Messy (21 page)

“I have to keep up appearances!” Brooke beamed. “Mostly I just use them as free weights.” She put her hands on her hips and frowned. “
Where
did I put that check? Can you
check the bedroom, under my vanity? Daddy said I shouldn’t be careless with my knees.”

Max swallowed a groan and pushed through the curtain, squeezing between the bed and the table and searching for anything resembling an envelope. All she found were some Kleenex that had been used to blot lipstick and a loose subscriber card from an issue of
Self
.

As she twisted herself back upright, Max heard low voices coming from the main room. She cracked open the curtain and saw Brady leaning against the trailer door, speaking earnestly as Brooke beamed. Max shrank back just enough that she could watch undetected.
It’s for research
, she told herself.

“… supposed to be one of the worst movies you can see in L.A.,” Brady was saying. “I’m dying to go.”

Apparently he still hadn’t gone to see
The Room
. Brooke looked at him a bit blankly even though it was one of the most infamous activities in town.

“You should be seeing
good
movies, to figure out which screenwriters you want to work with next,” she instructed him. “I’ve also been wanting to see that one where Cameron Diaz gives a kidney to Zach Galifianakis and then they take over each other’s personalities. It’s supposed to be hilarious.”

“Oh, well, sure,” Brady said, flustered. “I guess I just thought it might be fun to go see something hilariously
bad
. You know, escape from the business for a while.”

Brooke grabbed Brady’s arm and smiled up at him.
“You’re right, of course,” she said. “Does this mean you’re asking me out on a date, Brady Swift?”

The imaginary Spanx roared back, strangling Max’s gut more ruthlessly than before.

Brady flushed. “Well, I just think you were right before,” he said. “It’s hard to get to know somebody with all this going on, and if we’re going to work together—”

“
Intimately
,” Brooke interrupted him, pointedly.

“—well, yeah, so I think we should probably hang out on our own, you know, where no one is screaming at us to go to set, and I’m not wearing eyeliner.”

Brooke batted her lashes. “I would
love
to go out with you. Our conversations have become so
important
to me, even if they’re short.”

Brady flashed Brooke a self-conscious grin. His dimples were so deep, you could ask him to stash your car keys in them. “Well, okay then,” he said.

Max pinched shut the curtain. She didn’t want to see any more.

Max punched the delete key with abandon. She didn’t care if it broke off and smashed into a million pieces. Half the point of taking on Brooke’s blog had been to unlock Max’s own creative process. Instead, her NYU writing sample got worse every time she restarted it. And it didn’t help that Teddy was upstairs playing the same riff on his guitar over and over and over again.

“A little variety, please, maestro?” she bellowed in the
general direction of Teddy’s upstairs turret room. He thumped the floor and kept playing.

Max looked out her bedroom window and saw her dad puttering around with something that looked like an old-fashioned hand-push lawn mower with an oscillating fan attached, presumably to keep the person mowing the lawn from getting overheated. They were in the middle of a heat wave—the WeatherBug on Max’s computer claimed Los Angeles had hit a hundred degrees that day—and with the air still unpleasantly oppressive, Max was beginning to regret not taking Molly up on her offer of a postschool swim at her place. But Max felt too antsy to relax on an inflatable raft.

“I have to work on my application,” was her excuse. Which of course meant rewriting the opening sentences about seventy-five times, reading all the comments on OpenBrooke.com (the last entry, about how “if it zips, it fits” is not a proper style mantra, had gotten more than four hundred), and flipping between the Lifetime Movie Network and infomercials. She’d stopped even pretending to work when she discovered a Colon Zap ad starring Jennifer Parker.

Brooke called. Max sent her to voice mail.

A box popped up on her computer screen. It was a video-chat request from Molly. Max clicked Accept, and Brooke, wearing an orange bathing suit with a cardigan pulled over it, appeared on-screen.

“Gotcha,” Brooke said, grinning.

Dammit. Will I ever learn?

“Oh, my God. Your room is a
mess
,” Brooke added, trying to peer around Max’s body as if video chat allowed for a fully three-dimensional perspective. Without makeup and with her hair pulled back into a ponytail, she actually looked like a regular, wholesome sixteen-year-old who could as easily have come from basketball practice as from a movie set.

“Hello to you, too, Brooke,” Max said, reaching up to adjust her webcam so that Brooke couldn’t see the pile of dirty laundry on top of Max’s bed. “What do you want? And why are we video-chatting now?”

“Does Brady like red? Or is that too obvious?”

“How should I know?” Max felt prickly.

“Well, you two are all chatty all the time,” Brooke said. “I just assumed you’d found out the basics—favorite color, favorite sushi roll, favorite cut of jeans. Brick is
really
excited that Brady and I are going out, and I think he might be tipping off a reporter from
In Touch
. So this has to look good.”

“Lucky Brady,” Max said before she could stop herself.

Brooke rolled her eyes. “Maybe you should switch to herbal teas to cure your mood problems,” she said. “Is Molly there?”

“No, I thought she was at your place.”

“She was, but she said she was heading over to your house for moral support,” Brooke said. “I assumed she meant for you, like maybe you were going to color your hair or something…” Her voice took on a hopeful note.

“No such luck, Brooke,” Max said. “Try her cell?”

“That’s so 2009.” Brooke peered through the screen at something on Max’s desk. “Please at least throw out that apple. It’s practically a fossil.” She punched her mouse pertly and Skype made its signature sign-off blurping noise.

“Yes,
boss
,” Max sang to the blank screen. Glaring at the shriveled, slightly imploded apple, she contemplated hurling it at the ceiling to make Teddy stop his infernal twanging, but the backsplash would make her the actual victim. So she carefully carried it to her wastebasket and shoved it inside an empty Kleenex box for protection, then grabbed a shoe and threw it at the spot on the ceiling where Teddy’s music seemed the loudest.

“Some of us are trying to use our delete key down here,” she shouted.

A knock came at the door. Max jumped. That was fast. “Go away,” she yelled.

The door opened and Molly stuck in her head. “Really?”

“Oh, it’s you. No, you can stay,” Max said, flopping down on the bed and staring at the ceiling again. There was now a dirty spot on it in the shape of her sneaker. “But I’m warning you, Teddy has been playing the same half of a song for two hours and it might make you stabby.”

“I was just up there,” Molly said. “I guess he’s getting press attention because of what you wrote about him in Brooke’s blog, so now the band has decided to play one of his songs and one of Bone’s. He’s stressing. I decided to leave him alone.”

“Great. So we both have writer’s block.” Max rubbed her temple. “Sorry,” she yelled up at the ceiling. There was a pause, and then they heard a short acoustic version of the chorus to Cee Lo Green’s “Forget You.”

Max laughed. “Well played,” she shouted.

Molly curled up in Max’s desk chair and peered at the screen. “Why is Francesca writing Brooke’s blog now?” she asked.

“Crap, I thought I deleted that,” Max said. “I keep getting halfway through the opening of a story and then I get so mad at how bad it is that I start typing nonsense. It’s seriously bumming me out.”

“Well, at least you have one thing to look forward to,” Molly said.

Max snorted. “I’ve seen Mental Hygienist play before.”

“No, not the contest. Your date. With Jake. Saturday.”

Max sat up abruptly. “Oh, right.”

Molly looked shocked. “You
forgot
? You were so in love with him six months ago that you let him call you Mary, and you
forgot that he asked you out
?”

“No, it’s just… well, okay, maybe a bit,” Max said sheepishly. “I just lost track of what day it is.”

“Are you not into him anymore?” Molly asked, furrowing her brow.

“I’m just… I don’t know.” Max rolled onto her side and picked at a stray thread on her quilt. “My foot won’t stay still. It keeps twitching. I can’t concentrate. I feel really weird.”

“That happened to me once when I drank an entire two-liter of Diet Coke in one sitting,” Molly said. “Except I know that’s not what you did, so what’s the deal?”

“I don’t know,” Max moaned melodramatically.

“Okay,
Brooke
.”

Max shot Molly a halfhearted dirty look. “Fine. Let’s take stock,” she said, holding up her fingers to tick off the points on the list. “I write a popular blog. I’m paid pretty well to do it, and so if I get into the NYU thing I can actually
go
, and still pay for food. And the quarterback I’ve been in love with for years finally broke up with his girlfriend and asked me out because he ‘misses me.’ ” When she finished the air quotes, she spread her hands wide. “That’s everything I’ve always wanted, right? So what’s my deal? Shouldn’t I be totally stoked?” She swallowed hard. “Do you think I’m cold and dead inside?”

“Isn’t that pretty much the first line on your résumé?”

Max frowned. “I prefer sarcasm when it’s not directed at me,” she said. Then she sighed. “All the false pretenses are just kind of starting to bug me. And I feel so
lame
that it bugs me. I knew what I was signing up for, and now I feel like a whiny little kid asking to be noticed, which is so dumb because I
never
care if anyone notices me.”

“Uh-huh,” Molly said, a note of skepticism in her voice. Max chose to ignore it.

“The thing is, I don’t usually let people get to know me,” she barreled on. “And you know that. But now I’m meeting all these people, but of course they think all these little parts of me that I’m putting out there for the world to read on the blog are really
Brooke
, so they still don’t really see
me
. And maybe it offends me a little that they believe it all so easily.” She shook her head. “Has
nobody
noticed that those glasses came out of nowhere?”

“Wow,” Molly said, uncurling her legs and propping them up on the bed. “That was a lot to keep bottled up. But I get it.” She tucked her bangs behind her ear. “You know, when I first moved here, the hardest thing was feeling like I had to become someone else, either to survive Hurricane Brooke or to get Brick to like me, or both.”

“But you were always normal around me and Teddy.”

“Yeah, and I
still
almost got swallowed up by all the me-versus-Brooke stuff,” Molly said. “I’m doing so much better now, and it’s because I’m just being
me
, and not whatever version of me was trying to please Brick or beat Brooke at her own game. That got so exhausting.”

“I don’t even know what version of me to be anymore,” Max moped. “And now I’ve let her drag Brady into this mess. He doesn’t deserve that. He’s so into her writing and—”

“
Your
writing.”

“My writing, and her
everything else
,” Max said. “And she wants him, so she’ll get him. But that’s not the point.”

“Are you sure about that?” Molly asked.

The way Molly was looking at her, Max knew she couldn’t get away with a half-truth. She took a deep breath.

“Even if I did think he was kind of cool, he’s obviously crazy about Brooke,” she said. “She’s Barbie and I’m a troll.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You are not.”

“You know what I mean,” Max insisted. “I can’t compete with that. Besides, I’ve been obsessed with Jake since junior high, and he’s here
now
. So maybe he doesn’t read much. And his grammar is awful. And he dated that crazy bitch for the last few years. But he’s nice, and he’s
really
hot, and I make him laugh.
I
do that. Me.”

“As opposed to Brady, who thinks it’s Brooke making him laugh.”

“If you bring up Brady again I am going to throw my other shoe at you,” Max warned. Molly grabbed a Kleenex off Max’s desk and waved it in faux-surrender as Max added, “Jake was always what I wanted, and now he wants to go out, and that’s great. I’m just a little wonky right now, is all.”

Molly nodded sympathetically. “It must be hard living a lie.”

“
Lust for Life
makes it look easy.”

“Yes, and
Lust for Life
is noted for its documentary approach to social situations.”

The girls swapped smiles, but Max couldn’t contain a deep groan. “I miss old Max. I miss not caring.”

“Oh, come on, you cared,” Molly said. “Nobody who genuinely doesn’t care fights that hard to
look
like they don’t care. And now you just happen to care about something that’s all jacked up with little white lies, so you don’t know how to feel.”

“Thanks, doc,” Max said. “Do you charge by the hour?”

“I wish I knew what else to tell you,” Molly said. “Psychic identity theft is complicated.”

Abruptly Max sat up. “I
am
doing the right thing, though,” she insisted. “Right? Not quitting the blog? I mean, I am getting published. If NYU isn’t meant to be, then at least I have that.”