Frost officially releases November 1. The following is an excerpt from the book. If you’ve already pre-ordered, don’t forget to enter the giveaway.
Chapter 1
Tonya Katz is a Grade A bitch, and I am reminded of this each time I’m in her presence. You can dilute it with more palatable language if you like, but I’ll roll with the truth, thank you very much.
I play with the word on my tongue, rolling it around but not saying it. Bitch, bitch, bitch.
She isn’t mean; meanness would be a welcome moment of humanity for Tonya Katz. She’s exceedingly nice—that’s the deal—and the first few times you meet her, it’s easy to mistake it for real, genuine warmth. It once led me to the edge of liking her. But after that—after things progress past surface talk and simple pleasantries and oh well it sure looks like rain, doesn’t it?—that’s when you realize who Tonya Katz really is. Which is to say, she’s no one; the broad either doesn’t have a real personality, or she’s so ashamed of it, she smothers it with canned lines and pageant smiles until it’s unrecognizable. Why someone would choose to live this way, I don’t know. How exhausting.
I ponder this most every time I find myself in the same room with Ms. Katz, and I consider it now, as she unboxes a gift and gives the room that stupid, dimpled smirk, so calculated it’s laughable. The present is a stroller or baby swing or something. Tonya smiles bigger and hugs the woman who gave it to her and the whole room applauds. They literally applaud. I forced a clap for the first three presents, but here I draw the line, so instead I reach for another glass of champagne and get a subtle look from her best friend, sitting to her left. Meredith or Marilee, I think. I ignore it. Fuck you both.
It’s a baby shower. Yes, Ms. Tonya Katz, the princess of this shit town, is expecting. Her husband is golfing today, which she has told us twice. She probably instructed him to golf. Go golfing during the baby shower, honey. It’s what men do when their women are busy.
I watch her tear through these presents, and it seems she’s performing for us, with shades of Miss Summit County, forever a pageant queen. Married to a man with family money, situated in a big old house on a hill, expecting her first, beautiful child.
I finish my champagne and look for more.
“Do you have a ride, Amy?” Meredith or Marilee asks, all smile and glitter.
There are a few flutes left on the table with the white tablecloth, filled three-quarters full, tiny bubbles rising to the top. I reach over the woman to my right and grab one.
“I drove myself,” I say. “Women are being empowered to do all kinds of things on their own these days.”
Everyone hears it, no one laughs. Just weird looks. The blonde girl—the young one—looks away. I take a drink in silence.
Why I’m here is a question to which I can’t pin down an answer. It’s like most things these days.
I think about spoiling the party. Just do something, anything, to fuck it all up and throw a wrench into Ms. Katz’s perfect day. I think about stuff like that a lot; get mad and throw a glass, casually call someone a whore, that type of thing. Shatter the fragile, staged balance of an event like this. I think about ways to do it. Today I have a good way.
“I met an axe murderer,” I imagine myself saying, “a famous one.” I mouth the words as another present lands in Ms. Tonya’s lap. She’s giggling and smirking and we’ve completely moved on from my snide comment to Marilee. Marilee, that’s her name. That’s definitely it. With how quickly they all returned to form—a beat or two of awkward silence, then back to the party, back to the presents—it’s like they’re in sync. Like they expect me to say weird things, asshole things, and have a plan for how to handle it. I wonder what they say about me when I’m not around.
I could do it. I could say it. It’s true, mostly. “I met an axe murderer. A famous one.” That would be the nuke, the one from which they couldn’t just recover by looking away and opening another present. It would blow the place to pieces. Finally, some gossip that these bitches didn’t already find out on their own; some news about myself I would actually be able to break. So empowering. The idea gives me a flutter in the stomach, and for the first time today I feel good.
An axe murderer. It would make her squirm, for sure. But the part that would really get her—the part that would especially chap that bronzed and elliptical-toned ass—would be the second part. A famous one. She wouldn’t be able to handle that I’d met someone famous, and now I was talking about it, at her party, and removing her from the center of attention for a minute or two. It was the part that would make her look back on the party as a failure later that evening. She wouldn’t be able to handle that I had this gossip and she didn’t. That she had been so wrapped up in planning her little shower, she had completely missed the juiciest morsel to come through Ballast in years.
I mouth the words again and Tonya unboxes an oversized teddy bear.
“Oh. My. God,” she says. “This is going to be perfect for Baby Katz!”
Baby Katz. God help us all.