Oh! You Pretty Things, Page 27

  “What happened?” Eva says, pitching her voice into sudden warmth.

  “In th-the hallway—” I’m all stuttery and hiccuppy, like a little kid who got scared at a haunted house. “I ran into Trent Whitford. I fucking physically ran right into him.”

  Eva cocks her head, the picture of pretty bafflement. “Who? Is that the director who didn’t make the call sheet?”

  “Trent Whitford,” I repeat, because right now I can’t think of another way to explain.

  “Right,” Eva says. “So what’s the deal with him?”

  I scrub my face with a fistful of napkins. “He’s the guy.”

  Eva frowns. “I’m drawing a blank, Jess.”

  “The guy I told you about from when I was a kid.” I falter at the emptiness in her face. “At the beach house in Malibu?”

  She looks honestly confused, and I can’t tell if she really doesn’t remember or if she’s pretending and is punishing me—and I suddenly don’t care.

  “I told you,” I say. “I fucking told you. We were sitting in your bedroom and I told you everything.”

  “Take a breath, Jess,” Scout snaps. “Today isn’t about you.”

  She’s such a fucking parrot.

  “I’m sorry,” Eva says, sounding anything but, “if I don’t have perfect recall of every little thing you ever told me.”

  “It’s not every little fucking thing. It’s . . .” I take a shuddering breath. “You know what? It doesn’t matter. It’s a million years old.”

  “And Eva’s two minutes from going live,” Scout says.

  I wipe my face again. “Sure. Of course. Let me get your food.”

  “Yeah, maybe not,” Eva says. “Why don’t you go back to the hotel and make sure everything’s okay there?”

  “Already handled.” I toss the damp napkins into the trash. “You’re welcome to stay as long as you like, and they’ll even put you in a bigger room if you want.”

  “No need,” Eva says, the blankness of her face shading into hardness. “I mean, it’s just going to be me and Scout. I mean, unless you want to pony up ten grand for an hour of my time.”

  From the doorway, the page says, “They’re ready for you for a photo op.”

  “Coming,” Eva says brightly, and she and Scout file out without another word.

  “Talent is walking,” the page says as the door shuts behind them.

  When I get outside, I head down Fifty-Seventh across Central Park West and into the park. It’s one of those beautiful New York days that happen in May and September—seventy degrees, crisp and bright—and I sit down on a bench in the morning sun and sob. Fortunately, this being New York, no one gives me a second glance. When I’m done, I just stay there, watching thin, manicured women walking their purebred dogs while joggers expertly dodge them on the footpath.

  It’s 11:00 A.M. when I get back to the hotel, and I’m feeling almost normal. Fuck Trent Whitford. And fuck Eva and Scout—especially Eva, because I know I told her about him, but I’m not sure I ever told Scout. The room is deserted when I enter, but there’s a note on a hotel stationery envelope in Scout’s writing.

  Hope you’re okay. Eva says you can head back to L.A. on an earlier flight if you want. XOXO Scout

  Sixty-two

  There are five nonstop flights to L.A. on Virgin America and every single one is sold out, a possibility I wish I’d thought of before I flung myself into the smelliest taxi in New York. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say someone stuffed a half-eaten lobster roll under the backseat two days ago and the car has been parked in a sauna ever since. The balmy morning in the park has morphed into a humid eighty-five degrees, and I have both of the windows in the backseat rolled down as far as they will go.

  We’re in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Van Wyck heading toward JFK as I frantically try to wring a reasonable ticket out of Expedia.com. My Internet connection is shitty, and my phone goes dark over and over.

  I finally find a ticket on a JetBlue flight for eight hundred dollars. The on-time record is a dismal 42 percent, and I wince about the charge to Eva’s credit card—I try not to care, but I can’t help myself.

  By the time I get through security, my phone battery is perilously low. I look around for an available outlet, then I just think, Fuck it. I’m hungry and miserable and I don’t give a shit if anyone needs me right now. I power my phone off and wander into the fanciest airport snack shop I’ve ever seen. There’s a whole table of fancy chocolates and a refrigerated wall with fresh sushi to rival Whole Foods. There’s a hot soup bar, for fuck’s sake.

  Fifty-two dollars later, I’m headed for my dreaded middle seat, toting a bag filled with marcona almonds, Parmesan crisps, a container of mixed olives, and a bar of salted-caramel dark chocolate. I breeze through the newsstand and grab all the tabloids that are too humiliating to read anywhere but in a middle coach seat on an airplane: OK!, InTouch, Star, Life & Style. The flight attendants are always happy to have them after I finish; I once even traded my castoffs for free drinks.

  On board, my seatmates are a pair of elderly sisters who speak in voices so whispery I have to strain to hear them. One immediately offers me her window seat.

  “We were hoping we wouldn’t get someone between us,” she says. “I don’t want to be leaning over you every five minutes.”

  “Well, if you insist,” I say.

  I give them my eleven-dollar artisanal Brooklyn chocolate bar, which isn’t nearly enough to express my gratitude. I feel like I just got a row of sevens on a Vegas slot machine. Jackpot.

  Two hours later I’ve exhausted my supply of trash mags and almonds, and I’ve had two glasses of mediocre Chardonnay. I want to have a third, but I know it’s the last thing I need right now, with the crying and the flying and the what-have-you.

  I close my eyes and see Trent Whitford’s blank smile. Gross. I wonder if from now on, instead of remembering him in the pool house, in the upstairs bedroom, I’ll picture his polite disinterest instead. Ugh, it’s like caring enough to hurt me is better than not caring about me at all. Which is maybe why Eva’s reaction is an even bigger blow. Did she really not remember?

  It’s my own fucking fault. If there’s a beautiful, neurotic woman within a ten-mile radius, I will be drawn to her like a pile of metal shavings to a magnet.

  The seatbelt indicator dings about three seconds before I commit myself to another crying jag. A packed airplane is about the last place I want to unpack my psyche, so I take a breath and flick through the movie choices on the touchscreen in front of me. Tyler Perry. Nope. Screwball cop buddy movie. Pass. A-list musical period piece. Seen it.

  I stop at Viva Lost Vegas! It’s just what I need: something familiar and comforting. Megan and I saw it in the theater before she even met JJ. It’s cute and mindless, with JJ in the lead role as a down-on-his-luck James Dean impersonator at a seedy casino. There are worse ways to spend ninety minutes.

  I slip in my earbuds and press Play. It’s the perfect distraction, watching JJ and a girl blackjack dealer running from some stock Mafioso bad guys through a series of Vegas landmarks. Then they’re alone in a motel, neon blinking in through the curtains. She pulls JJ onto the bed, tugging his grimy T-shirt from his back as the music swells, and he spreads himself across her body, his muscles expanding like the hood of a cobra before it strikes.

  Wait, a hooded cobra.

  My stomach twists, and I suddenly know. That morning I walked in on Eva fucking some guy: that was JJ’s back. At the rooftop party at my house, Eva and JJ hadn’t been looking for a lime. They’d been looking for some time alone.

  How could I have not known that? Or maybe—and this hits me like a cartoon anvil on the top of my cartoon head—I’ve known for weeks, without ever admitting it to myself. It explains the sick feeling in my stomach, the way I’ve been half-assedly avoiding Megan. My growing resentment of Eva.
And it’s probably why Eva and Scout were having gigglefests in New York. There’s been a constant whisper that I’ve shoved down into some dark place to fester because I haven’t wanted to deal with it. It’s official: I’m not just the worst assistant on the planet, I’m also the worst friend.

  Sixty-three

  I have four messages from Megan when I get off the plane in L.A.

  Boof, call me.

  Where are you? I have a bottle of Chateau Petrus. Don’t make me beg.

  Where ARE you? I’m having a moment. JJ said he was going to do press, but I just heard a voice mail—okay, I hacked his inbox, sue me—and some PA left a message about his “days off.” WTF?

  JESS, IT’S MEGAN. NEED YOU.

  I call her back while I’m in the taxi line on the arrivals level, sweating in the humid L.A. evening.

  She answers as soon as I hit Send. “I’ve been calling you all day,” she says indignantly.

  “I’m standing in the cab line at LAX. I just got off a long-ass flight.”

  “Where were you?” she says, and her voice flattens like a dog’s ears sensing an intruder.

  “Work. Long story. I’ll tell you when I see you.”

  “Which needs to be immediately.”

  I hear her pull the cork from a wine bottle and ask, “Are you starting without me?”

  “I’m pre-gaming. That’s not the Petrus.”

  A guy in blue Dickies work pants and a reflective vest taps me on the shoulder. “You wanna move up?” he says, gesturing to the hole I’ve left in the stream of people jostling their bags as they wait for the taxis to swing into place.

  “Are you even listening to me?” Megan says.

  “Shit, I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m getting in a cab. Can I call you back?”

  “Seriously? I’ve been waiting to talk to you for three days.”

  “Boof, it’s been six hours.”

  “I need you,” she says, her voice small and contained.

  “I’ll be there in an hour,” I tell her, hating the hurt in her voice. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here.”

  “JJ is sleeping with someone else,” she blurts.

  “I’m on my way, Boof,” I say. “Fast as I can.”

  Ninety minutes later, the meter rounds seventy dollars and we’re still inching our way past Third Street and the Beverly Center. The driver finally stopped laying on the horn and yelling unintelligible epithets out the window, and settled into cycling through the radio dial, pausing for a few seconds on each blaring station. That kind of chaotic, cacophonous noise usually makes me crazy, but it’s perfectly mirroring what’s going on in my own head right now and I’m kind of grateful for it.

  I can’t believe I’ve been so stupid about the clues. My stomach is looping in lazy, greasy circles; I’m nauseated to the point that I think I may have to roll down the window and puke. Megan has been my rock since I set foot back in L.A. She’s always had my back; never—not once—has she not been there for me when something big went down. And I’ve done the same. Until now. This.

  I’m such an asshole.

  Sixty-four

  JJ’s house is a sprawling two-story faux-adobe structure with a terra-cotta-tiled roof, perched at the top of a steep hillside driveway lined by a row of backlit hedges.

  Megan buzzes me into the compound and is waiting in the open doorway as I trudge up the stairs leading to the wide, rough-beamed porch. Her eyes are swollen and she looks like she hasn’t slept for a week, which, for the record, still leaves her 82 percent hotter than anyone you’d run into on a regular day in any other town.

  “Oh, Boof,” I say, wrapping my arms around her.

  “You have no idea,” she says. “I’m just— I’m gutted.”

  JJ’s been working as an actor and supporting his family since he was nine, and his entryway confirms that he hasn’t made a lot of strides in the grown-up decorating department. The two-story wall flanking the staircase looks like a prop castle from a Game of Thrones set. There’s an old-timey soda fountain in what should be the living room, complete with red leather barstools. Instead of a normal seating arrangement, a row of high-end Barcaloungers faces a wall-size HDTV screen.

  “Let’s smoke,” Megan says, leading me through a set of French doors onto a patio where a two-story waterfall splashes into a pond filled with fat koi and lily pads.

  “This is better,” I say, sinking into a teak chair with a burgundy-and-cream-striped cushion.

  “His sister did this part,” Megan says. “She brings people through on a tour at noon on Mondays and Thursdays.”

  “Sounds like fun for you.”

  “Doesn’t make a difference at this point.”

  “Oh, Boof.”

  “He asked me to marry him.” She extends her left hand into the circle of light from the rustic chandelier above us. A yellow diamond the size of a Lemonhead glitters in a wide platinum band. “Last week, at the Griffith Observatory.”

  I don’t say anything; I just watch her and listen to the blood rushing in my ears.

  “I wanted to tell you in person,” she says.

  “What happened?”

  She tells me she hacked his voice mail, and realized he was sneaking around. She said she knew before the PA left that message. She just knew. “But maybe I’m wrong,” she says tentatively. “Maybe . . . I don’t know. Maybe it’s something else.”

  “It’s not,” I say.

  “It could be,” she says, and the hope in her voice breaks my heart.

  I don’t know how to tell her, so I just tell her. “It’s Eva.”

  “What is?”

  “The girl. It’s Eva. I walked in on them last month.”

  “You what?” she says, in that small, controlled voice that brought me here in the first place. “You knew about this and you didn’t tell me?”

  “No! No, no— I didn’t even know what I was seeing, I didn’t know it was him until—”

  “Until what?” Megan stands. “Boof, how could you not tell me this? You’re my best fucking friend.”

  “I know that! I know—it didn’t click until I was on the plane today.”

  She narrows her eyes at me, a suspicious look she’s never leveled in my direction until this moment.

  “I didn’t know when it was happening, I swear.”

  “How do you not know?” She wipes her eyes on the back of her sleeve. “How do you not know?”

  I don’t have a good answer. Because I didn’t want to know? Because they’re Eva Carlton and JJ Kelly, and I didn’t want to know?

  “I just—” My voice gets even smaller than hers. “I didn’t.”

  “When you’ve got to make a call between what you know and what you suspect, you cover the home team, Jess. You cover the fucking home team.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so sorry.”

  She runs upstairs and shuts the door to the master bedroom with a sharp snick. I wait and wait for her to come back down, but she doesn’t. I text her: I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. Please come out. But my phone is mockingly silent no matter how many times I repeat it, so finally I call a cab and go home.

  Sixty-five

  Since I moved to Hollywood, I’ve gotten in the habit of hiking Runyon Canyon first thing in the morning. At first I did it because it was the only time of day I could turn my cell phone off without worrying about Eva’s imminent need for wheatgrass or another copy of Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now.

  But today I can’t sleep. Everything’s gone so completely off the rails. So I trudge up the hill and sit on the first bench and watch the early sun brush the buildings downtown, so far away. I feel like I’m trapped in someone else’s life, yet I know this is all mine.

  My myopic self-centeredness hurt my best friend, and a coil of red shame writhes in my torso. And the only way out of
it is through the middle.

  I call Megan again when I get back in the car, but it goes straight to voice mail after one ring, like she sees it’s me calling and hits Ignore.

  Sixty-six

  When Eva gets back from New York, she leaves a chirpy message on my voice mail. “Are you ready to work tomorrow? I’m not in this week’s episode, but I have a lot of bullshit I need done. We missed you. Well, Scout didn’t, but I did.”

  I hear Scout in the background, laughing and calling Eva a bitch.

  Now we’re all acting like she was just fucking with me when she sent me home early? We’re glossing over the fact that she pretended she’d forgotten about Trent—or, worse, that she actually did? This is the worst thing you can do to a neurotic-brained girl like me, pretending that everything’s fine. I’d rather have a fistfight in the street than Megan’s freeze-out or Eva and Scout’s fakey Pleasantville situation. Also, when there’s no one for me to brawl with, I beat myself up worse than anyone else could. I’m such a dirty fighter when my only opponent is me.

  Since I’ve been back I’ve been holed up in my apartment, eating potato chips and watching The Real Housewives of Everywhere until I feel greasy and nauseated. I call Megan twice a day. She never answers. If I were a cutter, I’d have crop circles on my thighs, but instead I’m just bloated and fuzzy.

  I wake up every morning feeling like I’m swimming through smog-colored Jell-O. In my gray desperation, I even call my mother, but her phone just rings and goes to voice mail.

  You there? I text.

  Nothing.

  Sixty-seven

  Scout is staying at Eva’s, like they’re having an extended slumber party and I’m not invited. Whenever I show up, toting Eva’s dry cleaning and giant squishy rectangles of toilet paper and paper towels from Costco, they’re holed up in Eva’s room with the door dead-bolted and the music blasting.