Tis the Season for Revenge: A Holiday Romantic Comedy

They say good friends are hard to find, but I picked up these two in college when we tried to rush a sorority and didn’t make it past the first round.

And when I say they’re good, I mean they came with wine, tequila, Five Guys, and a giant box of desserts from the killer all-night bakery I love in Soho. We are now sitting in my tiny apartment surrounded by a sea of Halloween costume components and used tissues.

“First thing tomorrow, I’m going back to blonde,” I say, taking a handful of fries, dipping them in ketchup, and showing them in my mouth. “I already texted Julie, and she has an opening at 11.” I sigh, sipping the margarita Kat made me. “Good thing I took off tomorrow, thinking I’d still be in the city in the morning.” My chin wobbles a bit, but I fight off the seventeenth round of waterworks.

Barely.

“I still can’t believe you went brunette for a man whose nickname is Dick,” Cami says, unwrapping a devil’s food cupcake and swiping her finger through the frosting. “You are not a brunette.”

Last year, right before the Christmas party I thought I’d be invited to, I dyed what had become my signature long blonde locks a light, mousy brown.

All of Richard’s exes were brunettes.

All of his friends’ girlfriends and fiancées and wives are brunettes.

All the women at the country club who caught Richard’s eye when he thought I wouldn’t notice were brunettes.

So I became a brunette. I figured that brunette might be the way to go to prove I was it for him.

God, why was I so fucking stupid?

“She did a lot of dumb shit for a man whose nickname was Dick,” Kat says, which is kind of a surprise. Cami, I fully expect to rip apart any man who wrongs one of her friends—it’s essentially her brand: man-hating. But Kat? Sunshine and butterflies and a personality so sweet it could give you a toothache?

Unexpected.

“Remember when she stopped eating dairy because he told her it made her look bloated?” That was a miserable six months before I started sneaking it in when he wasn’t around.

“Or how she bought that entire new wardrobe of boring clothes so she could fit in with those mean bitches at that golf club?” Cami says, nodding at Kat. I wonder if they ever sat around talking about this stuff when I wasn’t around.

Probably.

Actually, they definitely did. Kat would have nodded in her concerned way, and Cami would have been waiting for this day, ready to pick up the pieces and help me move on.

“Or the time we came over and she was listening to one of those men’s podcasts because he told her it might help her ‘understand’ him better?” Kat audibly gags like the memory makes her literally sick, and honestly, it does the same to me.

With the edges of my awareness blurring with booze, dulling the burn of my heartache, frustration creeps in.

Because they’re right: I did a lot of dumb shit to try and fit what I thought would be his perfect woman.

I changed things I loved about myself because of a piece of shit man who thought I was too much.

Too much for him. Too much for the life he wanted. Too much for some boring fucking lawyers. Too much to spend his life with.

And you know what?

Fuck that.

Fuck that.

Fuck him!

Because the reality is, he wasn’t enough.

And he’s right: I am too much. I am too much for him because he always should have deserved less.

“And the fucking golf lessons,” I say, throwing my head back in dismay, adding to the bullshit I did for a man who did not deserve me. “I can’t believe I spent so much money to learn the most boring game on earth.”

“Oh my god, the golfing!” Kat says in a laughed shriek, like she completely forgot the hilarity of my trying to learn how to play golf. I dragged her to a few of my lessons, and she basically spent all of them laughing at me.

I can’t blame her.

“He deserves to rot in hell,” Cam says, and I look at her. She’s still shaking with anger on my behalf.

“Rot in hell is a bit extreme, babe,” Kat, the level-headed one of us, says.

“At the very least, he deserves some kind of payback.” Cami reaches over, stealing a French fry from the pile in front of me. “Hey, are you still in charge of all his appointments and shit?” she asks, and I nod.

“As far as I know. I mean, I won’t be handling those, but yeah, I guess. I’m the primary contact for everything.” Cami’s face lights up.

“Oh my god, cancel everything.”

“I can’t—”

“Give me your phone. The email with all of his shit you have.” My stomach drops because I forgot when I was drunk and annoyed with Richard, I once told her I had an email to help keep his appointments in line and schedule things for him.

“Like a personal assistant?” she had said with horror.

I’d told her no, not like a personal assistant, but instead, like a wife would do for her husband.

Now I’m second-guessing that thought process.

“I can’t give you that,” I say, holding my phone closer.

It’s not that I can’t give it to her because I’m afraid of what she’ll do with it.

It’s that I’m ashamed to show her just how far I had gone to keep this man happy with nothing in return.

Pathetic.

“Give it to me.”

“No!” I say, leaning back, but as Cami has a way of doing, she gets a hold of my phone, types in my password (it’s her birthday, after all), and scrolls to my emails.

“No fucking way,” she says, looking at me with wide eyes.

“Cam—”

“What?” Kat asks.

“No fucking way, Abbie.” Her voice sounds almost sad, disappointed.

“Cam, it’s not—”

“You signed your emails as his personal assistant?!” Kat’s eyes go wide with shock.

“It’s not what it—”

“Abigail Keller. You let this man fucking use you.”

“I didn’t—”

“You did! You did everything for him. Babied him when he had a big case load, made him meals, and cleaned up after him. Took his stuff to the cleaners and the tailor. Made his appointment and balanced his damn schedule for him.”

“Cam—” I start to argue with her.

“Honey,” Kat says, her voice low. I stop talking.

Because when Kat gets in and her voice is low and her eyes are soft, I know she’s about to dish out some reality I don’t want to hear.

“He was using you.”

The words ricochet in my mind like a bouncy ball.

Ping, ping, ping, hitting every corner of my consciousness.

“No,” I say, shaking my head. “No, he was just super busy and—”

“No real man would let you call yourself his personal assistant like that, Abbie.”

“It wasn’t—”

“It was, babe.” Kat looks at Cami, and they nod, sharing some kind of telepathic conversation. “We’d been meaning to talk to you about it, but you seemed happy. We didn’t want to step out of line.”

“He treated you like shit, Abbie,” Cami says, with none of Kat’s finesse. “He treated you like a maid, a mother, and a servant all in one.”

I don’t answer.

Partly because I know they’re right.

God, has there ever been a bigger idiot alive?

I think I had convinced myself doing all of this stuff—willingly, I should note, I was never forced—was my way of proving myself as wife material. The woman who could handle these details with a smile. That by doing it, I was proving my worth, that I was worthy of him.

But fuck that shit.

“I scheduled his doctor’s appointments,” I say under my breath, understanding crashing over me. Kat nods with a sad face. “I have a running order for his coffee every morning.” Cami gives me a similarly sad look, but hers is tinged in anger.

“You did everything for him, Abs.”

“I cleaned his apartment!” I say, standing. The world spins around me, but I don’t care. I ignore it. “I took his clothes to the cleaner every week!”

“He deserves to go to hell for treating you like shit,” Kat says, and again, it’s a shock coming from her.

“He said I wasn’t serious enough. I wasn’t good enough. Wait until he realizes everything I was doing!” I say, anger bubbling.

“You deserve revenge,” Cami says, a dark smile in her eyes.

I sit down.

“Revenge?” I ask, but the word rolls off my tongue like butter.

I love the way it feels.

“Hell yeah!” she says and stands. “We need to get back at him for this. We need to show him he can’t just treat people like shit and get away with it!”

“How?” I ask, but she’s already scrolling through my phone, through the emails and appointments I made. My stomach turns.

“This. This is the key,” Cami says, showing me the calendar. “We fuck with him. Change shit. Make his life hell.”

“I don’t know, guys, this seems—” Sweet Kat tries her best to put off the cause.

“Explain,” I say, ignoring the churn in my stomach that wants to agree with her.

My mom was weak.

A man left her, and it destroyed her life. But did she take it out on that man, my father? No. She took it out on Hannah and me and made our lives freaking miserable as children.

I am not weak.

I was, for a time, momentarily weak. I let a man define me, let that definition take over my self-worth.

But not anymore.

No fucking way.

“You did things for him. He has no idea how his life even works, Abbie.” She’s not wrong. “We fuck with it.”

“You know the best way to get over a man, Abbie,” Kat says, attempting to distract Cami. “To get under a new one.”

“Yes!” Cami says, reaching for my phone and nearly falling as she does so. She’s also just a hair past tipsy. “Right now.” Cami moves to sit next to Kat. The two of them are huddled over my phone. I have still not been given it back, and I understand in some part of my brain I should argue, but I can’t quite remember why.

They mumble while I continue to drink and stuff my face with French fries because while French fries might not fix a broken heart, they help add a layer of greasy and starch to the edges.

“No, not that one—the blonde one! She’s going to Julie tomorrow,” Kat says, pointing to something on my phone.

I lie down on the ground, staring at my ceiling.

“And you know, the craziest part is I really thought he was going to propose this December,” I say, talking to myself. “Honestly, I think it would have been good. A good marriage. We would have been great together. Maybe if I had been more excited about kids…””

“They would have been bald kids,” Kat says under her breath with a laugh.

“He’s very sensitive about that, Katrina,” I say back, defending him. “Maybe I should call him. Maybe it was a mistake. A . . . misunderstanding. He’s right. I should have been more conservative in my outfit. I should have—”

“Abigail Keller, if you even think about winning that scum of the earth man back, I’m going to gut you,” Cami says, looking me dead in the eye with a face that tells me she’s planning which knife to use if I do in fact try to go back to him.

“We dated for four years, Cami,” I say, my voice soft.

“Four years of hell, honey.” That’s Kat.

Again, a surprise.

Kat is the one who’s always on your side.

Cami is the one who wants to kill anyone who crosses one of us.

I’m a moderate in between. In college, I was the one planning revenge on the sorority girls who decided we weren’t good enough for their little club or how to get the professor of our fashion merchandising class to apply a curve to the exam.

Small, subtle actions can make the most significant impact.

“You changed when you started dating him,” she says.

“No, I didn’t,” I say, staring at her, confused.

“You totally did,” Cami says, agreeing with her. “You . . . conformed.”

“Conformed?” I say, incredulous. “Me?”

“You didn’t use to care what anyone thought of you, lived the way that made you happy. Pink and feathers and sequins no matter the occasion. Smiles and loud laughs. Blonde fucking hair.” She looks pointedly at the brown hair I’ve pulled into a bun. “You were . . . Malibu Barbie. Now you’re Barbara Bush.”

“Barbara Bush is an honorable woman. She did . . . good stuff.”

“She was boring and dowdy. You are not that.”

“I just . . . grew up, Cam,” I say, but the words aren’t confident. Instead, they’re quiet and meek and panicked, even to my own ears.

“Did you?” Kat says, her voice matching mine. “Or did you change to try to fit the mold you thought he wanted?”

Well shit.

She’s not wrong.

New hair.

A new wardrobe.

Shit, when he was around, I even changed how I talked, slowing down my words and working to lose any sign of my New Jersey roots.

“Fuck him. I need to get over him. Or . . . get revenge.” I sit up, my head spinning. “We should go egg his stupid car!” I say, getting excited. “Or post pictures of his receding hairline everywhere. Or remember those shitty dick pics he sent me? We should—”

“He’s a lawyer, babe. I know you want your taste of revenge, but let’s not get you into jail, okay? I don’t have money to bail you out,” Kat says, patting me on the shoulder.

“Hunter could bail me out,” I say, thinking about my sister’s husband. “He’s like a bazillionaire.”

“While that’s true, let’s start small, okay? Why don’t we try getting you a new man and posting it all over social media instead, okay?” Kat says in an appeasing, motherly tone.

“And maybe think of a few other ways to make his life hell,” Cami adds.

I look at Kat, who is smiling at me, and my phone with a dating app loaded, a profile already made in her hand.

Abigail Keller

Lives in: Long Island

Age: 28

Hair: Blonde

Eyes: Blue

They made me a dating profile to get over Richard.

“You guys are amazing,” I say, snatching the phone and swiping.