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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Julie Murphy
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September 24 - November 12, 2024
“And I,” declared Jack Hart, former porn star, living Ken doll, and the only wedding guest to have brought a dog to the ceremony, “am a body-safe menstrual cup, at the very least.”
His decrepit dog—a half-blind critter with fur the color of old milk—growled weakly in agreement.
Bee and Nolan’s wedding had been beautiful, moving, stunningly designed, but the people were ready for food. And there’d been whispers of a nacho bar.
Steph was desperate to collect the last jewel of the boy band INK for her talent management crown. She’d already successfully restarted Nolan Shaw’s career and turned Kallum Lieberman into America’s premier dad bod thirst trap.
Of course, the problem with coaxing a recluse into becoming your client was that you had to talk to the recluse first, and Isaac Kelly was a hard person to talk to, even after he’d left his gated Malibu home for a Gilded Age mansion here in Christmas Notch.
“If the parents are already here, the bridal party won’t be long behind,” Teddy said with the authority of having been behind the scenes of exactly one wedding in his life. A wedding for a marriage that had ended with a pity-hug outside of a lawyer’s office and his then-teenagers taking him out for ice cream like he’d been a kid who’d just lost a baseball game.
But—Teddy sighed forlornly down at the two baskets of nachos he was holding—did she want him?
They brushed their teeth together, ate way-too-late dinners together, fell asleep after a single episode of an overhyped drama together. They spent long Sunday mornings with black coffee and honest reflections about marriages and divorces, about having adult children and how scary it was to love brilliant people messily making their way in the world.
And like all the shoddily mounted sex swings he’d dealt with over the past twenty-odd years, there was no fixing it.
He might not have been the most impressive father, but somehow he’d wound up with the most impressive kids, and because of that he’d never stop feeling like the luckiest bastard alive.
“And I don’t even know if I believe in marriage anymore, anyway. But I believe in her and I believe in us, and goddammit, I want the whole thing, even if it is bullshit, even if it’s the wrong thing to want.
I want to be fresh and full of hope and give her my whole life.”
Teddy looked down at his suit, his only suit. He’d worn it to weddings, to the AVN Awards, and to traffic court. He thought it was pretty spiffy—it was from Men’s Wearhouse and it hadn’t even been on sale when he bought it.
“Also you have a jalapeño in your mustache.”
With his mouth full, he added: “All weddings should have a second dinner.”
With terror in her eyes, my best friend said the four words she’d been dreading since her first wedding-dress fitting. “I have to pee.” I punched my fist into my palm like I was ready to step into a wrestling ring for this girl—and I would. “We’re going to smash this,” I said just as Luca said, “You’re sure you can’t hold it?” “Luca,” I said, “there are serious medical complications caused by holding it.”
Plus he’d once seen her drunkenly pee on one of my ex’s mailboxes, and her aim hadn’t been great.
*cackles*
“This is an act of precision,” Luca told her as we backed into the handicap stall. “This garment was not designed to absorb urine. I told you to wear an incontinence diaper.”
Screaming lol.
I even got Teddy out on the dance floor, and he surprised everyone by knowing a popular dance from TikTok, even though it was a few years too late. That man was full of secrets, and I would fight to the death for that fact to be on his headstone one day.
But I couldn’t ignore this feeling that she’d found something that I might never find.
His name was Todd and the only pictures on his profile were of landscapes and a huge Saint Bernard. There were worse red flags, right? Though it did go against the community guidelines not to show your face in your profile.
He wanted to meet in public! How bad could he be? Serial killers didn’t meet in public.
I scanned the room for horny loners on their phones, but it was all wedding guests without shoes and loosened neckties.
What do horny loosers look like?
God, his sad-boy energy really gave me a lady boner.
And then it got awkward, and when things get awkward, I get gone.
Show me a plus-size woman who can sit comfortably on a barstool. I must learn her ways, because there is nothing more unsexy than me trying to fidget my way onto this thing like a toddler.
“Plus isn’t catfishing when you get a downgrade? I think it’s fair to say I’m an upgrade from a faceless sunset man with a comically large dog.”
We’d likely be the godparents to whatever spawn Nolan and Bee created, and I was not about to make every holiday and birthday party for the rest of my life awkward AF.
“You know what my grandmother always said: if you can fuck, you can dance.” He looked taken aback. “Did she really?” I shook my head. “No, but she did always tell me to wear clean underwear in case I died and someone had to see what I was rocking down there.” “Good advice.”
What was one more one-night stand with Isaac Kelly? At least this time I wouldn’t have to share him with Jack Hart.
I had to relearn How to Person long enough to record the last album in my contract before I could resume my journey as a medieval hermit, and it seemed easier to do that somewhere where the memory of Brooklyn wasn’t filling every corner. Somewhere that wasn’t warm and bright and built on make-believe.
It wasn’t Sunny’s fault that I didn’t know how to be a human anymore.
“Sunny, I’ve got a million rooms, and those rooms have rooms, and those rooms have little roomlets of their own.
She was going to be cold and what if there was a fire and I knew there had to be mold all over this place, the kind of mold that got fuzzy and hairy and made zombies out of itself, and I. Hated. That.
“You serve the beast tap water?” “Uhhhh . . . he only gets Mountain Dew as a treat,” I said with a laugh. “It’s really been a long time since you left your Malibu castle, huh?”
I briefly imagined Isaac’s mom—a very elegant, very A-list actress—cleaning gerbil pellets out of a cage. Yeah. Gerbils probably hadn’t been a thing in Chez Kelly.
“Brooklyn’s mom had a Pekingese and she gave it only Evian. The thing is like nineteen now. There’s bottled water in the fridge.
“I accidentally sold a script to the Hope Channel,” I said with my mouth still full. “I didn’t fully mean to, but I did, and now I’m here in Christmas Notch for the next two months, hunting for inspiration and hoping I can figure out how to format a screenplay by then.”
How does one accidentally sell a script?
“How do you accidentally sell a script?” “Well, funny you should ask. I went with Teddy to a meeting at the Hope Channel because he wanted to look like he had an assistant. Ya know, to impress the execs. He was supposed to pitch them three different scripts he’d bought the rights to, but then he had a little bathroom emergency because I forgot to ask for dairy-free creamer in his coffee that I mobile-ordered on our way to the studio.”
“He actually takes his coffee black, but the girl at the counter messed it up and when I went to get it fixed, she was crying because her pet iguana died and then I had to talk to her about it, because pet loss is something that no one takes seriously enough.
Teddy Ray Fletcher is lactose intolerant and hadn’t taken a Lactaid because he wasn’t prepared to be poisoned by his favorite employee on a normal Thursday morning. So he made a run for it mid-meeting and I started rambling to the Hope Channel execs.”
My ADHD was really out for blood today.
It’s the 1940s. World War II. A postman driving a truck full of Christmas letters and presents gets stranded on Christmas Eve in a blizzard outside of town. It’s foresty! And mountainy! And he’s faced with either freezing to death in his mail truck or freezing to death on a snowy mountain road, and just when he’s given up all hope, an angel appears and guides him to a pretty little house, where a young woman is just sitting down by the fire with a nightcap. And she’s sitting down alone because her husband is off fighting in the war, and she hasn’t heard from him in over a month, and she can’t
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Anyway, the woman and the postman wake up the next day and the angel is gone. The woman receives a telegram two days later telling her that her husband’s body was found in France, just before Christmas Day.
The label is breathing down my neck. I guess the my-wife-died get-out-of-jail-free card expired.”
“You could say that. Or you could say I thought I could spit out a cheesy Christmas album and be done with music forever after that, but the only song idea I have so far is about deforestation at the hands of the Christmas tree industry.” I laughed. “Sounds like a real bop.”
But I didn’t tell him my own sob story, because I’ve been on the other side of this conversation and the stories of solidarity and the sorrys never changed how incredibly alone I felt.
Environment was half of creativity, they said. I mean, I didn’t know which they had said that, but someone on TikTok had probably said it, and I bet there were lots of comments agreeing with them.
I thought we’d have a lot in common, since ghosts were supposed to be lonely and preoccupied with death, and I was too!
Once again I heard the popping noise, and when I stepped closer to the sofa, I could see that Mr. Tumnus was on his hind legs, absolutely shredding the acoustic foam lining the walls with his front claws.
