JENNY LOPEZ HAS A BAD WEEK: AN I HEART SHORT STORY. Lindsey Kelk

belly. Tomorrow I’d run another mile.

      Sigge the Sex God was coming over to look at the room on Friday evening, which gave me thirty-six hours to get the place into some sort of viewing order, but if he was coming from a model apartment, populated exclusively by Derek Zoolanders, I was probably OK as is. Just a quick wipe around and a spritz of air freshener, the place would be a palace. But still, I couldn’t rely on him taking the place. Or me wanting to give him the place. The ladyboner part of my brain rejoiced at the idea of a half-naked man-stud wandering around the place, but the potential spinster section was warning me that having the world’s hottest gay in my apartment while my vajayjay remained retired, was not the best idea I’d ever had. I might as well get a cat and some sensible shoes and just accept defeat.

      And so to Craigslist.

      ‘What am I supposed to write?’ I asked the computer. It whirred a little in response but, really, it didn’t have anything helpful to say. It never did. Instead of putting up my ad, I read a couple of others. Everyone had a relaxing, cosy room to rent. Which my bullshit translator read as dark and small. This was too hard. And besides, if I left it long enough, Angie would totally do it for me. She was the writer, after all. I was the do-er. The planner. The action gal. I was much better at browsing the Bergdorf’s website than I was at finding a roommate. Man, Brian Atwood made some nice shoes. I did miss styling. Shopping for free? Amazing. Even if it was shopping for other people.

      ‘Speaking of shopping for people … ’ I muttered. Online dating. Everyone was doing it, right? It was no big deal? I pulled up OK Cupid, the site I’d heard most of my friends talk about and entered in my search criteria. There was no box for ‘not an asshole’ so I was on my own with that filter. Huh. Just from the photographs, I could tell why they didn’t offer the ‘no asshole’ checkbox. Because every guy on here was a douche. Any second now I was going to come across Brian Williams’s picture.

      ‘Asshole … ugly … short … ugly and short,’ I said out loud, scrolling through profiles. ‘Short ugly asshole … OK … OK … dumb looking … can’t spell.’

      It was like shopping online for guys but with zero quality control. If you wanted designer duds, you went to the Barneys website, not Forever 21. But online dating? There was everything in here, from Prada to Payless. How were you supposed to choose? But still, it was better than doing what actually needed doing …

      Twenty minutes later, oprahlopez2011 had a live profile. The photos were cute, my answers to the dumb-ass questions were brief but fun (‘on a Friday night I am mostly … ’ – surely anyone who could answer that without sounding like a total loser wouldn’t be using an online dating site) and now, to wait. Only, waiting wasn’t something I was good at.

      ‘How hard can this be?’ The computer still didn’t answer. Ass-hat. ‘I just message them and they message me back?’ I really had to get a goldfish or something, just so I had a living entity to direct my banter at.

      ‘Height, six feet minimum.’ It was time to take destiny into my own hands. Let’s see what this baby had hiding away. ‘Hair, blond. Age, thirty to thirty-seven. No kids, likes kids, athletic build, sign, Aquarius, and income, one hundred thousand dollars minimum.’

      Like OK Cupid was going to have anyone who matched these criteria.

      Oh. Oh my God. Sweet baby Jesus in the manger.

      Suddenly, my dream man appeared on screen. Just one look into his baby blues and I was lost in a fantasy of Hamptons summer houses, candy-striped pinafores and two cute kids, gambolling around the garden. Did kids gambol or was that just lambs? Whatever, it was instant. I was in love.

      I had met my future husband. And his name was AJJ78. A brief perusal of his profile suggested he wasn’t a psycho, he had a healthy distaste for the whole online dating thing and he didn’t have any douche-bag flags flying, i.e. he didn’t at any point suggest that Ayn Rand had changed his life. This guy had to be worth a message. Or a wink. Just because the idea of someone winking at me in the street would make me run and hide didn’t mean I couldn’t bust one out here, right? I mean, if it was a valid option? And so, with one very fast, before I regretted it, click of a mouse, it was done. I, Jenny Lopez, had virtually winked at a man.

      There was no going back.

      A few hours, a short nap and two tacos later, my phone trilled on the kitchen counter.

      ‘Hey, Erin,’ I tried to keep the sleep out of my voice. ‘What’s up?’

      ‘I’m calling about tomorrow,’ Erin did not sound even faintly fatigued. Erin sounded all business. ‘I’ve emailed over the call sheet for the event and the number of your driver?’

      ‘I have a driver?’ This whole gig was sounding better and better.

      ‘Sadie Nixon has a driver,’ she replied. ‘And you have Sadie Nixon.’

      Oh yeah. The demonic supermodel spawn of Satan. Allegedly.

      ‘And I’m to do what? Pick her up, get her to the show, get her out of the show and ditch her again?’

      ‘Precisely.’

      I really couldn’t see what the big deal was.

      ‘And just invoice me your day rate when you’re done,’ she said. ‘And any expenses. Sadie doesn’t usually carry cash.’

      ‘Who does she think she is? The queen?’

      ‘Pretty much,’ Erin confirmed. ‘Listen, Jenny, I know you can do this, I know you’re not dumb but I cannot, cannot emphasize enough how important it is to me to have this walking clothes hanger in the right place at the right time, do you hear me?’

      Jesus, she was more on edge than she’d been at her first wedding. Way more chilled out than at the third, though.

      ‘I hear ya, chief.’

      Yeah, I might have saluted into the mirror.

      ‘It’s a new client for me and it’s a client I need to keep. They’re not going to stick with me if I lose their top attraction, are they?’

      ‘Erin, relax,’ I wanted to reassure her, but she was past it. ‘This is important to you, I get it. I won’t fuck it up.’

      ‘She’s just … ’ Erin searched for the right words. ‘I’ve worked with her before and Jenny, I can’t tell you. She was such a difficult bitch. And that was pre-supermodel Sadie. There’s no way fame and money have made her a better person.’

      So, this wasn’t looking quite so appealing all of a sudden. But still, a driver.

      ‘I worked with tons of tough clients in LA,’ I lied. ‘Honestly, honey, you think it’s easy being a stylist in the carb-free land of the size zero? We’re gonna be just fine. I’ll pick her up, I’ll tell her how great she looks, we’ll do wheatgrass shots, I’ll keep her off the coke and deliver her in one piece.’

      ‘Don’t joke about the coke.’

      ‘Keeping her off it or making sure she’s got it?’ I wasn’t sure what the protocol was with supermodels right now. Personally, I didn’t need to pay a hundred bucks for an inflated sense of self-esteem and crashing misery the next day. I could just knock back a couple of dirty martinis and then check Jeff’s Facebook page for the exact same effect, but the models? Sometimes, they expect you to look the other way. And I’d lived with a hooker. I was an expert at looking the other way, even if I didn’t like it.

      ‘If she even alludes to taking anything stronger than a Red Bull, you stop her,’ Erin ordered. ‘In fact, I don’t even want her on a Red Bull. I don’t want her on anything harder than green tea. You hear me?’

      ‘Green tea, got it.’

      ‘On your head be it, Jennifer Lopez.’ Erin resigned herself to her fate. And not a minute too soon, my ‘call waiting’ buzzed in my ear. ‘I’ll see you at the venue tomorrow.’

      ‘Y’ello,’