The Undateable Read online

  “I HAVE AN IDEA,” Clea said. She didn’t exactly rub her hands together in maniacal glee, but it was close. “I want a proposal from each of you by end of day tomorrow,” Clea said.

  “But it was my—”

  “Colin, share the unfortunate woman’s contact information with Pia. The two of you reach out to her, I don’t care how. Then I want a proposal from each of you for a month-long series on this, starting with the makeover.”

  “But what if—”

  “The advertisers will love this. Makeda, can you get clothes in her size?”

  Makeda gave Clea a side-eye that meant yes.

  “But this was my—”

  “Before and After. Jeanaeane, call Jack. Tell him it’s an emergency. Book him for later in the week. Wednesday at the latest.”

  Jeanaeane whipped out her phone, presumably to text their on-call hair guy, Jack.

  “But Clea!”

  “Geek to Chic,” Clea said, tapping her finger against her chin. “No. Dowdy to Drop-Dead Gorgeous. Maybe.” She turned to Colin and Pia, her War Room face dead serious. “I don’t have to tell you that we need the hits on this. I won’t play second fiddle to Cosmo anymore. I’m not paying rent in the most expensive city in the country to be laughed at by Nina Garcia. I want nothing less than world domination,” she added, and Colin would have laughed but he didn’t think she was joking.

  “Pia, I’m sick of your whining, and Colin, I’m sick of you not pulling your weight. As of next month, there is no more junior staff writer and senior staff writer. There is only a staff writer. Get it?”

  Pia scrunched her nose in confusion. “But—”

  “She means one of us is getting fired.”

  “Oh.”

  Clea patted Colin on the cheek. “You’re smart, good. Now get me that story.” She took the remote from Pia’s limp hand and tossed it to Dali, who caught it while still managing to furiously continue taking notes on Clea’s ultimatum. In red pen.

  * * *

  “It’s not that bad.”

  Bernie lifted her head off the café table long enough to give her friend Marcie a look that she hoped would kill. Or at least significantly maim. Or, at the very least, get Marcie to shut up about the stupid meme that was now Bernie’s life. This was not what she’d wanted when she’d called her best friends together for an emergency lunch. “You look thin,” Dave suggested, and Bernie was going to punch him in the arm, but Marcie beat her to it. “What, she does!” he said, rubbing his poor, stupid arm. “It’s not entirely unflattering.”

  “The most important thing is that it will pass,” Marcie said. “That’s what Take a Letter, Maria said. You read the column I sent you, right?”

  “I’m never going on the Internet again.”

  “The gist of it was that you’ll be old news in no time.”

  “Helpful,” Bernie told the table.

  “The humiliation will pass, too,” Dave assured her. Bernie took a little more comfort in that. Dave had tended bar at almost every hip restaurant in San Francisco. He’d seen his share of flash-in-the-pan celebrities rise and fall.

  Not that she was a celebrity. God, she hoped she wasn’t a celebrity.

  The Internet was supposed to be really big. It was supposed to have diverse pockets of communities that developed their own codes and languages that took years to become part of the everyday lexicon. Years! Not days.

  The Internet was a big, dumb lie.

  Maybe not too much of a lie. Her parents hadn’t called yet, which meant they hadn’t seen her new online persona. Would her parents even know what a meme was? Would they even recognize her?

  Yes, her mother would. In the meme, Bernie was making the face that had driven her mother to redo many a family picture. “Can’t you just smile?” her mother would say.

  Bernie should have listened to her mother.

  “It’s not the worst picture you’ve ever taken,” Marcie added, helpfully. “Remember that time when you met Junot Díaz?”

  Junot Díaz had come to San Francisco on a book tour, and since Bernie had a huge literary crush on him, she’d dragged Marcie along to the reading. They waited in line for a signed book, then Marcie insisted on a picture. In her heart, Bernie was completely fangirling and trying her best to shut up about Oscar Wao for long enough for Marcie to take the photo.

  She did not succeed.

  In that picture, Bernie looked like a maniac. A smiling maniac who appreciated great writing, but a maniac all the same.

  That picture, however, was not on the Internet.

  Certainly, this meme had traveled. Aside from Liam, she’d heard from several of her other library school friends. Maybe it was because they were connected, digitally speaking, for professional reasons, and maybe it was because the meme was both generally appealing (unfortunately) and industry-specific, but she’d gotten four different “how are you” e-mails.

  She was also the subject of more think pieces than she cared to admit to reading, mostly on professional blogs that covered issues of librarianship. They were a diverse lot of bloggers covering a wide range of topics in the field, but they all agreed on one thing: Bernie’s meme reinforced tired stereotypes, and Bernie’s meme was bad for business.

  It wasn’t her fault. She hadn’t taken the picture. She didn’t put that stupid caption on it. She didn’t make terrible faces when her too-young students took a plunge they were ill prepared for.

  Well, yes. She did make the face. It was not a great face, but what kind of face was she supposed to make? Carly and Evan were babies. Carly had just moved out of the dorms last year. They’d never dated other people or seen anything of the world, and now they’d be tied together forever. If Bernie had married her college boyfriend, she’d be a pastor’s wife in Ohio. Her college boyfriend wasn’t even religious when they were together, which was exactly the point. Carly and Evan were still finding themselves, so how could they possibly know that this was the person they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with?

  And why why why was every emotion she felt so apparent on her face?

  The whole thing gave her heartburn.

  It was never going to pass.

  Chapter Four

  Dear Maria,

  My friends think I’m too good for my boyfriend. I make more money than he does, but I still feel like we are partners in everything. They think I’m settling, but it took me so long to find him, I don’t think I should give him up. What should I do?

  Floundering in the Outer Sunset

  Dear Floundering,

  There may be other fish in the sea, but do you really want to put that worm on the hook again?

  Kisses,

  Maria

  BERNIE HEARD HER PHONE BUZZ from the bottom of her purse, where she’d buried it once she found her spare charger and discovered that, while she was dancing naked around a bonfire, everyone she knew in the Bay Area was sending her some form of message asking if she’d seen the meme and wasn’t it hilarious. Her friend, Helen, a fellow librarian halfway across the country in Kentucky, had sent her a link to a popular librarian blog that was asking Important Questions about the image of librarians, and whether or not Bernie had set them back decades. Bernie wanted to add to the comments that it wasn’t her fault she couldn’t control her facial expressions. Then she read what some of her anonymous colleagues had written and decided it was better if she just let them duke it out among themselves.

  Never read the comments, she reminded herself.

  The first person to find her Tuesday morning was Liz, the head of reference, who asked if she knew anything about the meme and whether it was too soon to laugh. Then Carly stopped by and told her that it was kind of cool that she was so famous, although her attempt at cheering Bernie up was somewhat marred by her apologetic tears. Then she got a call from the director’s secretary, saying he wanted to see her in his office.

  You’re not going to die, she reminded herself as she walked down the carpeted hallway to the director’s
office. You just might get a little bit fired.

  “Miss Bernard, right on time,” Director Dean said, standing as she entered his office. Maxwell Dean, Director of Libraries, was relatively new to the job and had the unfortunate habit of referring to the library as the “Googleplex.” But he was her boss’s boss, and he respected her ability to wield usage statistics, even though his complete reliance on numbers undervalued a lot of the good work the library did. He was obsessed with the idea of being hip and connected, and liked to include at least one hashtag in each departmental e-mail, even though it made him look kind of stupid, since hashtags didn’t track in their e-mail program.

  He also had an unfortunate habit of deferring to her student workers when he wanted a decision made. Not that students shouldn’t have a voice in their library, but she was the one with the MLS. And she was the one who supervised the students, when they weren’t dancing on the reference desk. Although she supposed she was, technically, supervising the students then, too.

  Which had to be what this was about.

  Oh, God, what if he had seen the meme?

  Dean was always getting on them about busting stereotypes and making the library a dynamic learning environment. She was all on board with that. She was pretty sure a dynamic learning environment did not mean inadvertently being part of an Internet trend that reinforced negative stereotypes.

  “And how is your semester going so far?”

  She blinked at Dean across his desk. Was he making small talk?

  “Great,” she replied. Until she became Internet Famous.

  If he was going to make an issue of this, there was no way she was going to be able to follow the ignore-it-and-it-will-go-away path for dealing with her infamy.

  “Getting down to the wire for some of the kids, huh?” he small-talked.

  “Yup,” she said, acknowledging the impending end of the semester and the chaos that usually ensued.

  She blinked at Dean some more. He blinked back.

  Productive meeting.

  “Sorry, what did you call this meeting for?” Bernie didn’t want to be rude, but she also wanted to know why she had been called to the principal’s office.

  “Miss Bernard—Melissa—you’ve been supervising the undergraduates here at the library for, what? About a year now?”

  “At the end of this semester it will be two years,” she corrected.

  “Yes. You’ve done a wonderful job, so Liz tells me. And the student workers do seem well-trained and well-prepared for their work. And they speak highly of you.”

  She blushed. Compliments always made her blush. Even though it wasn’t a compliment; it was true. When she was promoted, she’d worked hard to whip a bunch of disorganized, dispassionate students into the well-oiled, if sometimes tardy, machine that made the library function. And every semester, she started all over again.

  “I understand that last week there was an . . . incident at the library.”

  Crap. She knew she should have written it up. But what was she supposed to put in the incident report? Two kids danced on a desk and got engaged, and then they all left. But not before taking a totally unflattering picture of me and plastering it all over the Internet.

  “It was quick, and I didn’t see any danger of it happening again, so I didn’t see the need to—”

  “Yes, I understand it was over in a flash.”

  She looked up at the strange tone of his voice. Was Maxwell Dean, Director of Libraries, giggling?

  “I’m sorry, I should have put a stop to it right away. It just caught me by surprise—”

  “No, no, Miss Bernard, you misunderstand. I’m thrilled! A flash mob—is that what the kids call it?—right here in our library! I’m only sorry there wasn’t a video.”

  There probably was. And she wished the video had gone viral; then maybe her stupid face would be left alone.

  “Just the other day, my daughter-in-law sent me this.” He typed the pass code on his phone and turned it toward her.

  It was her face.

  Looking disapproving.

  Sigh.

  “I couldn’t believe it! I was just tickled!”

  Now he definitely was giggling. Had she fallen down a rabbit hole?

  “Do you know what this means for the library?”

  Nothing, she thought. At best, it means nothing. At worst, it means everyone will think a bunch of sour-faced old ladies work at the library. Which a lot of people thought anyway, so it really isn’t that bad.

  “Melissa, I see a real opportunity here.” He steepled his fingers in front of his chin. “Our own meme, right here in our very own library!”

  “Sorry?”

  “This is quite a coup.”

  “Well, I can’t really take any credit for it.” Although she supposed she had spent thirty-one years perfecting her look of disdain. The inability to control her facial expression just came naturally.

  “I had Marketing work some of these up.” He pulled a foam-core poster out from under his desk.

  It had her face on it.

  It said DISAPPROVING LIBRARIAN . . . WANTS YOU TO CITE YOUR SOURCES.

  Then he pulled out another one that said DISAPPROVING LIBRARIAN . . . DOES NOT USE WIKIPEDIA.

  Then he pulled out a few more, all with pithy, useful library tips, all with her frowning face staring back at her.

  “And there are matching bookmarks!”

  She had definitely fallen down a rabbit hole.

  With matching bookmarks.

  Chapter Five

  Dear Maria,

  My boyfriend won’t wear the expensive tailored shirts I bought for him, even after I threw his crappy old band shirts away. What should I do?

  Distressed in Balboa Park

  Dear Distressed,

  If you want to play dress up, get a Ken doll. If you want to be with a real man, buy your boyfriend some new band shirts.

  Kisses,

  Maria

  THE LIBRARY WAS OFFICIALLY CHAOS.

  Bernie usually thrived during finals week. It was a great chance to show off what the library had to offer, especially since she essentially had a captive audience. The building bustled with nervous energy, and desperate students came to Bernie with problems that she could solve. You need three sources for your paper on medieval morality plays? No problem. You need to access translated newspapers from Uzbekistan? Here you go. You need to see how shoe size affects performance in track and field events? Let me introduce you to this database. She loved it, almost as much as she loved the week after finals when everyone was gone and she could put her feet up—literally—and catch up on all the stuff she’d missed during the madness.

  This year, the madness was starting early.

  If one more student came to the desk and told Bernie to make a disapproving face, she was going to confiscate their phone and run up overdue fines on their library account.

  Worse, when she got dressed that morning, she changed her outfit half a dozen times, because in each one, she looked way too much like a spinsterish, Disapproving Librarian. Why did everything she owned involve a cardigan?

  Dammit, she was a librarian. Of course she was going to dress like one. No, that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was when students asked her to make her Disapproving Librarian face and she tried to ignore them but they took the picture anyway and went away happy. Was the Disapproving Librarian face actually just Her Face?

  God, did she look like that all the time?

  Bernie was not a vain person, but this whole experience was really testing the limits of her less-is-more approach to her appearance.

  Unfortunately, they were short-staffed and she couldn’t call in replacements because she needed to save those student worker hours for next week, when finals actually started. Liz had been on the reference desk for most of yesterday, but she had other stuff to do, too. As much as Bernie wanted to hide in her office all day again today, she couldn’t do that to Liz.

  This whole experience was als
o testing the limits of her welcoming smile.

  She thought about the e-mail she’d written last night, the one where she really let her pity party go hog wild, admitting that being the subject of a meme made her feel pathetic and angry. In the cold light of the morning (and the harsh fluorescent lights of the Richmond College Library), she was glad she hadn’t sent it. She didn’t need to be asking for advice from anonymous bloggers, no matter how sassy or wise they were. Maria might have all the answers for other people, but what could she possibly say to make Bernie feel any better?

  Besides, Bernie still had a job to do, so when the pixielike girl in giant platform sandals approached the desk, Bernie smiled at her.

  “Hi, can I help you?” she asked, because she was a Friendly Librarian, not a Disapproving One. Even if those shoes were making her very worried for the poor girl’s ankles.

  The girl studied her face for a moment, and Bernie braced herself for the inevitable cell phone picture.

  “I like your sweater,” the girl said, sounding almost as surprised as Bernie felt. “Is it vintage?”

  Bernie wasn’t sure if it was vintage. It was old, she knew that. And secondhand. “It was three dollars,” she said, as if that explained it.

  “Cool,” the girl said, and jotted something down in the purple notebook she carried. Bernie noticed that the notebook was the same color as the big flowers on the girl’s dress. She wondered if that was on purpose.

  “Do you get a lot of your clothes secondhand?”

  “Um . . . yes?” Bernie hated shopping. Most of her clothes were the first thing she picked up in a store that fit her, or castoffs from the more conservative end of Marcie’s wardrobe. So, technically, yes. Secondhand. Thirdhand. It didn’t really matter, as long as it was convenient hand.

  The strange little pixie took more notes.

  “Have you always dressed like this?” she asked.

  “Dressed like what? Like crap?” Bernie asked with a laugh. She knew how she looked. Meme or not, she knew.