1 Geraldine considered her grapefruit. To an observer it might have appeared that she was snacking, but anyone who knew her could attest that Geraldine Despont was a considerer. Perched on the window seat in her living room, her back upright against the washed-out January sky, she peeled the skin into careful ribbons and arranged them in a pile beside her. Rotating the heavy pink sphere in her palm, she was suddenly overcome by the grapefruit's erotic aspect. It was the fruit kingdom's breast or, she determined with a little squeeze, more likely a buttock. Geraldine contemplated her own backside, which was rosy and muscular, with slight puckering by the thighs. The citrus connection certainly held up. Geraldine let loose a snort and flushed, remembering she wasn't alone this evening. Her roommate, Barrett, was in the den with his girlfriend, Katrina, who took epic showers in Geraldine's bathroom most mornings and availed herself of other people's bath products. Ever since Geraldine had taken to keeping her shampoo and cleansing gel in a hunter-green canvas kit that traveled with her to and from the bathroom each day, Barrett felt free to accuse her of not liking Katrina. Liking had nothing to do with it. It was just that she didn't get Katrina. Her unintended roommate was a twenty-something woman who dressed in rave pants and baby-size T-shirts, as if airing out her navel ring were more important than avoiding looking like she'd wandered in from the mid-nineties. Barrett, too, was bepierced and no stranger to the Toronto rave scene-God, could there be three uglier words in the English language?-but at least he was serious about his work and in the process of losing his hair. His head now resembled a half-blown-off dandelion, which Geraldine found touching. And they had history. Back when Geraldine was assisting the managing editor at Province, Canada's weekly newsmagazine, Barrett, then in his second year at York University, was an editorial intern. He showed up for work in shiny button-down shirts and, because no one else talked to him, eagerly fetched Geraldine cups of tea and typed up detailed pitches for long-form features-mostly to do with food politics or the changing Canadian city (Jane Jacobs was a big influence). Geraldine had no clue whether his ideas were special, but she was always good for a dose of encouragement. She even invited him to join her for tea a couple of times. Barrett had been terribly respectful of his colleague, never realizing that she was merely a twenty-five-year-old who was planning on going to law school once she dug her way out of student debt. Geraldine did nothing to disabuse her intern of his perception that she was some all-powerful entity, never explicitly telling him that she simply passed his memos on to her boss, Barb McLaughlin. Barrett felt safe in Geraldine's hands, and who was she to take that away from him? There'd been a chance encounter at Kensington Market nearly a decade later, and now here they were, living together in the second-floor apartment of a peeling Victorian. Geraldine was no longer his superior, barely in his industry at this point, but he still viewed her with enough respect not to constantly make her feel like a loser for being on the verge of thirty-seven and renting out the second bedroom of an apartment that wasn't even her own. She was indefinitely subletting from her old friend Sunny MacLeod, who'd ages ago left town and moved to New York, where she was by all standards, measurable and not, winning the game of life. "I'm not eating God-knows-how-old leftovers. They're stinking up the fridge." Katrina's husky voice entered the room before she did. Geraldine wiped her hands on her sweatpants and considered running into her bedroom and shutting the door, but it was too late. Now Katrina was on the couch, one hand fiddling with her limp ponytail, the remote control dangling from the other. "Is it okay if Bear and I watch TV before we go out?" Katrina stared through Geraldine, her eyes blue orbs of indifference. She stalled at a promo for a Kids in the Hall marathon, then moved on to HGTV. A man with frost-tipped hair and his Eastern European wife were touring a three-bedroom condo on Vancouver Island. Garth, Geraldine's boss, had urged her to spend time watching these shows that might inspire new ideas. Garth was editorial director of Blankenship Media, the company that had acquired Province seven years ago, after its longtime owner, the Ricker Family Trust, in a fit of consultant-inflicted financial prudence, had decided to sell rather than fix it. She was a senior editor at Blankenship's Special Titles, a division responsible for creating cheerful one-off publications tied to holidays or popular movies or Canadian personalities. Geraldine didn't know anybody who ever purchased these heavy-stock magazines posing as coffee-table books, yet they were a surprisingly profitable business. The Drake special issue kept reprinting, and copies with a limited-edition fold-out poster now fetched nearly eighty dollars on eBay. "You in for the night?" Katrina asked. "There's a film screening I'm supposed to go to at eight," Geraldine said, and when Katrina didn't follow up with any questions, Geraldine made no mention of its being a science-fiction movie, some of which had been filmed in Toronto. "Oh, I thought since you were . . . ," Katrina said. "In my happy pants?" Geraldine was wearing her beloved Kermit-green sweats with interlocking tennis rackets and orange stripes along the seams. When she'd found them in the bottom of a thrift-store bin, they'd reminded her of childhood. Not her childhood specifically, which she'd gone through mostly dressed in cheap princess costumes from Winners, but an alternative version in which she'd cavorted in primary colors with an unbroken family. "Hey." Barrett arrived from the kitchen, cradling a bowl of microwaved popcorn that smelled vaguely vinegary. "Hungry?" he asked Geraldine. "It's vegan." "Sure, but I'm not vegan," she said with a slight laugh, and stood up to take a handful. "I thought you'd converted for January?" Barrett cocked his head. "I did a dairy cleanse," Geraldine reminded him. "For five days." Barrett settled onto the couch next to his girlfriend. "Want to watch with us?" "Sure, for a little bit," Geraldine said. One of her New Year's resolutions had been to work at improving her home life. She was over thinking she had a shot at doing anything about her career. There was more room for growth on the home front. Living with harmless weirdos was so much better than cohabiting with a fiancZ who thought it was his right to insert himself into any available orifice. Those days were over, thank goodness. Arranging herself on a low-slung armchair by the couch-with limbs as long as Geraldine's, she was never so much seated as she was arranged-she reached out for a second handful of popcorn and met Katrina's curious gaze with a warm smile. Such was Geraldine's determination to make nice. Last month Barrett had spent a grand total of zero weekend nights at home, and he'd gone to his parents' house in Winnipeg for Christmas week. Yet December had been stressful for Geraldine, an endless procession of holiday parties, with their identical oozing baked-brie wheels and inevitable token single man in velvet. Why did they always wear velvet? When Geraldine was among the coupled, she could ignore these predatory bachelors. Her ex-fiancZ, Peter Ricker, had brought ruin on her life, yet sometimes she missed having him at her side, if only to carry the conversation at gatherings. Now on her own, Geraldine was expected to show up wearing something sharp and not grumble about the often exorbitant carfare home. Even tonight, on this bleak, frostbitten evening, she was expected to be out and about. Geraldine really did not want to go all the way to Richmond Street to watch a movie that undoubtedly would contain not a single joke or snatch of genuine conversation. But Garth had more or less ordered her to go as some sort of an ambassador to the production company, to say hello to whichever bright-eyed assistant would be clutching a tablet at the theater entrance and waiting to cross Geraldine's name off an electronic list. Devoting the past month of her life to cobbling together a collectors' issue pegged to the latest release in the franchise had not been enough, Geraldine gathered. She would much rather stay in and read the book she'd bought at the Upper Yonge Street library sale, a paperback of You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again. Or, more realistically, she'd look up her online horoscope and settle in to near infinite refreshes of her social media feeds. Gus Di Paolo, whom she had slept with on her last trip to New York and who was her very occasional correspondent and possibly the next true love of her life, had been tweeting some weird shit. Perhaps his latest, "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards," was meant to telegraph that he spent his free time mulling Danish philosophers, but the only conclusion Geraldine could draw was that something sudden and important was up with Gus and his ex, Sarah. Geraldine had never met Sarah, but Sunny had filled her in. Sarah and Gus had been together for nearly a decade, and they hadn't had any problems save for Sarah's desire to make babies and Gus's unwillingness to propose. Last summer Sarah had startled everybody in her and Gus's circle by leaving him for a guy she'd met surfing on Rockaway Beach. Gus, who had crinkly blue eyes and meaty hands that made things that sold for ridiculous sums of money, was crushed. Geraldine had met him a couple of months after that and Sunny had coached her to give him his space in their courtship. "I know how he comes across, but he's far more sensitive than he appears," Sunny said. On the television the house hunters were wearing hard hats and inspecting a basement. The man was knocking on the beams while his wife expressed her burning desire to build an at-home spinning studio. Geraldine realized she was the only one watching. Barrett and Katrina were exchanging strange glances, and then Katrina was looking at a message on Barrett's phone. "What's up?" Geraldine asked. "Everything okay?" "Nothing's up." Katrina sounded jumpy. "We're fine." Cupping his hand over his girlfriend's knee, Barrett slowly turned to Geraldine. "Maybe we should talk," he said. Geraldine willed her features into a serene expression, as if she could fend off the dread closing in on her. She knew exactly where this was going. "Kat and I are thinking about . . . looking at apartments." "Apartments!" Geraldine exclaimed. "We've seen one," Katrina said. "But it was way above our price range." "You've worked out a budget?" Geraldine said. The room was becoming slightly blurry. "Nothing's definite," Barrett replied. "But you're moving in together." Geraldine tried to maintain her composure but couldn't help gulping. "That's huge. Wow." She stopped short of congratulating them; she and Barrett were past insincerities. "I'm going to miss you, buddy." "I know, it's bittersweet," Barrett said. "But I don't want to be keeping a secret from you until the last minute. Last Sunday morning when you asked where we were going, I felt lousy lying." Geraldine recalled talking to the two about the restaurant they were running out to-Ondine East, a Vancouver-based chef's hot new spot in the Beaches. At the time she'd felt envious, not of their plan but of their enthusiasm for waiting in line to eat brunch, a made-up meal that was entirely unnecessary in a city whose streets went dead at midnight. "You didn't go to brunch?" "We got bagels." Barrett cleared his throat. "Of course we'll help you find a replacement when it's time. I'm not going to leave you with some psycho." "My friend Mabel met her boyfriend through a roommate-search app," Katrina said. "Oh! I just remembered something." Geraldine refused to meet Barrett's eye as she sprang off the chair and headed for her bedroom door. Once she was safely alone in her room, the sensation of despair only became more piercing. Barrett was Geraldine's third roommate in four years to move on in order to cohabit with a significant other. Geraldine had attended two weddings that resulted from these departures. Gracelessly she dropped to her knees and pulled a blue plastic crate out from under her bed. She flipped through a couple of photo albums and spiral notebooks filled with diary entries before she even fastened on what she was doing. Some animal instinct had pushed her to find the composition journal with the marble-patterned cover that she'd started writing in some years ago. It was a greatest-hits of sorts: Only the very lowest of Geraldine's lows occasioned an entry in the Book of Indignities. And now she was faced with what might be the greatest indignity of all: She didn't even have her book. In one of the more poorly thought-out gestures of her life, she'd lent the journal to Sunny, who'd vowed to return it once she'd illustrated the scenes in it. The closest Sunny had come to keeping her promise was emailing Geraldine a picture of her Cray-Pas rendering of one of the original indignities: Dad Moves to Alberta, Age 3. That had been two years ago. Surely she wasn't still working on it. Geraldine collapsed on top of her bed, her coral tendrils fanning out on the duvet's cloud print, and felt stupid for letting Barrett's news take her unawares. That's what men did, even the sweet ones. They left. She tried to figure out which was worse, Barrett's forthcoming abandonment or the added disgrace of needing to remind Sunny to return the journal. Sunny forgot things only when it suited her, when she didn't stand to gain anything. The book was probably stashed away with a jumble of treasures Sunny had picked up on one of her international jaunts and some dried-up art supplies. The only way Geraldine could imagine reclaiming it was to finagle her way into Sunny's house. An invitation to stay at Sunny's for any longer than the length of an afternoon had not come in years and years. Geraldine pictured herself looking like some deranged assassin as she marched through a throng of Sunny's bubble-dress-clad admirers at one of her painfully curated all-women get-togethers to demand she hand over the composition book. She could picture Sunny's disorientation, her nervous chuckle as the reed of her body tilted five degrees away from her friend as she realized the magnitude of Geraldine's sense of injury. Sunny had been kinder to Geraldine during her darkest hour than anybody else, and certainly kinder than she needed to be to somebody who had no way of repaying favors. She'd been there for Geraldine during her crack-up and had bequeathed her Toronto apartment, with its crooked floorboards and plastered-off fireplace, to her friend. But on some level Sunny had to know the truth. Holding on to the journal was a means of keeping Geraldine in her place, serving as insurance against Geraldine's ever thinking, God forbid, that she was equal to Sunny. Excerpted from How Could She: A Novel by Lauren Mechling All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
