasn’t discouraged at all. This felt like a step toward my career. I had gotten out of Downers Grove once, and I was going to again. I didn’t know how it was going to happen, but it would. This was just the beginning. I was completely, unwaveringly sure.

Okay WHOEVER keeps calling me delusional, I can hear you and also—SHUT UP.

CHAPTER 4

How to Ignore a Hundred Red Flags

I got back to Downers Grove expecting things to be the same as when I left. It still looked the same for sure—but all my friends were gone. Maggie was at Northwestern, and Jack was in Wisconsin at St. Norbert. They were all doing great things and making career moves, and I was so happy for them! But for me it sucked.

I did have Colleen, though. She was living at home, working at the restaurant, and going to community college.

“How did my investment do in LA?” she’d ask, referring to all the money she lent me for my summer away.

“I’m gonna get you ten times that money after I make it big.”

Colleen and I were opposites in some ways, but the same in others. I was a rebellious, loudmouth weirdo, and she was an introverted, quiet weirdo. She had no friends and would just read books all day and play guitar and sing in French. When we were younger, she loved school and was good at it. She would even offer to write my high school essays for me, scrawling out the entire thing in tiny handwriting on a couple notecards so that I could take them to school and copy them over in my clumsy, boyish handwriting. When she offered the first time, I was stunned.

“Seriously. I’ll write your essay for you.”

“You’ll write my essay . . . and I’ll do nothing in return?”

“Yeah. I just love US History.”

I took her hand. “I don’t understand you at all, but I will gladly take advantage of your weirdly vast knowledge of early-American aviation.”

Colleen looked into my eyes. “They dreamed of flying and they did it, Laura.”

She also had a water bed. Yes, the bed she grew up sleeping on was the sexiest bed of the ’90s. I’m not sure how it got that title, seeing how it just felt like sleeping on a weird bladder. We’d slosh around on it for hours, talking and laughing and eating pistachios. And if I jumped onto it hard enough, she would go flying off from the waves I made.

But being at home wasn’t easy. I felt my cabin fever coming back. I grew impatient for a way to get back to LA.

Oh. There’s one thing I forgot to tell you. The day I got back home, I started getting phone calls to our landline.

“Hello? Laura? It’s me!” There was a long pause. “Damon!”

“Who??”

“Damon! We met at the Argyle!”

I had to rack my brain. The Argyle? OHHHHHHHH. Damon. He was the very pretty man I met outside the Argyle in LA who gave me some coke and told me he wanted to shoot me. With a camera. How could I forget anyone who was generous enough to give me a free bump??

Side note: What kind of confidence did this dude have to start off a phone call with “It’s me!” after I had met him just one time, two months ago. As if there were any chance I would just recognize his voice?

“Come out to New York so I can shoot you!” he said excitedly.

I barely remembered him. Honestly, he was just evidence that my summer in LA went super well. So of course I said no to his offer! Jeez, who do you think I am??

But then, a few hours later he called back:

“Hey Laura! Come out to New York so I can shoot you!”

“I can’t just come out to New York. I’ve met you once!”

I’m not that impulsive. But apparently, he was. He started calling . . . every day. Multiple times a day.

It was always variations of: “I’m in New York, I still want to shoot with you! Come out here!” over and over again.

My family was starting to get annoyed. On one particular day, Damon had called four times, leaving a voice mail each time, as if we needed to be reminded what his call was regarding. My family had just sat down for a formal TV dinner and then . . . RINGGGGGGGG—

My dad, mom, and sisters all glared at me.

Colleen took a bite of corn on the cob. “I wonder who that