by Ella Berman
“Are you fucking laughing, Grace?” Nathan turns to Kit and points at me, as if he can’t deal with me anymore. “Is she laughing?”
“I really am sorry. I know you have families and, like, billion-dollar houses to pay off and stuff. I do understand that. It’s hard. It’s just, you kind of convinced me I already was a household name?”
“Do you think anyone in Wallace, Idaho, wonders where Grace Turner went?” Nathan asks. “Do you know how hard everyone worked to get that movie out in time to be eligible for awards season because of you? Do you know how much groundwork we laid to try to get you that Oscar nomination? We rented a fucking billboard on Sunset Boulevard, Grace, but you’d already left by the time it went up. We played the entire thing perfectly from the start, and you fuck it up at the last minute by disappearing. Who blows off the Golden Globes?”
Nathan looks at Kit, who shakes his head sadly, and I wonder how many times they’ve had this conversation.
“You know, actually, let’s talk about the Globes for a moment. We flew sixty-five members of the Hollywood Foreign Press out to Berlin for the wildest party they’ve ever been to. Most of these guys didn’t sleep for the entire trip. Two guys missed their flights home. Our For Your Consideration campaign was so fucking flawless that kids would have studied it in film school for years to come. If you hadn’t disappeared six weeks out.”
“I didn’t know you were doing all that,” I say defensively. “Nobody told me.”
“Don’t play dumb now, Grace. You know, even if by some miracle you’d won that fucking Oscar, everyone always knew you needed one more movie to fully cross over. You’ve fucked it up.”
“Nathan, I get it,” I say, holding eye contact with him for the first time. “Please. I really get it.”
“No, because if you got it, you wouldn’t have done what you did. Have you thought about what you’re going to do next? Because whatever you do has to be commercial but still have integrity, and do you know who the only person creating commercial stuff with integrity at the moment is?” I can tell that Nathan’s about to lose his shit again.
“Can you at least see what else is out there?” I direct my attention to Kit, even though the real battle is with Nathan. “It’s pilot season next month. There has to be something for me.”
“Sure, honey,” Kit says, pulling out his phone and frowning as he reads something. Nathan does the same. They are letting me know they are done with me.
Kit’s mouth moves slightly as he types a message.
“Are you making a note of that?” I ask, narrowing my eyes.
“Of course,” Kit says absentmindedly.
I stand up, and then I stamp all over the expensive rug to get to the door. I turn around and shake my head. They both ignore me, tapping away silently at their phones.
“You guys are fucking cretins.”
* * *
• • •
The valet at Nathan’s office building, Pat, isn’t as friendly as he used to be. I wonder whether it’s filtered down to him that I’m not someone he needs to impress anymore. I try to remember whether I usually give him a tip for Christmas or not. I hand him a fifty-dollar bill from my sunglasses case anyway and he’s a little nicer after that, opening the car door and smiling at me. Pat used to tell me that my talent was a gift from God every time he saw me, but this time he just says, “Happy holidays,” quickly as he’s closing the car door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I sit in the car with my eyes closed for a few minutes, trying to ground myself or whatever it was my Transcendental Meditation coach was always trying to teach me to do. I feel uneasy after my meeting with Nathan and Kit and I’m irritated to find that I still care what they think. When my phone buzzes on the seat next to me, I pick it up, staring at it for a moment. I clumsily tap in my security code before opening the message app like my sister taught me.
Don’t be mad
I handled it
(It’s Esme btw)
Want to know whose little friend this is?
The picture is of a dick, purple and swollen. I slap my hand over the screen and check outside my window to see if anyone is watching me. Fuck, fuck, fuck. What is she doing?
That’s right, it’s Mr. Best Buy, cretin-in-chief, liar-in-command himself
You’re welcome
I delete her messages and throw my phone back onto the seat next to me, banging the steering wheel hard. Then I pick it back up and open a new text to Esme. I type slowly and with lots of autocorrect errors at first.
How did you get that? This is completely illegal and inappropriate.
Esme texts back almost immediately.
It is not illegal. I was trying to help. Don’t bother replying if you’re going to be dramatic
I rest my head on the steering wheel for a moment, but when I pull out of the parking garage and into the stark sunshine, I’m surprised to find that I’m laughing.
* * *
• • •
“Sooo, what do you think?” Esme says, trying to control the pride in her voice. I press the phone against my ear and sink back into the porch chair.
“I think I could probably get arrested for having that hideous picture on my phone. Is Mom home?”
“They’re both out. Jesus, chill, you’re not going to get arrested—he’s super old.”
“How old is super old?”
“At least twenty.”
“How did you even get that?”
“Instagram. I started talking to him under a fake account, and he asked me to send a nude first,” Esme says defensively. “So I figured he definitely deserved it. He knew nothing about me and he still thought he’d earned the right to see me naked.”
“You didn’t . . . ?” I ask hesitantly, thinking of the nude she sent at school.
“Of course I didn’t. I’m not a total idiot, Grace. I sent him one I found on Reddit, and he sends me his shit back right away, and it was just so gross that it had to be real.”
“Oh God.”
“Look, I’ve already been in contact with him to reveal our true intentions, and he’s agreed to post something else about you in return for us not sending his dick pic to his boss at Best Buy. So, you’re welcome.”
“Something else?”
“Something to say he was just trying to get attention by posting mean things about you, and you’re actually really normal and nonderanged. Et cetera, et cetera,” Esme adds.
“Well. This was all very . . . kind of you, in a way,” I say, feeling bad because she seems so pleased with herself. “But that’s not going to work.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s just not how it works, Esme. Nobody will even bother printing a tiny retraction, let alone a whole new post to say I was behaving perfectly normally on a Wednesday afternoon in Best Buy. That’s not a story. Have you ever read that about anyone?”
“That’s bullshit,” Esme says sulkily, and I feel like I’ve just told her that puppies don’t exist, or that Tom Hanks is a raving misogynist.
“People are saying you have a problem. Like drugs or drinking or something,” Esme says, and I resist the urge to tell her that it’s probably the first time in five years that I don’t have either of those particular problems. She doesn’t need to think any less of me than she already does.
“Maybe even psychosis,” she adds.
“Esme, I appreciate the effort you went to, but I’m pretty sure that however you got that photo is the last thing I need to be involved in right now. Thank you for what you were trying to do, but can we please just forget about the kid with the boner?”
“But why should he get away with it, just because he’s a guy?” Esme says, sounding as if she’s about to burst into tears. “Didn’t anyone teach you that you have to stand up to bullies?”
I t
ry to remember a time when I believed in rules like this, too, when I last felt owed anything by life. I feel a tug of envy at her naïveté.
“Sometimes real life doesn’t work out like that,” I say quietly. “Look, you may not know this yet, but there are some bad people in the world, and while some of them get exactly what they deserve, others just don’t. I’m sorry to say it, but it’s true. This guy might feasibly keep winning, over and over, to the point where you can’t even begin to understand how unfair life can be. So the sooner you just accept that, the easier it will all be.”
Esme is silent on the other end of the phone, and I shift in my chair to stop my leg from cramping up.
“The Best Buy geek is going to win?” she asks eventually. “What are you saying?”
“I don’t know,” I reply, exhausted suddenly, and grateful that my parents aren’t home to witness the demotivational speech I’ve just given my sister. “No, probably not.”
“So who’s going to win?” Esme asks softly.
“Can we talk about something else?” I say, and for some reason I feel lonelier than I have in a long time.
“Why are you just giving up? It’s so sad to watch,” Esme says, sounding just like our mother.
“I have to go,” I say, hanging up the phone.
I lean back in my chair and stare up at the collection of four houses on the bluff over Coyote Sumac. The view of Able’s house is even better from here, and when I squint, I can just about make out a figure on the roof, staring out toward the ocean. I know instantly that it’s Able. He’s at home, standing on his roof deck and waiting for the sun to slip behind the ocean. My heart hammers with fury that he could be doing something so ordinary, something so quietly gratifying as watching the sunset on a Monday afternoon, just like the rest of us. I think of what I told Esme, and how I wish I had been lying. I wish that the bad guys were just the bad guys, that they didn’t know exactly how to claw you down with them until your own shame becomes indistinguishable from theirs. As I watch him stare out at the ocean, I understand that I can hide myself away for as long as I want, but it will still only ever be because he made me.
When Able moves inside, a simmering anger bubbles underneath my skin for the first time in a while. The sky casts a deep red light onto the white roof of his house, and the whole ugly thing glows from the inside like it’s on fire.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Everything with Able changed a couple of months before my nineteenth birthday. I had just finished shooting the last movie where I would play a child, in a World War II film set in a concentration camp, and Able was hosting a party to celebrate at his house, the peach house up on the hill. He had ignored me throughout the entire shoot, breaking the usual pattern, and I had assumed that this time my performance really wasn’t good enough, that I hadn’t lost enough weight, or that he’d made a mistake by casting me in such an intense role. Or maybe he’d found out about the drugs I was relying on more and more to get through the weeks. The project was the first time we’d worked together since I turned eighteen, and a tiny part of me wondered if he wasn’t interested in me now that I was older, but the thought came from the deepest, most unruly part of my mind, the part I had to suffocate in order to do what I had to do, and be who I had to be every single day.
I was surprised when Able excused us from the rest of the party under the guise of showing me our next script, and he led me into his office at the back of the house. Other guests smiled indulgently at us as we passed them, both of us America’s adopted sweethearts. I remember that Emilia even waved as we went, before turning back to break up another squabble between the twins.
I floated after him, so relieved that he wanted to talk to me again. A sense of calmness descended over me that made what came next even worse. In the office, Able leaned against his desk and told me that he was finally giving in to me, that he would give me what I had wanted all this time. He unzipped his jeans as he spoke, and somehow, through my fear, I found the words to say that I didn’t think it was a good idea. He told me to stop being disingenuous. That everyone knew I’d been chasing him for years. I said I needed to go to the bathroom, but he just looked at me with blank eyes as he forced me down onto the floor and put his penis in my mouth. I started to choke. Thick saliva dripped down my chin and my eyes burned with hot, shameful tears. I was staring at a photograph of Able, Emilia and the twins on the desk behind him the whole time. He didn’t even turn it around.
Afterward, I tried to justify what happened. I’d let him believe that we had a special relationship because it had benefited me too. I didn’t want to admit that I hadn’t had a choice in any of it, and even when the disgust eventually flooded every inch of my body, it was an uninvited, complicated disgust after so many years of believing that his attention meant I was special. Every time he accused me of wanting him or needing him, or making him act this way, a tiny part of me believed him. He’d always warned me that I couldn’t trust myself, and deep down I knew I never fought back as hard as I could have.
* * *
• • •
At some point, I started referring to what happened in Able’s office only as “the incident” in my head. I’d had to work harder to repress it than ever before, and it wasn’t just because the physical act had been so alien to me. It was what he’d said to me before it happened that really made me feel like I was drowning. In telling me he was finally giving in to me, Able had confirmed my worst, darkest suspicions—that I had some sort of power I had been unintentionally wielding over him all these years. On the rare occasions I did allow myself to think about it, usually if I hadn’t drunk enough to blunt the edges of my mind, or if I hadn’t topped up my Percocet prescription in time, I decided to believe that there had been a miscommunication at some point, like in one of those sitcoms where everyone’s wires get crossed, only instead of ending up on a fancy blind date with my ex-boyfriend, I ended up alone in Able’s office. If I thought about it only in abstract terms, without remembering the way I’d brushed my teeth until my gums bled when I got home that night or how I couldn’t look in a mirror for three days after it happened, I could tell myself that the incident wasn’t quite so bad. I flinched every time someone came near me.
My agent informed me that I had the best part of a year languishing ahead of me while Able developed his new project, the one he had been “showing” me the early draft of that night in his office. At first I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to see him, but after a couple of months, when I hadn’t heard a word from him, my disgust made way for an all-consuming terror that he no longer wanted me for the part, even though Nathan and Kit assured me that he did. I was so used to our usual pattern—Able’s focused dedication at the start of a project, the rare flattery he would display to get me to sign—that I figured I’d done something really bad for him to be ignoring me like this.
For the first time in my life I was filled with both an expanse of free time and an acute, overwhelming awareness of how much trust we put in the hands of other people every single day of our lives. It was a crippling combination. There was no guarantee that the car coming toward me at a crossing was actually going to stop at the red light, yet I was still expected to step right out, and nobody could promise me that one of the many strange, older men waiting outside my hotel with a camera wouldn’t just cross that line one night and force his way into my room. It all seemed so fragile to me, the trust we put in others without thinking about it, and once I realized it, the loneliness hit me like nothing I’d felt before.
When I woke up on my nineteenth birthday with my cheek stuck to the dirty floor of a strip club on the wrong end of Sunset Boulevard, watching underneath the toilet cubicle door as the girls adjusted their wigs and stiletto fastenings, I couldn’t even lie to myself that I was okay anymore. Something was broken in my brain, and the more I tried to block it out, the worse it was getting.
I texted Nathan to tell him I wouldn
’t be doing the movie, and that I was done with it all, and I asked him to pass the news on to the rest of my team. Then I turned up at my parents’ house in Anaheim much like I have every other time before and since, with my tail between my legs and a duffel bag filled with designer clothes, only this time I sank to my knees the moment my dad answered the door.
For a couple of weeks everything seemed like it was getting better. I told my parents I was recovering from a bad flu and stayed in bed, watching old sitcom reruns on the TV in my room. My dad brought my meals to my bedroom door, and even my mom, whom I’d barely had one civil conversation with since I left home, seemed to enter into an unspoken peace treaty with me. One night, she even ran me a bath filled with bubbles that smelled like rose petals, and in return I listened to her stories about Esme with a fixed smile on my face. I knew it was a fragile peace, effective only until I informed them of my decision to leave behind everything they had sacrificed for me to have, but it still felt better than anything else I could be doing.
One evening, I heard the front door bell ring. I looked out my bedroom window and saw Able’s Jaguar parked in front of the driveway. It was low and dark silver like a shark, and it reminded me of another world I had been trying to forget. I closed my bedroom door and sat with my forehead pressed against my knees, my breathing shallow. I hate you, I thought, at the same time as I hoped he would come up and find me, tell me he was sorry and forgive me for whatever part I played in what had happened. I was confused, disgusted with myself, but the one thing I understood with perfect clarity was that my parents could never find out about the incident. Whenever I thought about it, the shame would burn through me in rings, then it was waves; before long it became impossible to tell who I was without it.
Half an hour later, I heard the front door close and a car engine start outside. My mom knocked on my door a few minutes later.