Messy (30 page)

Max swallowed hard. “No,” she said. “No, you are not allowed to do this. You are not allowed to be super cool when I acted like an asshat. Don’t you want to swear at me, or tell me I look like a Muppet, or…” She took a chance. “I don’t know, force me to watch your spring scrimmage or something?”

Jake’s mouth twitched. “I
could
give you a lecture on how to read blitzes,” he said. “No offense, but your poker face sucks. I knew you were faking it about the pistol offense.”

“My poker face does
not
suck,” she said. “I’ll have you know that when I worked at Fu’d, I once saw Jennifer pick up a napkin that had been used by that bearded kid from
American Idol
and put it in her purse, and I didn’t even crack a smile.”

Jake laughed with her, the familiar old twinkle briefly returning to his blue eyes, then turned quiet. “She wants to get back together,” he said, leaning forward and hanging his head slightly so that his blond locks hid part of his face. Despite knowing she was over him, Max still kind of wanted to reach over and brush them away, just to know what it felt like.

“Old habits,” she murmured.

“Maybe. Probably,” Jake said, not realizing her inner monologue was on another topic. “I really wanted it to work out with you, but it didn’t, and… I don’t know what it is about Jen, but it feels like we always have unfinished business or something.”

“More like an unfinished argument,” Max said. “You guys are kinda the Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton of our high school.”

“Are they on
Glee
?” Jake asked.

“They’re… never mind.” Max turned to face him and inhaled deeply. “It’s tough love time, from your Get-a-Grip Friend, which I hope you will let me be for a long time,” she said. “Jake, you have turned out to be one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. And you deserve way more than being squawked at every ten seconds by someone who is so insecure about her own life that she’s trying to control everything about yours.”

“She
does
kind of do that,” Jake said, chewing his lip. “I never thought of it that way.”

“It’s way easier to see what’s going on in other people’s lives than it is to see what’s happening in your own.”

“Maybe you just don’t
want
to see what’s happening in your own life,” Jake said with unexpected wisdom. “Because that’s when things get complicated. Take you and that Roman Brady kid. You like him, I think he likes you, he’s going out with Brooke, and you know you should fight for him.”

“I can’t do that to Brooke.”
I’ve done enough to her already.

“But it’s what you want. And since when are you guys even friends?” Jake asked. “Seriously?”

“It’s complicated,” Max said with an apologetic smile. “But as far as Brady is concerned, if I have to talk someone into liking me, then what’s the point? Right?”

Jake slung an arm around her and hugged her. Max let him. It felt way more real than any embrace on their date had.

“I
do
like us as friends,” he said. “It feels nice.”

Behind them, the school’s doors banged open. “Jake!” Jennifer squawked, barreling toward them.

Max stood up, then leaned down to Jake and whispered, “Friend to friend, if you get back together with her, promise me you’ll make some changes. You deserve better.”

He smiled. “I will get a grip.”

Jennifer came to a halt next to their bench with a mighty pout. “You are missing the entire meeting!” she brayed. “What are you doing out here with Oscar the Grouch? And if you’re coming to the meeting just to sit around and glare, Max, you can save it. No one cares what you think.”

Jake opened his mouth as if to say something, but Max beat him to it.

“Chill out, Jen. I would rather eat toham than go in there with you,” she said. “In fact, here’s a thought: How about any time you have the urge to speak to me at all,
you
save it? Because I’ve never cared what you think, and I don’t plan to start. And if you keep treating Jake like crap, I will make sure my old coworkers at Fu’d put meat juice in your tofu burger.”

As Max stormed off toward the parking lot, she felt more than heard Jen’s outraged gasp. Peeking over her
shoulder, she saw Jake stand up and put his hands on his hips. “Jen, you can’t talk to me or anyone else like that,” he boomed. “Max is my friend, and she—”

With a private grin, Max wrestled open her car door. The engine noise drowned out the rest of Jake’s lecture to Jen, but Max rode the high of having said exactly what she wanted,
when
she wanted to say it, all the way to her house. Slinging sarcasm was one thing; actually giving Jen a piece of her mind was another, and that was long overdue. After feeling so unmoored the past few days, Max reveled in the sudden surge of confidence that shot through her veins.

Max pulled into the driveway and braked so hard that the gravel was still making crackling noises when she got out of the car. She dashed up to her room and threw her backpack onto the window seat, where it assaulted her hardback of
The Eyre Affair
and an old careworn copy of Judith Krantz’s
Scruples
that she’d purloined from her mother’s stash three years ago (clearly, Max’s own camp-loving heart beat beneath Eileen McCormack’s sensibly shod exterior). Digging under her bed, Max pulled out several of her old black-and-white speckled notebooks. There was a poem she’d written about crayons in second grade, and a poem she’d written
with
crayons the year before, the beginnings of stories about a talking pig, and one about a planet full of blob people. It was all hideously embarrassing, and also deeply, deeply
her
, from a time when Max hadn’t cared about what anyone thought
because being creative made her happy. She’d been writing for
fun
.

Suddenly, words crowded her brain like people cramming toward the stage at a concert. Max woke up her sleeping computer, opened a new Word document, and began typing as quickly as possible, as if she were worried she wouldn’t ever get this feeling back—this sensation that she had something to say. Something about herself. Something real. And, finally, the writing came easily, pouring out of Max like water from a garden hose. She called it “Diary of a Fake Teenage It Girl,” and she had a complete rough draft in barely twenty minutes. She was proofreading her (hopefully) stirring conclusion when her cell phone rang.

Max didn’t even look at the caller ID. “What?” she barked, wedging the phone between her ear and her shoulder as she tweaked the ending. She probably shouldn’t have answered. It might kill her mojo.

“Max McCormack?”

“Yeah?”

“This is Elena, Kyle’s assistant, from
Nancy Drew
,” the woman said. Max remembered her as a perky blonde in her early twenties, way less severe than her voice now sounded. Suddenly, Max felt like she really
shouldn’t
have answered.

“How can I help you, Elena?” she asked with a sinking feeling.

“You’re needed at the studio,” Elena said. “Brick Berlin
has requested your presence personally. He said to tell you… wait, I wrote it down… ‘Stress commits brain murder.’ Huh, that seems… Well, whatever—the point is, he thinks Brooke needs you on set to keep her calm.”

“But I’m not…”
Speaking to Brooke anymore
, her mind finished for her. “… currently employed by the Berlins,” she said instead.

“That’s immaterial to him right now,” Elena said. “How soon can you leave? Now?”

It didn’t sound much like a question.

After they hung up, Max gave her blessedly finished essay one more glance before hitting Print. It was still warm from the printer when she clipped it to the NYU application and stuck it into her backpack. She could drop it off at school on the way back from the studio—someone would be at the main office until at least seven.

And yet, even though things were looking up—her writer’s block was
finally
smashed—Max still felt a bit queasy. Not because of her essay, or even because she’d been summoned to help repair a psyche that she might’ve helped break. No, she was uncomfortable because she knew going to set meant seeing Brooke. And Brady.

BROOKE RUBBED BLEARILY
at her eyes and glanced at the clock on her trailer’s microwave: 4:04
PM
. She bolted upright in her chair. Could that be right? Two hours ago, when she’d been handed the pink pages that signified last-minute script adjustments, she’d only meant to rest her eyes for a minute before studying her lines for the rewritten scenes. Now her call time was in half an hour, and she still had to touch up her hair and makeup. By Brooke’s estimation, this gave her ten minutes to learn everything.

She felt a sticky wetness on her cheek. Apparently she had dozed off with her face resting on the table on top of the script, and then drooled on it. A visit to her bathroom mirror revealed a pinkish stain stubbornly clinging to her skin. Brooke rubbed it, to no avail, then scrubbed and
scrubbed until her face turned red but the dye was gone. She rechecked the clock. Great.
Five
minutes to learn everything.

Brooke smacked her cheeks and shook her head, willing her brain to work. She tried to focus on Brady, and the kiss so epic that it made one of the inside pages of
OK!
magazine, but the warmth she’d felt in her extremities that night had faded over time. Now she just felt uneasy around him. Brooke had thought he was considering asking her out again after their date, but once Max quit, Brooke had found herself spread so thin that they’d barely spoken—and when they did, Brady always seemed sort of concerned, even confused. Brooke suspected this was because of her blog.

That stupid, stupid blog.

It had been a rough week. Her fight with Max last Wednesday had left Brooke feeling prickly yet optimistic. The blog was already in full swing, so she’d figured keeping it up would be easy: Max had found it simple enough to pose as Brooke Berlin; surely Brooke would have an edge due to actually
being
Brooke Berlin. But panic had set in when she wrapped shooting at exactly midnight—God bless child labor laws—and slumped through her bedroom door, dying for sleep but feeling obligated to post something before she crashed. She’d spent the next three hours pacing in front of her picture window, chewing on Twizzlers she’d stashed under her mattress, and watching infomercials (the one where Jennifer Parker
posed as a Yoga Booty Ballet pupil was running on the CBS affiliate at 2:30
AM
; delirious by that point, Brooke decided sitting through it made her a better friend). In the end she’d banged out something she wasn’t even sure made sense, hit Publish, and passed out on top of her comforter.

This kicked off a chain reaction of late nights, flubbed lines, inability to focus on her work
or
her blog, paranoia, stress-induced insomnia, and finally outright exhaustion. After yet another bout of writer’s block—it turned out Brooke had slipped into Max’s shoes as easily as Max had slipped into hers—Brooke determined, with the help of WebMD, that she was probably about to start losing her hair, and also that she most likely had leukemia. This meant that not only were her looks
and
her career threatened, but she might kick it before she could star in her own Lifetime movie. Even Brick had noticed something was awry; last night he’d come up to her room and asked very seriously if she needed her Chaka Khans realigned, which led to a very strange ten minutes in which Brooke snacked on the vegan flaxseed brownie he’d brought her (a recipe he’d found on GOOP) while Brick called his meditation specialist and clarified that, in fact, Chaka Khan was fine, and it was Brooke’s
chakras
that were in doubt.

And now there was that stupid Tumblr, cracking on her best efforts—well, okay, they weren’t her best efforts, but they were
efforts—
and implying she was a fraud.
(Which was only even
partly
true.) Molly had sent her five text messages about it, trying to be cool but clearly panicked that the site would send Brooke into some kind of fugue state. Brooke appreciated her worry, but the truth was, she was too numb to feel much of anything. She was too tired. So tired.

At 4:13
PM
, Brooke heaved herself out of her seat, grabbed the new pages, and shuffled out of her trailer with a monstrous yawn. She’d study while the makeup people fixed her sleep-creased face.

“Brooke!” squealed Carla Callahan the second Brooke hit daylight. Brooke squinted against the May sun and regained her sight just as Carla hugged the crook of her arm. “That Tumblr blogger is a wicked chowderhead.”

“You’re nobody until you’ve been parodied,” Brooke chirped, giving Carla as blasé a wave as she could before disentangling herself and speeding ahead toward hair and makeup. But all of Brooke’s internal organs seemed to be trading places, her stomach down in her toes and her liver somewhere up in her throat. Theoretically, the Tumblr was just another silly site poking fun at a famous person. Today, however, after the horrors of what she knew were some truly terrible performances on her part this week, it was the last straw. Anyone with third-grade reading comprehension knew the Open Brooke entries from three weeks ago were superior to the new ones; so far, probably because of her obvious stress, nobody had mentioned it. Now that dumb blog might give them an excuse to start.
And then what? Could she get away with claiming she’d simply cracked her head on the floor underneath Nancy’s garbage-bag bed?

Snap out of it. You are Brick Berlin’s daughter, and you have wiggled your way out of way worse messes than this one.
This was just some random jealous jerkface ragging on a star, and the best way to stick it to him or her was to get her act together and nail it on set that afternoon. Her Oscar wasn’t going to win itself. Brooke’s mind drifted to one of her favorite fantasies, where she was giving a stirring acceptance speech while her husband, Channing Tatum, wept lovingly in the front row of the Kodak Theatre.

But first she had to make it through her scenes. Gazing down at her pages, which were littered with lines totally foreign to her, Brooke prayed her luck hadn’t just run out.