All the Girls in Town

DANI

DANIS

atisfied, Dani hit “publish” and took a swig of her Diet Coke. God, she missed smoking. And Ding Dongs.

It was Karyn, her OA sponsor, who’d politely suggested that Dani try journaling, as a way to fix some unresolved issues from her marriage and fill her God-shaped hole with something other than screaming resentment, sorrow, and sugar products. A soft-spoken, irritatingly sweet person, new to sponsoring, Karyn took her Overeaters Anonymous duties very seriously. Eager not to be the one to discourage her fresh out of the gate, Dani had gone to Michael’s Art Supply and purchased a hardcover sketch book with blank pages, plus a few black pens, because she didn’t like writing on lines or in blue ink. At the time, it had seemed like a futile exercise to write about how much her ex-husband had hurt her during their five-year marriage, and even more so after, but Dani was tired of crying herself to sleep covered in powdered sugar dust. And her boyfriend, Barney, was, too.

With three pages in, her ex was already dead. Bad potato salad at a family picnic. It was surprising, exhilarating, life-affirming. Dani had danced around her apartment singing, “Ding dong the d**k is dead. Which old d**k? My dirty old ex-dick.” And she didn’t even like dancing. The next morning, Peter, was hit by a truck. When Dani wrote, “His perfect body cracked the semi’s windshield in a bloody sunburst,” she achieved poetic justice.

Each morning, Dani awoke, heart fluttering, eager to stab, shoot, or poison Peter. She filled the blank pages of journals with the flames of her revenge fantasies until they caught fire and exploded into her blog, “Just Deserts,” with (currently) sixty-one avid followers @just-deserts. Of course, once she went online, Dani changed everyone’s names. Peter, her ex, was Steve on the blog. Sasha, the backup singer, became Vasha. And his real-life band, The Disasters, were The Calamities. It suited them. They could all f**k off.

Shortly after the divorce, Peter & The Disasters had released “Crazy Girl, Crazy Boy, Love.” Dani first heard her lyrics playing on KROQ 106.7 one morning while driving to a shitty temp job. Shaking with fury, she ran a red light, hired a blood-thirsty attorney, and sued for half of the rights. The lawsuit went to trial, six brutal, violating months, which had increased the band’s visibility into a record deal, but decreased Dani’s bank balance to zero. “Crazy ex-wife sues over ‘Crazy Love’ song.” A tabloid feeding frenzy. Without documentation, email or paper trail, there was no way to prove she’d written the song. Peter won. A week after the trial, Dani received a check for ten thousand dollars with “God!ess! We wish you peace,” written in a feminine scrawl in the memo section.

“Does God!ess know you’re f*****g my husband, Sasha?” she’d shouted.

Then, Dani cashed the check, hired a couple of guys outside of Home Depot to help carry her away from their married apartment full of roaches and sorrow in Van Nuys, and moved into a sunny two-bedroom in lovely green Pasadena. She told herself she was starting over but spent the next few months cramming treats down her gullet until, thirty pounds later, her younger sister, Monica, a turnstile twelve-stepper, suggested Overeaters Anonymous. For once in her miserable life, Monica had been right.

Researching and devising creative ways to kill Peter was filling Dani’s God-shaped hole, not in the way mortified Karyn had hoped, but at least she wasn’t shoveling baked goods into her pain. Ten pounds shed, and a reason to get out of bed. Who could have imagined that Danielle Desi Smith, crossing over the hump of thirty-five, earning fifteen an hour as a shitty temp, was born to be a literary assassin?

“Okay,” Karyn had waxed and warned philosophic. “When God closes a door, he always opens a window. Without your ex-husband’s infidelities and emotional abuse, you might never have discovered your writing talent. You should take a screenwriting class and move away from this kind of dangerous fantasy thinking.”

Killing Peter didn’t make Dani feel bad. She didn’t want to write screenplays. She appreciated her sponsor’s support, but Karyn wore on Dani’s nerves. She had beaten on a closed door until smashing her fist through a window. She had the ugly scars to prove it. She wouldn’t quit killing him now. It felt too good, almost better than sugar. She was hooked on revenge, a race car speeding toward a cliff, eager to see how close she could get to the edge.