The Goy Next Door (Girl Meets Goy #2)

Chapter 14 Butt of boredom

“You’ve been really grumpy lately,” Asher noted while he unboxed Styrofoam containers of matzah ball soup. “I feel like I’m getting comfort food for us at least once a week.”

Leah rolled her eyes. “You can stop with the comfort food. It really isn’t that comforting. I don’t think it’s comforting at all.”

Asher stopped what he was doing and looked up at Leah with sad, puppy dog eyes. Those eyes used to make her heart melt but today they just made her feel more annoyed.

“It’s fine, Ash,” she said, feeling a little guilty for her behavior. “I’m sorry, it’s not your fault. I appreciate your effort.”

The puppy eyes disappeared, but Asher didn’t go back to the soup. Instead, he plopped down on the couch next to Leah.

“Did I do something? Did I upset you? I’m sorry if I did. If you could just tell me, so I’d know—”

Leah waved her hand. He hadn’t done anything. He had just been Asher, the same Asher he’d been all along. It was Leah who had changed. She’d grown up, matured some. She’d taken up running and was now doing it at least twice a week. And that cut into her interest in getting drunk or finding good happy hours. And yes, Asher was right, she was grumpy a lot. Despite the endorphins, she found herself angry and annoyed most of the time. Especially when she was at work or after work. That meant that five days out of seven, she was officially grumpy.

She was trying. She’d taken Arlo’s advice to heart and tried to make herself useful at Teen Club. She’d tried to schmooze with the senior reporters to see what they were working on and sometimes they’d let her help. She brainstormed 50 different names for the color red for an article about why lipsticks were back. She wrote a how-to article on pleasing your BF without being a slut. She described ten ways to make your period less sucky. She even wrote a spread about what your butt shape says about you. Did you know a heart-shaped butt meant you were more likely to gain weight when you were older? Or that square butts were connected with lower immune systems? Or that bubble butts generally signified the highest overall health. Well, Leah knew all that now. She’d actually had a thirty-minute conversation with a doctor about it. She’d done the interview, wrote up the article, and then one of the senior reporters took over for edits and it was slated for publication in an upcoming issue with the senior reporter’s byline.

That had been a low point for Leah. Sure, the senior reporter had asked Leah to do the interview and had asked for notes. But Leah thought that all her work meant she deserved the credit, at least some of it. Oddly, she felt even worse about this butt article than the correction she had to run during her last week at Club Business. Maybe it was better not to have a byline about butts anyway.

She wanted to pitch her own stories at Teen Club, but she didn’t really understand how. Marnie’s closed door didn’t look like the right address for it, but neither did any of the senior reporters—who took every idea and made it their own—or the other editors who were always so busy looking. Busy writing, busy editing, busy scurrying around the office.

“It’s not you, Ash,” she said and grabbed Asher’s hand. She felt bad about how she was treating him. He was so nice to her all the time and she really didn’t deserve it. Not with her grumpy attitude and snide comments she made when he wanted to comfort her or take her out for fun. “I’m sorry I am being a bitch.”

“It’s OK,” he consoled her right away.

“It’s not really OK,” she said. “I’ve been really mean to you lately.”

“You’ve been under a lot of pressure.”

“No I haven’t,” she insisted. “I’m just…” She just wasn’t happy. Her job sucked more than the periods she proposed solutions for. There was no instruction or order at work, no camaraderie in the office, and frankly, she was bored. She thought she’d like writing about teen issues, but so far she hadn’t written anything she had found remotely interesting. She wondered if she would have found her articles interesting when she was 15, if she had just matured too much for Teen Club, or if teens today were just interested in beyond boring subjects.

She also wasn’t just bored at work. She was bored at happy hour most of the time when they gossiped about high school friends or when Asher told her inconsequential stories about the guys at work. She was bored on the weekends when everyone slept in until noon and then wanted to meet for brunch for more gossip and meaningless stories.

She wanted to talk about books or ambitions or what she thought about things, but to Asher, her descriptions of the books she read from her New York Public Library card were as meaningless as the stories Asher told about pranking the new interns at his work.

She wasn’t sure how to get out of this rut of boredom, but she knew eating the same matzah ball soup for the hundredth time was not the answer.

“I have an idea,” Asher announced and pounced up. “Get up! I’m taking you somewhere the guys at work were talking about.”

Leah raised her eyebrows. Did she want to go somewhere “the guys at work talked about?” It was probably some overpriced bar where Asher’s colleagues picked up girls or practiced all the ways to be on the receiving end of rejection. She did not want to go somewhere the guys at work were talking about.

“No, it’s fine.” Leah waved her hand. “I’m tired, and I want to get up for a run tomorrow.” And also her feet were hurting because she was trying to wear nicer shoes since she started working at Teen Club. She could think of a few more excuses if needed.

“C’mon Leah!” Asher urged her, holding out his hand to her. “Seriously! I think you’ll like this place. Can’t you just trust me?”

She wasn’t sure if she could trust Asher to know what she liked. But maybe she was being too much of a grump and she should give her boyfriend, who had known her for at least a third of her life, a chance.

Leah slowly lifted herself off the couch and grabbed Asher’s hand. They grabbed their jackets and walked outside.

“So where are you taking me?” She asked while Asher fiddled with his phone.

“One sec…” he was staring at the screen and typing away. Leah tried to see what he was doing, but he pulled the phone away. “Uh uh! It’s a surprise!”

Leah decided to succumb. She let Asher lead her to the subway, down to Grand Central and then across to the west side. They got off the subway and Asher navigated according to his phone until they got to a small storefront with a sign that said: Break it. The logo had a picture of a hammer smashing a printer.

“What the hell is this place?” Leah asked.

“A rage room!” Asher’s enthusiasm oozed out of his every pore. “The guys at work always come here when a deal doesn’t go as planned. I think my company has like, a monthly membership or something.”

“What’s a rage room?” Leah was curious. She hadn’t heard of a rage room before, and one of her New York City life goals was to try new things. And she definitely had been feeling rage lately.

“You get to break things,” Asher explained. “Take all your anger out.”

He led her inside where a guy was sitting at a reception area playing with his phone. He explained to them they had several rooms and they were welcome to pick one to destroy. One was designed like an office and would include at least one premium electronic like a computer or a printer that they could destroy. Another room had a car in it. The car had taken its fair share of beatings, but was still very smashable. Another room was designed more like a kitchen.

“Choose your tool, get protective gear, and go at it,” the guy explained.

Leah suggested they choose the office room. Maybe it would be cathartic to pretend it was Marnie’s office, or the cubicle of the senior reporter who stole her butt article. The guy gave them plastic face masks, gloves, and white paper gowns to wear over their clothing. Next, he led them to a room of tools, baseball bats, hammers, other metal rods. Leah grabbed a hammer while Asher took a bat.

He then brought them into a room that looked like a very basic office. It had a desk (dented, but sturdy looking) with an old computer monitor and keyboard on it. There was a phone and a few cups and mugs that seemed out of place, but were probably to give more options of things to smash. The guy then told them they had thirty minutes and he left them alone in the room.

“What do we do?” Leah asked. Already, she was feeling slightly exhilarated and less grumpy.

“Smash everything!” He took his bat and cracked it right on top of the monitor. Somehow, the monitor barely budged.

Her eyes widened and she swung her hammer into the monitor’s screen which shattered instantly. Unrecognizable laughter exploded from her mouth. She swung again and pounded away at the monitor while Asher batted the cups across the room, watching the pieces shatter and then shatter even more when they hit the opposite wall.

Leah focused on the monitor. It had every stupid story she wrote in it. Every stupid expectation of fulfillment at Teen Club. Every bit of promise she had felt when Marnie had offered her the job through Tony.

She hammered away at the keyboard, whose letters were flying up in the air. One letter hit the plastic mask shielding her face. And the phone bounced every time the hammer came down on it. She was laughing uncontrollably when a buzz sounded to tell them their time was up.

She dropped the hammer and lifted her mask. She and Asher were both panting and smiling and she felt exhilarated. This was exactly what she had needed.

She jumped into Asher’s arms and hugged him tight. “Thank you,” she whispered in his ears, but her own ears were ringing from all the banging that she wasn’t sure it was loud enough for him to hear.

Adrenaline pumped through her as they left the rage room and retraced their steps back to her apartment. She pulled him into her bedroom and kissed him deeply. She knew he was trying hard. She knew he was a good guy who wanted to do right by her.

Maybe she was the problem. She needed to give him a better chance.