Page 1 of How NOT to Seduce a Rockstar
1
I wasin the zone, deep into what I was convinced would become the Great American Novel, when Tess burst into my room with all the subtlety of a SWAT team raiding a crack den.
“That asshole dumped me!”
I didn’t even look up from my typewriter. On any other day, I would’ve kicked her out without a second thought. But something in her eyes—something wild, the emotional equivalent of a Category Five hurricane—made me pause. I decided to sacrifice a few pages. With any luck, she’d unleash her monologue and evaporate like a passing thundercloud.
My fingers lifted slowly from the keys of my Olivetti Lettera 35. I took a deep breath. Then I turned my chair with the same slow-motion gravitas you see in Westerns, right before the shootout.
Tess stood in the doorway, striking a full-on melodrama pose: one hand on her hip, mascaraslightly smeared, her ponytail looking like it had just come back from war.
“Chad?” I asked.
“Chad.”
“But... you two seemed so into each other.”
“Cute.”
She flopped onto my bed with all the grace of a sack of potatoes shot out of a cannon. Bounced once on the mattress, then sighed like she’d just closed some sort of karmic cycle.
“So... he dumped you? Are we celebrating? Should I grab the champagne?”
“Maybe. My quality of life can only go up from here.” Then she paused, looking at me with the grave intensity of someone about to announce a death. “But you haven’t grasped the real tragedy.”
“The real tragedy would’ve been staying with Chad. That guy is the human equivalent of a ten-minute voicemail.”
“Exactly. But the tragedy... is that he won.”
“Won what? Did you two fight it out in Mortal Kombat?”
“He won because he did the dumping. Whoever dumps wins.” Tess tilted her chin like she was stating a universal law. “Whoever gets dumped… loses. End of story. Like gravity.”
“But you told me you were going to break up with him! Weeks ago!”
“Yeah, but I didn’t. He did. And now he gets thegold medal in Assholery while I’m stuck here with the ‘Most Humiliating Breakup of the Month’ trophy.”
I stared at her. “So... let me get this straight. You’re not upset the relationship ended. You’re upset because he dumped you before you could dump him?”
“Brutally,” she clarified, crossing her arms. “KO in the first round. And I didn’t even have a helmet.”
“How did it happen?”
She stood up, pacing the room, overheated with agitation. She shrugged off her jacket and flung it onto my reading chair. One of its legs had been wobbly for weeks, but of course, it chose that moment to finally collapse.
“Bea, picture this: I leave the house, heart singing, thinking about my banana milkshake... and he greets me with a ‘We need to talk.’”
“Oof.”
“And then he tells me I’m intense.”
I clutched my chest. “No!”
“Yes.”
“Intense?”
“Intense. Boring. Frigid. Psychotic.”
