The Real Real (10 page)
“Sorry, no, I am!”
“Cool.” He shoots his index finger and thumb at me while reaching inside his parka to retrieve his sparkly Cap’n Crunch phone. “You’re getting everything you want. Trust me. The set’s down by the water where your new story line is waiting to kick off, so hit the trailer!” Eager to see Fletch’s definition of “everything,” I reach for the door.
I don’t even mind as they re-seal my pores with concealer and re-wave my fried hair. Or when they strip me of my 93
coat in exchange for a mink pullover, skinny jeans, and slouchy suede boots to send me out into the dunes.
Zacheria walks by holding his hands overhead a loaf-sized distance apart and then snakes them down to his hips. “This early light is
scandalous
!”
“It’s his catchall for good,” Kara translates as she points me toward the water. “Okay, now just walk out to the old lifeguard station. We’re going to shoot this one from here—no audio: no mikes, no booms—”
“Cameras are on zoom,” Zacheria cuts her off. “Very Cassavetes.”
“So you can be more natural.” Kara holds back her flapping hair as the wind rolls up the shoreline.
Nodding, I jog against the strengthening breeze about a hundred yards down to the waves, smiling despite the lip gloss shellacking my ponytail. As I reach the old wood ladder, I squint to see Kara wave from the dunes for me to climb up. Careful not to snag the fur on an errant rusty nail, I hoist myself up.
“Cay?” I call out, conjuring Kelsey Grammer’s advice to Mom, hoping, praying, willing this into being. I pull myself onto the little deck outside the boarded-up station and wipe off the sand that’s blown onto my jeans. “Cay?”
My voice drains away as I stand upright to see my new story line, looking as stunned as I feel.
“
Jase?” “Jesse. What the hell?” He scowls, darkening under the XTV bronzer highlighting his impossibly square jaw.
“I was hoping . . . never mind.” I slump against the railing, cursing Kelsey Grammer and feeling like a jackass.
“Would you answer me?! What are you doing here?”
“I was sent out here. By them.” I point behind me to the dunes and a flurry of down-covered arms wave me away.
“Why?” His blue eyes flicker over my shoulder. “Why would they send
you
?”
“Why would they send
you
?”
“All I know”—he steps closer, dropping his voice—“is 95
that you spent the night with Nic.”
“So?” And then I get what he’s implying. Oh my God, my life does not revolve around whether or not you can keep it in your pants! I get a surge of anger so intense I feel heat in my forehead. “Look, I’m tired and hungry and have to go break my best friend’s heart now. So if you’ll excuse me.” I push past him and he grabs my arm, the fur puckering where his fingers meet his thumb.
“Let go,” I manage.
“You didn’t tell Nico what you saw.”
“I didn’t tell Nico what I saw,” I repeat, as the salty breeze picks up into an audible speed, my ponytail flapping between us like a loose sail.
He squints into my eyes before releasing me. Straightening my jacket, I move to the ladder, stepping over it to climb down. As I watch my suede foot reach for the next rung, I flash to Nico curled in on herself in that robe.
“You should, Jase,” I yell, my head just clearing the warped boards of the deck.
He crouches, his face incredulous. “Come again?”
“You should tell her.” And then it’ll be out. It won’t be my secret or the secret I sold for a fat wad of nothing. “She deserves to know it happened.” And in that moment his flattened expression tells me that it wasn’t an “it,” it was/
is
? a “thing.”
I drop my eyes and instinctively keep moving. “Okay, whatever, I’m going to go—”
“You don’t know shit about me. Are we clear?” His cold hand gruffly takes my chin and jerks my face up to 96
his. “Not a word.” And we are no longer talking about Nico. “So go back to town and do what you’re good for, cleaning toilets like Mommy.”
Tugging my face from his grasp, I clamber down the ladder, jumping off into the sand. Screw him, screw Fletch, screw everyone. Taking off, I look back to see Jase leap the last few steps like Christian Bale in a Batsuit. We both tuck into the wind, trying to get ahead of each other’s stride back to the dunes.
As soon as I hit the tall grass, I run toward the trailer to get my stuff so I can get the hell out of here. Fletch jumps into my path from behind the stack of monitors. I open my mouth, but before I can even begin, he pulls me into an Axe-saturated bear hug, screaming, “Yeahyeahyeah!”
My eyes tearing from the fumes, I jerk back to see Jase get pulled in with Fletch’s other arm, and we are head-tohead in orange parka.
“Freaking awesome, man!” Fletch slaps Jase on the back as Jase jerks away from me.
“Dude, there was no audio on that, right?” Jase seeks confirmation. “I thought Nico was coming.”
“Just mixing it up, Jase.
Man!
” He grabs each of us by the shoulders to give us a vigorous shake. “You two have
it
!”
“What do we have?” I ask.
Fletch blinks at me like I must be joking. “Heat! You two have heat!” he yells as he releases us to clap his gloved hands in hollow thuds. “File that away, Kara!”
* * *
“Caitlyn.” My lungs on fire, I push into the ever-empty Bambette, close the door behind me, and slump down the pastel-stenciled wall to catch my breath. “I . . . jogged . . .
from the Beach Club . . . in these . . . ” I kick one foot out in front of me along the carpet. “Ridiculous . . . ” I extend the other. “Boots.” I drop my head like Dorothy’s scarecrow. “I’m so sorry about last—”
“
So?
He’s back this morning, right? Fletch?” She stands from her makeshift reading perch on the cardboard box behind the register, her shoulders and eyebrows lifted in hope. “What did he say?”
I look up at her, prepared to launch into a bullshit speech of why this is all for the best, but she knows me way too well. As she reads my expression beneath the layers of makeup and sweat, her face, her shoulders, her everything—falls.
“Whatever.” She shrugs.
“No, wait—” But how can I spin the unspinnable to the one person who’s been reading my mind since kindergarten? “The thing is that, well . . . ”
Taking a nearby stack of folded cashmere bibs and shaking one out sharply, she commences refolding. “Whatever,”
she repeats. The cold rock in my stomach overriding my screaming shins, I use the shabby-chic dresser of onesies to pull myself up.
She lifts a hand to stop me. “It’s cool, Jesse. I said whatever.”
“It’s not cool!” I arrive at the white wood desk and put 98
my hand on hers as she reaches for the next bib. “It
sucks
!
And they didn’t even have the balls to tell me; they just sent me out to practically get murdered by Jase McCaffrey! Jase, who I apparently have ‘heat’ with—how scary is that—and I broke out of there
the minute
it was clear that they weren’t going to cast you—”
“So you quit?” Her voice is quiet. The CD we’re always joking is going to drive her to down the Windex plays Pachelbel’s Canon in the space between us.
“No, I . . . ” I pull back my hand. “You know I can’t turn down this money, Cay; my parents would kill me.
I feel so bad—I don’t even think there’s a word for how crappy I feel. You deserve to be in this show, not that I would wish it on anyone. Oh God, it’s so ridiculous. All waiting and having crap slapped on and scrubbed off and
‘stand here’ and ‘say this’ with people you don’t know, don’t like, don’t think are remotely funny, and there’s, like, a million people there who care
so much
about all of it and, like, a million professional actors from the city—
they’ve got them staying in the B&B behind Saks—and it goes on for, like, hours—”
“Sorry,” she interrupts, resuming the rhythm of her folding. “Am I supposed to feel bad for you?”
“That’s not at all what—”
“Because
I
”—she flicks a bib at me—“spent the night
alone
.” She folds it once. “With your
fish tank
.” Twice. She flicks the next one as her nostrils flare. “Oh, and that’s
after
the smoke alarm went off from the oven where I was 99
keeping the pizza warmed for you. The pizza
I
had to pay for from your dad’s
penny jar
while the guy waited for, like, an hour because somebody took the money in
their
pocket.”
“Oh my God, Cay, I’m so—”
“Then, after I stopped it the
first
time, the alarm just went off, like,
every hour
for the rest of the night, and I was totally freaked out after watching the scary movie somebody told me,
promised
me, they were going to come home after. But that somebody did not come home because she spent the night where?”
“I tried to leave a message as soon as they were done filming—at dawn—but your box was full.”
“And then when I wake up you’re
still
not home. I rode your bike to the spa and there was no one there. Nothing.
And I was rattled from the fire alarm and the movie and I was worried. And I didn’t know what else to do so I called your mom. I didn’t know they were going to have you all night! I didn’t know if maybe you had tried to walk home and something or someone—”
A panic bell thuds dully from the back of my head.
“You called my mom?”
“Yeah, she was, like, ‘I’m getting in the car right now.’”
“When was this?”
“Sometime between the fifth fire alarm and calling the emergency room. Sorry to be worried you were dead.”
“No, I’m sorry! It’s just—your mailbox was full.”
The door jingles open, and a woman comes in with a massive Birkin bag and even more massive
Nanook of the
North
hat.
“Weekender,” we both automatically mutter.
“I need three of these in an infant size, wrapped separately.” She dangles a lime-colored cashmere onesie in our direction while continuing to flip through the rack.
“I have to get back to work.” Caitlyn scoots around the table and takes it from her.
“I’m sorry,” I say furtively. “I did everything I could.”
“So did I.” She bites her bottom lip.
“Oh my God, is that the new J. Mendel?” Covetous, the weekender practically steps on Caitlyn to finger my borrowed fur. “
Gorgeous
. I’m on the wait list. Meanwhile I get to spend all my husband’s hard-earned cash on shower gifts for my IVF BFFs, lucky me.” She turns to Caitlyn.
“Are you going to wrap those?”
Caitlyn smiles tightly. “Of course.” She takes the onesie and steps quickly to the register.
“The help around here seems a little inbred, if you ask me,” the weekender says to me out of the side of her lip-lined mouth.
“That’s my best friend,” I say loudly. Caitlyn shoots me a
just leave
look.
“Well, I . . . ” Red-faced, the woman shakes her head.
Not knowing what else to do, I head for the door.
“Oh, Miss O’Rourke?”
I turn to Caitlyn’s sickeningly sweet voice.
“You can send your driver over with the seven dollars and fifty-two cents you owe me for the movies. I’ll take that in pennies.”
“Jessica Taryn O’Rourke.”
I fight through the grip of deep sleep to see Mom standing over me, still in her coat, arms crossed, face pissed.
“What the hell happened to you last night?”
I wipe away the hair matted to my face and push myself up to sit on the couch. My hand traces the imprint of the phone in my cheek, where I kept it in case she called back after hanging up on me from the road. “I’m sorry,” I try again, a yawn escaping as I pull my bare legs up under my bathrobe.
“Yes, so you said. I need a little more than that.”
I blink my eyes in a struggle to stay awake. “I’m
really
sorry. The show had me out all night.”
“Doing what? What exactly do they need you
all night
for?”
“Filming. I guess they’re going to be shooting weekends now, too.”
She sits heavily on the La-Z-Boy. “So you were working,” she says mostly to herself, staring at me in the late-afternoon light. “. . . Okay.” She rubs her hand along the back of her neck. “You really scared us, Jesse.”
“Mom, this show’s just a lot more . . . ” I struggle to put the experience into words for both of us. “I thought I’d be doing my thing and they’d follow and film it 102
and—okay—weird. But not
this
. This is someone else’s life. With no
Caitlyn
. I don’t know if she’s going to get over this.” I feel my cheeks dampen, and her expression softens.
She stands and reaches down for my hand, helping me up into a hug. I sink against her. “This is just new, that’s all. Just like any job. The whole house is such a mess you think it’ll never get clean. But one room at a time and it becomes habit. You’re a smart girl; you’ll get the hang of this, Jess.”
“I don’t know if I want to.”
She pulls back to wipe my tears with the well-worn sleeve of her down coat. “God willing, you’ll both be at schools in D.C. next year, and this’ll be no more important than when that boy you both liked asked you to the roller-skating party.”
“I don’t know, Mom. It’s pretty bad.” I flash to Caitlyn’s wounded face as I circled past her, tugged along by Josh Dupree’s clammy hand to LeAnn Rimes telling us she can’t fight the moonlight, the only time he acknowledged me all night. All I wanted to do was tell her that up close he looked like a toddler with a blond mustache and smelled like Cheez Doodles and Old Spice. But she didn’t return my calls all weekend. It took weeks for things to get back to normal, for the glint of hurt to fully vanish from her eyes.
Mom takes off her coat and folds it over her arm, fingering a tear in the lining. “Just think how much more exciting it is than filling muffin tins and washing them 103
out all day long. You want to be doing that for the rest of your life?”
“No.”
“Nobody does, Jesse.” She looks up from the dime-sized hole with a tired smile.