Messy (2 page)

“Yo!”

Great. Here they come now.

Chaz Kelly and four of his burly Colby-Randall football teammates loped up to the counter, the chains clipped to their low-riding jeans rattling like spooked snakes.

“What up, Kermit! Got any steak up in here?” Chaz boomed.

Max placed her palms flat on the mint-green Formica,
as if summoning whatever Zen it might possess. “Brilliant, Chaz,” she said, tipping up her head so that she could see his face, which was a good six feet, five inches off the ground, as round as a soccer ball and about as empty. “Your wit is matched only by your literacy.”

Chaz frowned. “You’re so queer, Kermit,” he said, flicking her hair. “Gimme a Coke. And don’t get any of your head mold in it.”

Chaz’s football buddies all started chortling and punching his extensive biceps, onto which were tattooed smaller replicas of those exact biceps. Max gritted her teeth and turned to face the guy who stepped ahead of them in line. Her amber-flecked eyes met a warm pair of deep blue ones. Max’s breath caught in her throat a little bit, just like it did every day, just like it had when she was in eighth grade and Jake Donovan had glanced at her while giving a book report on
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
. She’d been so hypnotized by his beauty that she barely heard him saying how bummed he was to learn the title didn’t refer to a bunch of underwater sports teams.

“Sorry about Chaz,” Jake said. “He’s my best offensive lineman, but he’s kind of…”

“Offensive?” Max finished for him. “No kidding. It’s a miracle that he’s mentally capable of recognizing the color green.”

Jake seemed apologetic. “His helmet breaks a lot,” he said. “Don’t worry. We’re not going to be here very long.
Chaz is obsessed with Selena Gomez, and he read that she eats here sometimes, so he’s scoping it out.”

“How romantic,” Max said, peering around at Chaz trying to use his car key to slice a hole in the knee of his two-hundred-dollar True Religions. “What should I get for them? We only serve locally sourced organic teas and tisanes.”

“What’s a tisane?” Jake asked.

“I have no idea,” Max confessed.

“I’ll just tell Chaz it’s organic Gatorade,” he said, slapping some bills onto the counter. “Keep the change.”

As Jake headed off to join his teammates, Max allowed herself a tiny smile. Despite the fact that she’d been crushing on him for years, Jake hadn’t even learned her name until after she’d given him a pep talk before last fall’s school production of
My Fair Lady
. Now, if they weren’t quite friends, they were definitely friends-
adjacent
. Which made Max feel slightly less pathetic. There was nothing more
obvious
than the spunky, unpopular girl having the hots for the quarterback. But secretly liking one of your friends (adjacent)? Way less like the plot of an old Freddie Prinze Jr. movie.

Max rang Jake’s purchase through the register and put his change in the tip jar. She let her hand linger a second, wishing she could stuff the generous twelve-dollar surplus in her pocket. Despite working nearly every day after school and every Saturday for the last four months, she
was still well short of what she needed for NYU. But everyone at Fu’d split tips—well, unless you were Dennis. Last week, when that bony girl from
Frigid Valley
had come in, Max sold her a plate of carrots and then watched as the girl did nothing but stare at it for ten minutes before slapping a Benjamin on the table and announcing that she was stuffed. Dennis had swiped the bill without a word. Two hours later, Max was at the In-N-Out drive-thru sinking her teeth into her first cheeseburger in six years. It was delicious. It tasted like spite.

“Kermit!” Chaz yelled. “What’s taking so long? It’s just a Coke, dude.”

Dennis burst out of the kitchen and poked Max hard in the back.

“What did you do?” he demanded. “Never mind—I don’t want to hear it. Just go clean out the grease traps in the tofunnator.
Now
.”

Chaz made the “Oooooh” sound universal to high school boys who liked getting people in trouble. Max wanted to protest, but fighting with Dennis was always a losing battle. With a deep breath, she shoved her way into the kitchen. The smell of body odor, stale tofu, and lemon Pine-Sol hit her in the face so hard she broke into a coughing fit.

NYU. NYU. NYU.

It wasn’t working.

Max smacked the delete key and leaned back in her chair, picking at the stud in her upper ear.

“Ooooh, I like this one. It’s for a ‘bookeeper’ with great communication skills,” said Molly with a snicker from across the room. (After the day’s disastrous shift, Max had called her over for an emergency job-hunting session.) “What this woman actually needs is a proofreader,
although I love the idea of you running around locking up all her old boyfriends.”

Max grunted.

The application wasn’t due until May—the program’s founder was a Colby-Randall alum who mandated that a spot be held each year for a student of his alma mater’s choosing—but Max had been trying for weeks now to churn out a good writing sample.
Applicants for New York University’s creative writing apprenticeship program will submit an original work or essay of no fewer than three thousand words, demonstrating the ability to develop compelling characters, plot, and tone
, the instructions read. So far, Max had started, and erased, about thirteen stories whose characters, plot, and tone made her want to puke all over her keyboard. It was so much easier writing stuff for school or scribbling bits and pieces in her spiral-bound notebooks, piles of which were shoved under her bed for posterity (or to give everyone something really amusing to do at her funeral, when she was too dead to be mortified). But this was the first thing she’d ever written that actually counted
for something, beyond a letter grade scrawled on the corner of the page next to another one of Ms. Perkins’s stains of dubious origin. The last one smelled like Thai curry.

“I don’t suppose you’re secretly a registered nurse,” Molly said. “You could make fifty bucks an hour at Botox parties if you’re willing to stab people’s faces with needles.”

Delete delete delete…

“Or you could get paid a hundred bucks an hour to shoot video of your feet stepping on milk cartons.”

Max jerked up her head. “What?”

Her friend grinned. “Finally. My next step was selling your eggs just to get your attention.”

“Sorry,” Max said. “I’m kind of distracted. I think getting assaulted by fake meat sucked out my writing mojo.”

“All the more reason to stop banging on that thing and get over here and look at craigslist with me,” Molly said good-naturedly. “I’m not sure I can do this by myself anymore. I had no idea how many people wanted to invest in other people’s ovaries.”

“Oh, you haven’t even gotten to the good ones,” Max
said, pushing herself away from the old iMac on her desk and plopping down on her bed’s torn quilt next to Molly and her laptop. “Last month I almost applied to be some old lady’s ‘bird manicurist’ just because I wanted to see the inside of her house. You know that place was full of those creepy collectible babies you can buy off the back of
Soap Opera Digest
.”

“So you’re saying I should return the one I got you for your birthday?”

Max laughed. When Molly had moved to Los Angeles from the tiny Indiana town of West Cairo, she and Max had clicked into the kind of rapport Max rarely had with people. Maybe it was because Molly hadn’t known Max was the headmistress’s daughter the first time they’d talked, or maybe Molly was too nice to care about being socially associated with the offspring of an authority figure (unlike everyone else at any school Max had ever attended). Either way, Max appreciated feeling like she had an ally against all those Colby-Randall Stepford teens. And when Molly—after a brief stress-induced detour back to the Midwest—decided to return to L.A. for good to make it work with her crazy family, she’d made Max promise to keep her sane and calm now that she lived in a house with stone lions in the driveway and its own climbing wall. Perfect social symbiosis.

“Okay, seriously, though, how about being an English tutor?” Molly now said. “You’re into writing. That might be fun.”

“Nah, it says here you have to send in a completed script, no rights reserved,” Max said. “Sounds fishy. And it’s five bucks an hour. I make more than that scrubbing Dennis’s grease traps.” She frowned at the screen. “Which, thank God, is not a euphemism, unlike the listing here that says it wants a girl who can work a feather duster.”

“Gross!” Molly squirmed. Then she rummaged for her phone. “What time is it?”

Max pointed to the computer’s clock. “Six forty-three. Why, are you and Teddy heading out?”

Molly tried to tuck her russet bangs behind her ear, but they weren’t grown out enough yet, so they just flopped back into her face. “He’s taking me for Indian food after practice. It was my mom’s favorite. It would’ve been her birthday today. Or… I mean, technically I guess it’s still her birthday.”

Molly’s mother had died the previous summer, after blurting out Molly’s parentage secret on her deathbed. Even after years of watching
Lust for Life—
whose stories ranged from dramatic confessions to face transplants to, according to Internet spoilers, the love story between an AWOL Air Force nurse and the handsome circus ringmaster she recently recapitated—Max never imagined she’d know someone to whom anything that soapy actually happened.

Max smacked her forehead. “Oh, my God. I am a
jackhole
,” she announced. “You mentioned that last week and I totally forgot. I’m sorry, Molly.”

But Molly smiled.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Actually, I’m kind of glad you forgot. I’m sick of being Dead Mom Girl. The other day Brooke asked if it would be cathartic to watch
Beaches
.”

Max snorted. “Yes, Brooke Berlin is so sensitive to people’s pain,” she said. Molly’s half sister, whom Max had disliked since the eighth grade (the duration of which Brooke spent calling her “little boy”), was something of a tornado of self-involvement. When Molly arrived in Southern California, the sisters had gotten off to what could be described charitably as a rocky start. “It must have really soothed your wounds when she tried to make the whole country think you were some scabby alcoholic hussy.”

“Well, that was by accident,” Molly defended Brooke. At Max’s expression, she amended, “Okay, some of it was an accident. But in a weird way, all of that drama with leaking stuff to
Hey!
turned out to be the best thing that could’ve happened. I think I kind of needed a nuclear moment to realize how much I wanted to fight to make things work here.”

“Brooke Berlin
is
a nuclear moment, that is true.”

“All right, all right, no more Brooke bashing,” Molly said. “We’ve been getting along pretty well since I decided to stay in L.A. The mink slippers she got me for Christmas are really comfortable.”

“She also got you a
wig
.”

Molly giggled. “She thought I might want to wear it while I grew out these bangs.”

“I guess that
is
kind of funny,” Max said grudgingly.

“See? Even you have to admit that she’s been a lot better since we made up.”

“A bit better,” Max allowed. “In a very Brooke way. And mostly only to you. But look, I’m happy about that. You deserve a break.”

“Thanks,” Molly said, picking at a stray thread on Max’s quilt. “You and Teddy have been awesome. I’d probably be in a mental hospital if you hadn’t decided to eat lunch with me that first week.”

“That’s true. I am a hero,” Max said with a nod. “How are things going with Teddy, anyway?” She paused. “Wait, hang on. I should warn you that I both care and am completely grossed out discussing my brother’s love life. Okay. Please continue.”

“I will spare you the juiciest details,” Molly said, grinning. “But things are good. Really good. It’s kind of awkward at school sometimes, though. The other day Chaz Kelly saw us hugging and yelled at us to save it for prom night, and your mom was standing
right there
.”

“I heard about that,” Max said. “But I also heard him ask Jake whether he should get his left fist tattooed onto his right fist, so I would go ahead and assume even my mother knows Chaz is an asswagon.”

“Please promise me you’ll never use that word in front of Bone,” said a voice from the vicinity of the doorway, followed by the form of Max’s brother, Teddy, shuffling into the room. “He’s looking for an insult that rhymes with
dragon
.”

“Sounds like band practice was… educational,” Molly said.

“I don’t know why you put up with Bone Johnson’s lame-ass lyrics,” Max scoffed. “I swear, I’ve never heard anything more tragic than the song where he rhymed
shrubbery
with
secret hot-tubbery
.”

“Yes, but the ladies love his wounded soul, or something,” Teddy said, plopping down into the overstuffed armchair in the corner of Max’s room after brushing away three socks, two folded crosswords, and a plate with a two-day-old sandwich crust on it. “Maybe I should invite him over here. Show him what real tragedy looks like.” He sniffed the air. “Is that topheasant?”