Asunderland

By Mary Kitt-Neel

Bridget Beck accidentally achieves sudden internet fame, marking the beginning of a cascade of events including political and corporate scandals, new love, a pyramid scheme, possible emigration, and a 10-year-old blackjack expert. As relationships both personal and professional unravel all around her, will Bridget find a way to keep her own life from coming undone?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mary Kitt-Neel
• Release date: Oct 30, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452368160

Mary Kitt-Neel

I am a full-time freelance writer, writing website content and blogs for my clients. I also enjoy writing fiction, both novels and short stories. In addition to being a writer, I spent over a decade as an engineer at an Air Force facility, and I have also worked as a newspaper journalist.

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Asunderland

Mary Kitt-Neel

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Mary Kitt-Neel

License Notes

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Cover Photograph © 2010 Maurice FitzGerald

1.

If you catch the bastard, tell him he owes me a Diet Coke.

That was the sentence that started the whole thing with Bridget Beck.

She was on her way home from the Flash Mart around 6:30 one morning in August when a skinny guy with full sleeve tattoos crooked his elbow around her neck and tried to take the carrying bag that held her breakfast and her wallet.

Bridget had struggled, elbowing him with her free arm and then dumping her 32 oz. Diet Coke on him. He had screamed like a little girl, startling himself as much as Bridget. But it gave her the opportunity to get away, and she ran the rest of the way down the alley until she reached Grady Street. At that point, since she was only three blocks from the nearest police station, she headed in that direction, ready to run again if the jerk came after her. But one way or the other she was going to do her best to turn the guy in for ruining her morning like that.

The officer who took her statement recorded her comment about the Diet Coke, and a little while later, a novice reporter looking through the police log, intrigued by the statement on a slow news day, put it in the paper. It was picked up shortly thereafter by a statewide alternative paper, and within a day and a half was on Huffington Post under the headline Tattooed man ATTACKS Diet Coke wielding woman.

Tell the bastard he owes me a Diet Coke started appearing on Twitter as a catch phrase for anyone who felt like they had been wronged. When a Ukrainian student, who apparently hadn’t learned the finer points of copying and pasting, transcribed the statement as Say that he gives me your Diet Coke, prompting a Facebook fan page devoted to minor forms of vigilante justice, Bridget knew that life was going to be different for awhile.

The suspect, 22-year-old Archie Wade McDaniel, had been arrested the day after the incident, and it became public knowledge that there had been warrants out for him on some old bad check charges and an incident involving a bottle of Parrot Bay, a lighter, and his ex-girlfriend’s 1986 Grand Am. His mug shot spread over the internet along with the rest of the story, and it didn’t do him any favors, what with half his right eyebrow missing and the word Mandy tattooed along his hairline.

The fact that Bridget Beck was 30 years old and cute in an Ellen Page sort of way only made the story more virulent. Someone found the profile picture from the Twitter account she had forgot she made in the summer of 2009 and suddenly everyone had a face to go with the statement.

Feminist forums raged back and forth about whether Bridget had stricken a blow against male dominance, or whether she had set feminism back 50 years by only demanding restitution and not raising hell and insisting that the judge throw the book at McDaniel.

And then it got weird when someone from a company named Agnes Denim called Bridget and asked to rent her butt for a period of six weeks.

2.

You want to rent what? said Bridget. She shook her cell phone thinking it was a poor connection, but she had heard correctly. Agnes Denim wanted to know her measurements so they could send her a pair of custom-tailored skinny jeans that she would wear five days a week for six weeks, washing them according to specific instructions on her days off.

The idea was to get the jeans broken in the old fashioned way and then auction them off to some lucky girl with the same measurements and give the proceeds to Agnes Denim’s favorite charity. She would, of course, be compensated for her time, to the tune of $6,000.

Opportunity Taps was the name of the charity, and it provided poor kids with tap shoes for some reason. Bridget found that she liked the idea of earning several thousand dollars by sitting around in the same pair of jeans for six weeks, but she wasn’t sure how much publicity to expect, and whether the project would cause even more personal upheaval.

Gracie Maddox, Bridget’s housemate, convulsed with laughter when Bridget told her what happened, but as the dollar figure sank in, she sobered up quickly. Maybe it could lead to other things, she said.

But that’s just it, said Bridget. Where do you go from having your ass rented?

Well, you could write a book, said Gracie.

No.

Ooh! You could record an album.

I don’t think so, said Bridget. Maybe it would be best if this whole thing blew over and everyone forgot about it. And the worst thing is, my mother keeps calling me.

This was a sore point with Gracie, whose mother had died several years earlier.

I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that, said Bridget

No. Don’t worry about it. It’s been a weird time for us both. Have you told Isaac? I mean about the ass thing?

Nah. I’m not sure how he’ll take it.

Well, if he’s going to get upset over someone paying you $6,000 to sit on your ass for six weeks, then he doesn’t deserve you.

He just got a Wii fit and he can’t stop talking about it. I don’t want to ruin it for him.

Gracie made a noise that was somewhere between a snort and pfffffff... and went back to her computer. She made her living keeping the books of rich people and helping them get out of paying their taxes. Bridget was her assistant. Most of the time Gracie worked from a tiny office she rented downtown and Bridget worked at home, but the arrangement was pretty fluid. Occasionally it was the other way around.

They’d only known each other for just over a year, but it was a strong connection. Bridget desperately needed someone in her life to tell her she didn’t have to take anyone’s bullshit, and Gracie, who considered herself a Life Coach to anyone within earshot, took great satisfaction in encouraging Bridget to stand up for herself. She just hoped that Bridget didn’t decide one day she didn’t want to take any of her bullshit and quit on her. The fact was, she couldn’t do it without Bridget’s help, and everyone knew it.

3.

Isaac called that night to ask if Bridget wanted to go to a movie, but she was working and ignored the phone. And when she checked her messages, she was relieved because she didn’t really feel like going anywhere, and had escaped having to tactfully explain this to Isaac. She hated disappointing Isaac, because he really was a very sweet, very good, very kind person. He even volunteered his Saturday mornings at a local cat shelter because his landlord didn’t allow him to have his own cat.

He and Bridget had been together for just over half a year, and it was a good, easygoing relationship, unlike the brutally intense ones that both had come out of before meeting each other. Isaac was a programmer who was a year and a half older than Bridget, and he had a 10-year-old son from a previous marriage.

During the weekends Isaac’s son had spent with him, Bridget had taught Joey how to play both Texas and Omaha Hold’Em poker, and he in turn showed her how to play Super Mario 64, which she actually already knew how to play. They got along well, a fact she attributed to her being a Libra and his being an Aries. Joey, on the other hand, mostly attributed it to the fact that Bridget always had gum in her purse and shared it.

After checking her phone messages, she genuinely hoped that Isaac had gone ahead to the movies without her. He had two or three male friends he could count on, and one female co-worker that Bridget didn’t really like to think about. Jamie was the one female programmer in the department and as such had taken on a sort of larger than life quality, even to Isaac. Bridget had her suspicions that Jamie was interested in Isaac, and she would have felt better if Jamie had had the common decency to be unattractive, or at least have bad skin or crooked teeth. But alas, she was pretty. And blonde.

When Bridget finished work, she emailed Agnes Jeans back saying she’d take their jeans for six weeks. Gracie’s lawyer had looked over the email, laughed, and said it looked pretty straightforward, so Bridget decided to accept. After she clicked Send and her mail client checked the server for new messages, it informed her she had 439 new messages. She would be very glad when the whole Tell the bastard he owes me a Diet Coke thing got stale.

One email was from her brother, however, and this made Bridget both happy and cringeful since she owed him several hundred dollars for some car repairs he’d taken care of for her. At least she could pay him back once Agnes Jeans was through with her ass, she thought. In his email, he said he had a new girlfriend, and they were going to watch Cleveland play Seattle, and it was going to be on TV. He told her to watch for him if she had the game on. She planned to agree enthusiastically, knowing full well she wasn’t going to watch an entire baseball game just to see her brother on television, love him though she did.

Then he dropped something nuclear: Did she want to meet him and his girlfriend in Paris in October for her birthday? They’d pay the airfare if she could take care of her own hotel bill.

4.

She got up the next day to get ready for work, still wondering if she’d take her brother up on his offer when she discovered yet another offer in her inbox. A company called Jumping the Snark wanted to hire her as an advice columnist. But there was a twist: her advice had to be short enough to be a Tweet, in other words, 140 characters or fewer. For a fee of $175 per week, she would be required to answer 15 questions per week, and those questions would be pre-screened and sent to her on Sunday mornings. She had until COB Friday to complete the 15. She could do it all at once, a little at a time, whatever, just so it was done by the end of the day Friday.

Without really giving it much thought, Bridget accepted the offer, figuring it could help pay for her hotel room in Paris if nothing else, particularly since she would feel obligated to get a room with WiFi so she could keep up with the stuff Gracie needed her to do. She could do this as well. How hard could it be?

She picked up her calculator and, figuring that the average word was five characters long, 140 characters would cover 18 words, or more like nine or ten once spaces were counted. Say ten words per reply. That would be approximately 150 words a week for $175, which was more than a buck a word. She’d never done any writing before, but that sounded like a pretty good rate to start out with.

By 10 o’clock she was deep into entering some data into a spreadsheet for Gracie when she heard back from Jumping the Snark: they were thrilled and would like to send her a few practice questions to play with before the first real batch showed up on Sunday. She could send them in as she did them to get pointers on where they wanted to go with them. Would that be cool? asked the sender, whose name was Craig. Yes, that would be cool, she replied.

She was meeting Isaac for lunch at a coffee shop near his office and she really, really hoped that nobody would bring up Archie McDaniel. The coffee shop was their place, and she didn’t want it to turn into just her place, which she would feel like it was doing if people kept bringing it up.

Archie had a court appearance coming up on some unrelated stuff, and the local paper seemed to feel it was their duty to keep the community informed on every stage of his criminal career, no matter how petty. Fortunately, they weren’t mentioning Bridget as much, and larger publications had mostly lost interest. The running joke at the coffee shop was that they brought her a Diet Coke without her asking, and even that was getting a little old, so there was hope.

Maybe life was going to settle back down after all, and with an extra $6,000 from Agnes Jeans and the Twitter advice money, maybe she’d have the chance to enjoy life without squeezing every dollar until it screamed.

5.

Lunch was totally uneventful (Yes, yes, yes! she mentally exclaimed when they walked out, relieved that nobody had mentioned the whole 15 minutes of fame deal.), and Isaac was in a good mood. He was telling her about the balance board for his Wii system, and it was great until he mentioned that Jamie had one too. Bridget managed to keep the smile on the lower half of her face while he said this, but she was more relieved than she would have liked to admit when the subject turned to Joey, who was going to spend his Fall break from school with him.

Bridget broached the subject of going to Paris to meet her brother and his new girlfriend.

Do it! said Isaac. If you don’t have enough money for the hotel, I’ll help you. You’ll be kicking yourself if you don’t go.

This was the response she was hoping for, but Isaac could be a slippery fish sometimes. There were times she was positive she knew what he was thinking but was absolutely wrong. But this was good. The precedent had been established: Isaac was OK with her taking off for a week.

When she got back to work, her pretend advice questions had arrived, and she thought she’d try to answer one of them before starting back on her real work. The first question was this:

My dog peed on my girlfriend after we had a fight last week, and now she’s saying that either the dog goes or she does. We were fighting about whether Blackberry Vinaigrette Dressing is awesome or gross. I say it’s gross. My dog’s a yellow lab, and a male, but he’s been fixed.

Bridget started typing a few trial answers:

Dogs are great judges of character, so don’t just dismiss ...

Your dog obviously has something important to say on the subject of ...

Peeing is how dogs communicate, and the fact that he ...

This wasn’t going to be as easy as she thought.

That night Isaac came over and they made popcorn and he said he wanted to watch some of the old Twilight Zone episodes. They watched one where a teenage girl has to decide which of handful of perfect young women she will have plastic surgery to look just like. It was oddly appropriate, she thought, in a world where MTV had had a show called I Want a Famous Face.

The next episode they watched was about an elderly couple. The old man and his old dog went raccoon hunting and woke up the next day next to a lake. But when they get home nobody could see them or hear them, including his wife.

The man finally realizes he’s dead and walks with his dog to a gate in a graveyard. A friendly man invites him in telling him how great it’s going to be, but tells him his dog can’t come, but he can leave the dog tied up at the gate and someone will be along for him shortly.

The old man politely declines and says he’ll walk up the path a ways with his dog, even though the man at the gate puts up a friendly protest, assuring him his dog will be OK. But the man insists, and they wander up the path and sit down to rest when another gatekeeper approaches them, and invites both of them in through a different gate.

So the old man explains what happened at the other gate, and the new gatekeeper lets him know that the earlier gate was actually the gate to hell. And then he says, A man will walk into Hell with both eyes open, but even the Devil can’t fool a dog.

Bridget was crying when the episode ended, and Isaac looked a little shaken as well. I’ll be right back, she told him.

She walked past the bathroom to her office and got on the computer, typed a few words into Google and then opened her email. She found the trial Twitter questions and wrote her first answer, to the question posed by the guy whose dog peed on his girlfriend:

Twilight Zone 3rd Season ‘The Hunt’ 1962. It’s online. Watch it.

6.

After her Agnes Jeans arrived, Bridget realized that it was entirely possible to wear the same jeans every single day without anyone noticing. She followed their instructions about how often to wash them, and exactly how to wash