“Listen, it’s been a lousy day.” I reach down, pick up my discarded bag, try to seem casual and not like I’m thinking of my efficient wash-and-cry coming right up. “So if not the end of summer ... ?”
She looks down at her noodles. So this is the hard part, then. I tighten my already tight shoulders in preparation.
“We can get in at the end of June.”
“That is . . . soon.” Tough-to-find-a-non-creepy-subletter soon, and anyway, the hope was that by the time Sibby moved out, I wouldn’t need a subletter right away. I’d have landed the Make It Happyn job.
A fresh wave of anger rises within me, and I feel desperate to get away from her, to shove it down.
“I was thinking I could call my dad,” Sibby says. “Then I could pay you for the rest of the summer, even though I’m leaving earlier than I said.”
It’s my turn to blink in surprise. Sibby broke financial ties with her dad about four years ago, when he’d come to the city for a conference. She’d met him for dinner and a show, some musical Sibby had already seen three times, and afterward at the hotel bar, Mr. Michelucci told Sibby he couldn’t see her up there, not ever. “You’re not like those girls up there, Sibyl,” he’d said to her. “You don’t have the voice or the face or the body. It’s time to get serious.”
When she’d come home that night, she’d cried and cried, choking on the words he’d said to her, and my heart had broken. All the connections and commonalities Sibby and I had, the ones we relished and celebrated as each other’s very best friend—I would have never wished this one on her, a fractured relationship with one of her parents, especially her dad. She’d always been closer to him, had always felt he was in her corner.
So I know exactly what it would cost her to ask him for this.
“Don’t call him,” I say. I’m mad at Sibby, and I’m confused by her. But I love her, still. I want her to be happy. And if she’d propose something this desperate, then obviously what she needs to be happy is this move. “I can cover it.”
“Yeah?” she says, her voice lilting, musical. Her dad, he can get in my gum cocoon, too. He was so wrong about her. She does have the voice and the face and the body, whatever that means. It’s only that a whole lot of other people in this city do, too.
“Oh, yeah,” I sort of . . . chirp. “It’ll be fine.”
Already I’m thinking about what’s in my bank account right now (my business bank account, thank you very much), how much savings I have, how many regular jobs I have lined up in the next few weeks, when my next quarterly tax payment is. It is supremely, face-punchingly annoying that I’m thinking about how useful a quantitative analyst who does math in his head quickly might be right now. A handsome pocket calculator on demand.
“Can we work out the details later? I really need a shower.”
“Sure, of course.” She picks up her phone from where it sits beside her box of noodles, checks the time before she speaks. “Why was your day so lousy?”
I stare at her for a long moment. What can I even say in the remaining minutes she’s got to give me? What would even make sense, what with all these long gaps of time between our interactions? I think, painfully, about Reid and his blunt, no-nonsense questions. The ones I said he had no right to ask. He doesn’t, but still.
It wasn’t the worst thing, to be asked.
I don’t really answer her. I shrug and gesture to my wet, bedraggled face and body and tell her to have a good time at Elijah’s. I go to my bedroom and close the door behind me.
But before I strip off my clothes, I pull my phone from my bag, hold it in my hand for a few minutes while I look around my room. For weeks all I’ve been able to see in it is the cramped chaos of my desk, the work I’ve been trying to do and redo as I struggle with the Make It Happyn job. The rest of it, though—sure, it’s small and it’s messy, but it’s also lovingly, carefully curated. The perfect, pale-blue down comforter with fluffy, pin-tucked-style squares. The big white pillows with a gray monogram that I designed, an indulgence after the Times article came out. The sheer pink scarf I have draped over my bedside lamp. The small, rose gold statuette Cecelia bought me for Christmas a couple years ago, a bird at rest, its rounded body perfect for cooling the palm of your hand. The silhouette I did of the Manhattan skyline—instead of lines defining the buildings, I’d done a tiny, pristine roman print, snippets of conversations I’d overheard on the subway, a simple dot separating them.
I don’t want to have to move from here right now. I don’t want another upheaval.
But I need more money—and soon—to make it work. And since I won’t have any more walks with Reid on the agenda, I guess I’ll have the time. I pick up work easily, I hear myself telling him. I’m in demand.
I swipe my thumb across the screen and navigate to my contacts.
“Cecelia,” I say, when she picks up the phone. “Do you still have that number you mentioned?”
Chapter 6
I don’t mean to be dramatic, but: It’s a motherfucking movie star!
I mean, it’s not like it’s Meryl Streep. But it is a person who has been in at least one movie, and it is also a movie I have seen. Said movie was called The Princess Tent, and not only did Sibby and I see it together in the theater when we were fourteen years old, we also each had our own copy, and we watched it at probably sixty percent of our sleepovers.
The Princess Tent was pretty objectively Not A Good Movie, with lines such as, “You’re a princess where it counts. On the inside,” and “My tent may have been small, but this castle is a prison!” For years afterward, Sibby and I would say these lines to each other at moments both appropriate and not, and always dissolve into laughter afterward.
But even if we teased about it, we also loved it—a long-lost princess, believing herself orphaned, fed up with the system that shuffled her in and out of foster homes. Living on her own at the edge of a forest, strong and resourceful. Hiding her circumstances from everyone at her high school, including the handsome boy in her English class who wrote noncreepy poetry—a feat, let’s face it—and always packed an extra sandwich for her just because. Sibby and I were so invested that we probably would have burned the movie theater down if Princess Freddie (real name: Frederica, of freaking course) didn’t get her happy ending (crown, castle, tent on the grounds, poet-sandwich boyfriend), so it’s a good thing it all worked out for her.
And I guess it also worked out for the young starlet who made Princess Freddie a household name, because on Friday afternoon I’m standing in the doorway of her and her actor-turned-director husband’s brand-new row house in Red Hook—part of a line of buildings that are similar to brownstones in that they’re shoved all together, but dissimilar to brownstones in that they are brutally modern, some faced with wood siding dry-burned black, some with what reminds me of the dull side of aluminum foil, some—including this one—with orange-rusted steel. They all have huge, high windows on the second and third floors, the kind a fancy decorator would tell you absolutely cannot have curtains. It’s not my taste, but I’ve lived in this city long enough to know that this sucker costs at least two million, more depending on what’s beyond this doorway.
I’m sure I’ll get a peek at it soon, but right now I’m still too busy concentrating on keeping my mouth from hanging open as Lark Tannen-Fisher’s assistant, Jade, shows me a piece of paper that she “totally promises” is not legally binding but that also contains scary words like practitioner (which I think means me) and termination (which I don’t think means murder, but who knows). I’ve only been here for three minutes, tops, and even though I know I’m not going to take this job until I have an attorney (yeah, I know when to call an attorney! Suck it, Reid!) look over this thing, I’m still having trouble moving past that first minute, when Jade explained who I was about to meet.
Again: a motherfucking movie star!
Jade smiles an extra-white smile at me when I look up from the non-legally-binding paper. “Lark is so excited to meet you. She
loves your Insta.”
“Great!” I say, but my mind is a sieve for anything other than I’m thinking it all the way down the long front hallway, which smells of fresh paint and money, and I’d probably continue to think it if we didn’t step into a massive kitchen-dining-living room, open and airy and bright. There’s not much furniture yet, but everything that’s built in is gorgeous—sleek, dark-stained wood cabinets lining one whole wall, steel hardware that matches the appliances, a massive white marble island, glass-blown pendant lights hung above. Beyond it, a work-of-art chandelier, tangled branches of wood beautifully intertwined with delicate glass prisms. And where the living room furniture will surely go, a low, rectangular fireplace, built into a white brick half-wall, windows above and flanking it on either side, overlooking the kind of landscaped patio that half the population of Brooklyn would terminate someone for.
In spite of the fact that Jade has spoken to me in sentences that include at least twelve more words in italics, I don’t know if I’m processing it; I am absolutely not playing it cool when she pulls out a fancy acrylic chair away from the island and invites me to sit and “set up.” She asks if I want anything to drink and when I decline, she gives me another blinding smile and says she’ll see me later.
I’m going to meet Princess Freddie, I think as I sit there, my client notebook and my Micron in my hand. Neither are pink or have sparkles, and under the circumstances I consider this a profound failure.
“Meg?”
Lark looks remarkably the same as she had on-screen all those years ago—shorter than I thought, the planes of her face sharper with adulthood, but she’s still got all that long dark brown hair, brown eyes to match, a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose and cheeks. Her smile is Princess Freddie’s, closemouthed and cautious, and after the movie came out I remember reading an interview where she’d said she’d always gotten teased for how big her mouth was. Since I’d had a face full of braces at the time, I’d felt a kinship.
Lark shakes my hand when I stand from my chair, and I make a real effort not to curtsey, holding the Micron in my other hand so tightly my knuckles ache. “Thanks for having me,” I say, as though I’ve shown up to her wedding shower or a cocktail party.
“I’m thrilled you came. I’ve been following you for ages!”
Given that I spent a good portion of my freshman year drawing sketches of her magical forest tent, this is a moment of cognitive dissonance for me, so I’m pretty sure I smile goofily, feeling as if my braces have grown back.
But when we sit at the gigantic island and Lark tells me about the work she wants me to do, something about her makes my smile start to feel frozen and awkward in a different way. She’s light, cheerful, a mode I know all too well and usually feel comfortable with, but everything she says seems littered with the name of her husband. Cameron wanted to leave LA because it was a wasteland. Cameron picked Red Hook because it’s “gritty.” Cameron wanted this house because its simplicity won’t interfere with his “process.” Cameron supports her acting but also doesn’t approve of the rom-coms she gets offered, and definitely doesn’t want her doing TV. Cameron wants kids, two boys. Cameron wishes she was a better cook.
So I low-key hate Cameron, which is awkward since Lark doesn’t want me to do only a custom planner for her. She also wants me to do two large walls in her house, because Cameron is into inspirational quotations (here’s hoping he’s not a fan of Bloom Where You’re Planted!). One of them is a larger-scale version of something I’ve done before, a narrow panel in the kitchen that they want done in chalk, but the other—which Lark leads me to—is a massive, high-ceilinged wall in the master bedroom that they want done in paint.
“I don’t usually work with paint,” I tell her as we stand in front of all the blank whiteness. This isn’t entirely true—about a year and a half ago I took a four-weekend sign-painting workshop in Williamsburg to get some practice with retro-style lettering and composition. I’d translated most of what I’d learned there into my regular ink-and-paper practice, but I’d also done a couple of painted signs for Cecelia and the shop, and one for little Spencer Whalen, mostly because I didn’t want Sibby to get in trouble if I’d said no to the request.
So I could probably do this, could brush up on my brush skills, and as long as they don’t want anything too complicated, it’d probably be fine, if more time-consuming than I’d hoped. But something makes me uneasy about it. At first I think it’s a whisper of my most recent outing with Reid, staring up at walls, even though those weren’t blank. After a few seconds, though, I realize it’s another type of familiarity. It’s the sense that if I do this job, I’ll want to say things I have absolutely no place saying. The sense that I’ll break my promise to myself—to Reid, not that I should care—if I take it.
“I could give you some names of people who do that kind of work full time,” I add, once I realize the silence has stretched too long. There’s hardly anything in this room yet—a big California king with all-white linens and a large black-and-white framed photo from Lark and Cameron’s wedding leaning against the wall beside it. In it, Lark’s face is almost totally obscured, and Cameron is wearing a slouchy knit cap and wide black leather cuffs on both his wrists. On the beach! I feel newly committed to my decision to pass. How would I ever get through this job without hiding a message about how much I disapprove of Cameron’s wedding attire?
I would not, probably.
But then Lark says, “Oh,” and she sounds so genuinely disappointed. “Maybe I’ll skip it. I was kind of trying to avoid—” She breaks off, tucks her hands inside the front pocket of the hoodie she’s practically swimming in. “I’d rather have fewer people coming in and out of the house, I guess?”
I look over at her and she gives me a sheepish shrug.
“I get nervous about privacy stuff.”
“Oh, of course,” I say, as if I somehow know how it is to be a child star. I look back up at the wall, now feeling decidedly less committed about why I should pass. All through the mini-tour of this massive house, I couldn’t help but think, This castle is a prison! Except this time, it hadn’t seemed funny at all. When I first saw Lark in that movie years ago, the three-year age gap between Freddie and me seemed huge. She was a real teenager, not the kind of teenager I was—emerging and awkward, parties and proms and joyrides on a very distant horizon. But right now, with Lark standing beside me in this huge, sterile room, I feel like the older one, the real adult in the room.
Maybe I could do this part of the job, to help her out. I can ignore whatever she says about Cameron, keep my promise to myself, and give her what she’s asked for. And this will be good for me, too. Even aside from the money I stand to make, this will be a good challenge to set alongside the Make It Happyn job. A place to put all the excess inspiration I am absolutely still going to get out of my city walks.
I take a big breath, speak with all the cheery, casual confidence I’m still mustering about this.
“You know what? Why not, right? I like trying new things.”
She smiles at me, big and genuine. Then she says, “Cameron,” and I resist the urge to groan. “He’s always encouraging me to try new things.”
“Such as cooking,” I blurt, and right after it comes out of my mouth I grimace. First of all, I sound like Reid, whom I should not be (a) thinking about, or (b) imitating in any way. Second of all, I barely know this woman, and I’ve also just committed to keeping my mouth—well, my hands—shut about whatever she has going on in her life. And who knows, Lark/Princess Freddie might have a tyrannical streak and I could be five seconds from getting thrown out. Jade had a really firm handshake; she could probably do it.
But Lark surprises me with a snort of laughter that she brings a hand to her mouth to cover. When she composes herself she huffs a small sigh. “It can be exhausting, trying new things. You know?”
Boy, do I. I wonder if she’d want to know about trying a new thing where you call a man who doesn’t like you,
ask him to indulge in your probably useless efforts at artistic inspiration, develop an inappropriate fondness for his face, and then get into a fight with him in the rain on a crowded street in Midtown.
Exhausting indeed!
“I absolutely do,” I say.
For a second, we both look up at the wall, and I try to convince myself that all this blankness won’t turn into another block.
I call Cecelia when I’m on my way home.
I don’t do it because I want to disrespect Lark—or, God forbid, that piece of paper—but because Cecelia helped me out by hanging on to her number, and she’ll want to know how it worked out.
“Oh, Meg!” she says, her voice high. “Was it a Real Housewife?”
I laugh, but then I feel sad again at the mention of it, thinking of Lark in that big house, Cameron wanting boys-only kids and cooking and his knit-cap/leather cuffs portrait, and Lark looking a bit shell-shocked by it all. I push the thought away.
“No, definitely not. She’s got a pretty big following, so it’d be great if she showcases any of my stuff on her social media.”
“See, that’s exactly what I hoped for. Another planner?”
I tell her briefly about the planner, the two walls, and she’s interested but also distracted, probably counting stock or looking over new samples.
“So I wanted to say thanks, and—”
“I’m glad you called, actually,” she interrupts. “Can you stop by the shop? There’s a package for you here, delivered by messenger a few minutes ago.”
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