“I don’t suppose you’re secretly a registered nurse,” Molly said. “You could make fifty bucks an hour at Botox parties if you’re willing to stab people’s faces with needles.”
The keg rolled into Digger Bond’s leg, nudging him awake and forcing him to confront the fact that [insert event here] had not gone as planned. His first clue: [something hilarious]. His second clue: He sucks and I’m going to be a waitress forever.
Delete delete delete…
“Or you could get paid a hundred bucks an hour to shoot video of your feet stepping on milk cartons.”
Max jerked up her head. “What?”
Her friend grinned. “Finally. My next step was selling your eggs just to get your attention.”
“Sorry,” Max said. “I’m kind of distracted. I think getting assaulted by fake meat sucked out my writing mojo.”
“All the more reason to stop banging on that thing and get over here and look at craigslist with me,” Molly said good-naturedly. “I’m not sure I can do this by myself anymore. I had no idea how many people wanted to invest in other people’s ovaries.”
“Oh, you haven’t even gotten to the good ones,” Max said, pushing herself away from the old iMac on her desk and plopping down on her bed’s torn quilt next to Molly and her laptop. “Last month I almost applied to be some old lady’s ‘bird manicurist’ just because I wanted to see the inside of her house. You know that place was full of those creepy collectible babies you can buy off the back of Soap Opera Digest.”
“So you’re saying I should return the one I got you for your birthday?”
Max laughed. When Molly had moved to Los Angeles from the tiny Indiana town of West Cairo, she and Max had clicked into the kind of rapport Max rarely had with people. Maybe it was because Molly hadn’t known Max was the headmistress’s daughter the first time they’d talked, or maybe Molly was too nice to care about being socially associated with the offspring of an authority figure (unlike everyone else at any school Max had ever attended). Either way, Max appreciated feeling like she had an ally against all those Colby-Randall Stepford teens. And when Molly—after a brief stress-induced detour back to the Midwest—decided to return to L.A. for good to make it work with her crazy family, she’d made Max promise to keep her sane and calm now that she lived in a house with stone lions in the driveway and its own climbing wall. Perfect social symbiosis.
“Okay, seriously, though, how about being an English tutor?” Molly now said. “You’re into writing. That might be fun.”
“Nah, it says here you have to send in a completed script, no rights reserved,” Max said. “Sounds fishy. And it’s five bucks an hour. I make more than that scrubbing Dennis’s grease traps.” She frowned at the screen. “Which, thank God, is not a euphemism, unlike the listing here that says it wants a girl who can work a feather duster.”
“Gross!” Molly squirmed. Then she rummaged for her phone. “What time is it?”
Max pointed to the computer’s clock. “Six forty-three. Why, are you and Teddy heading out?”
Molly tried to tuck her russet bangs behind her ear, but they weren’t grown out enough yet, so they just flopped back into her face. “He’s taking me for Indian food after practice. It was my mom’s favorite. It would’ve been her birthday today. Or… I mean, technically I guess it’s still her birthday.”
Molly’s mother had died the previous summer, after blurting out Molly’s parentage secret on her deathbed. Even after years of watching Lust for Life—whose stories ranged from dramatic confessions to face transplants to, according to Internet spoilers, the love story between an AWOL Air Force nurse and the handsome circus ringmaster she recently recapitated—Max never imagined she’d know someone to whom anything that soapy actually happened.
Max smacked her forehead. “Oh, my God. I am a jackhole,” she announced. “You mentioned that last week and I totally forgot. I’m sorry, Molly.”
But Molly smiled.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Actually, I’m kind of glad you forgot. I’m sick of being Dead Mom Girl. The other day Brooke asked if it would be cathartic to watch Beaches.”
Max snorted. “Yes, Brooke Berlin is so sensitive to people’s pain,” she said. Molly’s half sister, whom Max had disliked since the eighth grade (the duration of which Brooke spent calling her “little boy”), was something of a tornado of self-involvement. When Molly arrived in Southern California, the sisters had gotten off to what could be described charitably as a rocky start. “It must have really soothed your wounds when she tried to make the whole country think you were some scabby alcoholic hussy.”
“Well, that was by accident,” Molly defended Brooke. At Max’s expression, she amended, “Okay, some of it was an accident. But in a weird way, all of that drama with leaking stuff to Hey! turned out to be the best thing that could’ve happened. I think I kind of needed a nuclear moment to realize how much I wanted to fight to make things work here.”
“Brooke Berlin is a nuclear moment, that is true.”
“All right, all right, no more Brooke bashing,” Molly said. “We’ve been getting along pretty well since I decided to stay in L.A. The mink slippers she got me for Christmas are really comfortable.”
“She also got you a wig.”
Molly giggled. “She thought I might want to wear it while I grew out these bangs.”
“I guess that is kind of funny,” Max said grudgingly.
“See? Even you have to admit that she’s been a lot better since we made up.”
“A bit better,” Max allowed. “In a very Brooke way. And mostly only to you. But look, I’m happy about that. You deserve a break.”
“Thanks,” Molly said, picking at a stray thread on Max’s quilt. “You and Teddy have been awesome. I’d probably be in a mental hospital if you hadn’t decided to eat lunch with me that first week.”
“That’s true. I am a hero,” Max said with a nod. “How are things going with Teddy, anyway?” She paused. “Wait, hang on. I should warn you that I both care and am completely grossed out discussing my brother’s love life. Okay. Please continue.”
“I will spare you the juiciest details,” Molly said, grinning. “But things are good. Really good. It’s kind of awkward at school sometimes, though. The other day Chaz Kelly saw us hugging and yelled at us to save it for prom night, and your mom was standing right there.”
“I heard about that,” Max said. “But I also heard him ask Jake whether he should get his left fist tattooed onto his right fist, so I would go ahead and assume even my mother knows Chaz is an asswagon.”
“Please promise me you’ll never use that word in front of Bone,” said a voice from the vicinity of the doorway, followed by the form of Max’s brother, Teddy, shuffling into the room. “He’s looking for an insult that rhymes with dragon.”
“Sounds like band practice was… educational,” Molly said.
“I don’t know why you put up with Bone Johnson’s lame-ass lyrics,” Max scoffed. “I swear, I’ve never heard anything more tragic than the song where he rhymed shrubbery with secret hot-tubbery.”
“Yes, but the ladies love his wounded soul, or something,” Teddy said, plopping down into the overstuffed armchair in the corner of Max’s room after brushing away three socks, two folded crosswords, and a plate with a two-day-old sandwich crust on it. “Maybe I should invite him over here. Show him what real tragedy looks like.” He sniffed the air. “Is that topheasant?”
Max threw a pillow at him. “Shut up. I have to get out of that smellhole and I only have two more minutes of Molly’s help before she clocks out,” she said. “Or else I might get desperate and reply to this ad for…” Max paused. “Wait. I could make twenty-five grand as a surrogate mother? For that money I could be Juno, no problem.”
Teddy nodded very seriously. “You do own a lot of hoodies.”
“Hey, how about this one: ‘Wanted: same-age Official Blogographer for teen actress/It Girl’s social media empire. Competitive pay, socia
l and lifestyle perks, complimentary Diet Coke,’ ” Molly read. “Actually, that’s kind of perfect.”
“Are you cracked out?” Max retorted. “I would never in a million years work for one of those nutjobs. Also, in this town, ‘lifestyle perks’ usually means ‘colonics.’ ”
“I actually like this idea,” Teddy said, rubbing his hands together. “My sister, the professional hanger-on.”
“Because I so want to fetch dry cleaning and, like, be forced to buy this girl meth in a bathroom stall,” Max countered.
“Just think, in four months you could be dating a Jonas brother.”
“Or dumping a drink on him.”
“Will you still talk to us when you’re wrangling her gown at the Oscars?” Teddy pretended to fret.
“Give her a break, Teddy,” Molly said, laughing. “Seriously, Max, maybe you should think about it. You want to write. This is a writing job. You could probably do it at home half the time. And aren’t you even a little bit curious?”
“Oh, no, not Maxine,” Teddy said. “She doesn’t believe in how the other half lives.”
“What is wrong with thinking it’s ridiculous, for example, to pay a facialist to exfoliate you with diamond dust?” Max said hotly. “And it doesn’t even help. Jennifer Parker still looks like she fell asleep on a pizza.”
“Maybe this is Jennifer,” Molly mused. “I heard her saying the other day that she’s working on adding a message board to JenniferParker.com, because she’s applying to be on Celebrity Roller Derby.”
“ ‘Celebrity’? Please. Cancún Barracuda Swarm was two years ago, and I think it might’ve even gotten yanked while it was airing.”
“Yeah, but not before the scene where one of them ate her face,” Teddy said. “It was so moving, Molly. Max made me watch it with her because Jake tweeted—”
“Aren’t you guys late for something?” Max said frostily.
Molly closed her laptop and stood up, squeezing Max’s shoulder. “Look, I know it seems bleak, but I promise you are not going to be making toham sandwiches for the rest of your life.”
Teddy joined her near the door. “That blog thing could be a pretty painless gig,” he said. “Maybe writing about something else every day will cure your writer’s block.”
“Who says I have writer’s block?” Max said, shooting a poisonous look at Molly.
“Your delete key,” Teddy said. “I can hear it crying all the way up in my room. You have a signature deletion pattern, sometimes mixed in with just bashing the keyboard with your palms, like it’s a drum—”
“Go away now.”
“Maybe if you tried writing a romance novel? I hear they’re timeless, and full of artsy synonyms for—”
“OUT.”
Max saw Molly smack Teddy lightly as he closed the door while reaching for her hand with his other arm. Max sighed. She really was happy for the two of them—they’d spent most of Molly’s first six weeks in Los Angeles not admitting they were into each other, and all the unsubtle yearning was more annoying than the hand-holding. But having your best friend date your brother meant you had to share custody, and Max hadn’t felt done with Molly yet today. She still needed a job. Or a writing topic. Both.
She flopped back down into her desk chair.
Matilda swept her fiery bangs out of her eyes and glared at the muscled laird standing before her, his kilt leaving little to the imagination as he mounted his steed and said, “asdfjkl’asdfjk;agkhltkjhk.”
She stopped her hand on its way to the delete key, then highlighted it all and clicked Cut instead. Take that, Teddy.
Since she obviously wasn’t getting anywhere with her submission, Max opened up a new browser window and headed back to craigslist. There it was again: official blogographer. It was terrible word. A nonexistent mash-up. Weren’t real words good enough anymore?
On the other hand, blogographer had nothing on—and nothing to do with—toham.
Max leaned back in her rickety wooden chair and took stock of things. At this rate, she wouldn’t get into the NYU program, because she couldn’t make her brain operate above a fourth-grade level, probably because she spent every day inhaling lethal meat-substitute fumes. Dennis was pickling her brain. And then stealing her tips.
Her eyes drifted around her room, past the giant heap where her hamper had exploded, across the posters of classic Keanu Reeves movies (Max had decided in middle school that his rampant awfulness came back around to making him amazing), finally settling on the gray-and-red paisley wallpaper that was peeling in several places. Her dad had promised her room would be next to be renovated, but then he’d lost his job at Cal Tech and she’d overheard her parents having a tortured conversation about how they’d make ends meet on her mother’s salary. Max had marched right in on them and announced how much she loved paisley.
So even though CRAPS—Max’s favorite nickname for Colby-Randall Preparatory School—paid Mrs. McCormack enough that they weren’t poverty-stricken, they definitely weren’t rolling in spare cash. Max knew she had to fend for herself if NYU was going to happen, and that might require drastic measures. Casting a furtive sidelong glance at the door, Max clicked the “Reply to” link.
Relax, she scolded herself. Probably nothing would come of it, anyway, and it could just be her dirty secret. But Molly and Teddy were at least a little bit right. If writing was the end game, a job doing any writing had to be better than where she was now. Whoever Teen Actress/It Girl was, she couldn’t possibly be any worse than assault with a deadly sandwich meat.
three
“… AND SO I WAS, like, Mom, of course the Chloé bag is fine, but it’s not like it’s Chanel.”
With a shrill laugh that echoed sharply in the school’s high-ceilinged hallway, Jennifer Parker and three of her cronies brushed past Max—bumping roughly into her arm without acknowledging it, as if Max’s limb were merely very thick air—toward Mr. Kemp’s classroom. Max cursed her predictable bad luck. Of course Jennifer was on the Colby-Randall Spring Carnival Planning Committee. Far be it from Max to make it through one semester without being forced to hear Jake Donovan’s girlfriend drone on about how she was one audition away from getting a final audition to read for the part of Third Cheerleader on the Left in one of the straight-to-DVD Bring It On sequels.
“So tremendous to see you, too,” Max groused at their backs. But none of them answered. In Max’s experience, nobody ever had much to say to a headmistress’s kid except “You’re not going to tell on us, are you?” Her mother would say this was because Max tried to push everyone away, with her caustic tongue and her neon coif. Teddy—to whom this problem did not apply, because he was in a rock band, which was so Hollywood—would say it was because of her habit of preemptively thinking everyone sucked. But Max knew better: Everyone did suck. They always had. Following her mom to three different L.A.-area schools had taught Max that much, from being kicked in the face in fourth-grade gym by a future Olympian who told her to “get out of the way of greatness”; to getting stuck at a table in sixth-grade art with Carla Callahan, the kid from the E.T. sequel E.E.T., who did nothing but make dots on paper with her Hello Kitty pencil while yapping about how Spielberg thought she was the next Anna Paquin (and yet still got an A for her “brave minimalist approach”); to Jennifer Parker, whose credentials for social greatness included one long-dead sitcom and a string of execrable made-for-TV movies, most recently The Pied Viper, about a murderous flute player. Max had nothing to say to these people. If she was destined to be a pariah, better to do it on her own terms.
Max hung back from following them into the classroom. She felt jittery and weird. Not at the prospect of spending more time marinating in her and her classmates’ mutual hostility—sometimes that could be invigorating—but because after this, she had a meeting with YourNewIt [email protected]. At It Girl’s suggestion, they were meeting for dinner at Mel’s Drive-In on Sunset to see if they had “a copacetic rapport.” Max focused her nervous energy on retying her Doc Marten
boots and trying to brush the fine film of chalk dust off her black skirt. It had never recovered from this morning’s blackboard race in calculus. Nobody else had come out of class looking like a powdered doughnut. Maybe designer pants repelled dirt in a way H&M’s one-ply cotton could not.
Swatting at her skirt was just making the situation worse, so Max gave up and leaned against the wall to watch other kids trickling into the meeting—prim student-government types, a couple of overeager freshmen, and Magnus Mitchell and some other athletes who were clearly there for their college transcripts or under parental duress. Max could relate to that. Mrs. McCormack tried to force school spirit into Max by prescribing extracurriculars as punishments, in the hope that one of them would stick (the carnival planning committee was for routinely ditching her last two classes to drive down to Irvine to go to concerts). It was a cunning plan, in theory; alas, if only the esteemed Headmistress Eileen McCormack had known that the motherly and teacherly pushing made Max less interested, and in fact made her want to drop out of high school altogether in favor of being one of those stoner trustafarians who panhandled in front of The Grove. Except without the trust fund. Or the drugs. So, basically, a loiterer.
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