Messy

by Cocks, Heather

  She pulled a clipboard out of her giant leather bag and brightly clicked open a pen that said Avalanche! on the side.

  “That’s your dad’s latest, right?” Max said. “The one he’s shooting in Florida?”

  “Yes,” Brooke said, pleased as she always was when people were abreast of her father’s career. “Would you like me to get you a pen?”

  “It is my life’s ambition to advertise such an impressive feat of cinema verité.”

  Brooke shook back her curls and leveled Max with a smile that said, Nice try, but you can’t provoke me. “Let’s start at the beginning,” she said. “What do you think of my shoes?”

  Max shook her head and rose. “They’re blue. That’s what I think. And since that is totally not a real question, I’m going to go home to catch the Lust for Life prime-time special. Julianna is supposed to find out that her recapitation surgery is illegal and that Pip’s head might get reclaimed.”

  Brooke put down her pen and affixed Max with a very serious look. “God invented the DVR for a reason,” she said. “Sit down and respect the process.”

  Max appeared to be wrestling with something, perhaps a very muscular inner demon, and then plonked back down. Brooke mentally patted herself on the back. She knew she had a way of making it hard for people to wriggle out of things. She’d inherited it from Brick. It was how she kept managing to wrangle Molly into driving her places (at last count, Brooke had flunked her written driver’s test six times, although it wasn’t her fault—that stupid rectangular manual was ergonomically nightmarish to read).

  “My shoes?” she prompted.

  “They look like you left your feet outside a Siberian tree farm for three weeks.”

  Wrong, but at least it was creative. Brooke silently ticked the box on her form that read Pithy Turn of Phrase. “Favorite outfit of mine?”

  “Are you ser—”

  “Respect the process.”

  “I like whatever it is you’re wearing when I’m not around you.”

  Brooke nodded and made another mark, this time next to Sass Factor. The waitress slammed Max’s chocolate malt onto the table.

  “Interesting,” Arugula murmured, reaching over to check a box with a flourish. This one read Can I Sneak Fattening Snacks?

  “You Tyra Banks?” the waitress asked, flicking her thumb at Arugula’s head.

  “Yes,” Arugula deadpanned. “Top Model auditions are in two days at 4100 Bar in Silver Lake. Seven AM sharp. Bring your bikini waxer.”

  The waitress skipped away, looking exponentially more cheerful.

  “You sent her to Silver Lake?” Brooke whispered. “There are hipsters there.”

  “It will be character-building,” Ari said primly. “Now, Max, who is your celebrity role model?”

  “Brooke Berlin.”

  Arugula’s lip twitched. “Present company excluded.”

  “Courtney Love, obviously.”

  “Style motto?” Brooke asked.

  “ ‘I shop to avoid nudity.’ ”

  “How noble,” Arugula muttered.

  “Best American Idol winner?”

  “Duh, Kelly Clarkson. I can’t even joke about that,” Max said.

  “How many of Daddy’s four Dirk Venom movies have you seen?” Brooke continued.

  “Three,” Max replied. “I skipped the second one because I don’t believe in Kate Hudson.”

  Brooke looked up, surprised. “That’s actually my ideal correct answer.”

  “Some truths are too powerful to ignore.”

  Brooke regarded Max curiously. “Let me just confer with my associate for a minute.” She turned to Arugula. “So what do you think?”

  “Well, she dresses like one of the orphans in Annie.”

  “Mmm. And she eats dairy.”

  “And I think her hairdresser also did my parents’ hedge maze.”

  From across the table, Max cleared her throat exaggeratedly. “I’m right here.”

  Brooke looked at her. “Yes, you are. Tell me, why is that?”

  “Me? Why are you here?” Max countered. “If you were really an It Girl, wouldn’t you already have, like, people?”

  “I am an It Girl. Unfortunately, the world just doesn’t know it yet,” Brooke hedged. “You saw me in the play last fall. I was a triumph. The Los Angeles Times wrote, ‘Brooke Berlin is on!’ ”

  Max frowned. “They were just listing the play in the events calendar. The rest of that sentence was, like, ‘Brooke Berlin is onstage at Colby-Randall Preparatory School’s nonmusical fall production of My Fair Lady,’ or something.”

  “Details,” Brooke said, waving an immaculately manicured hand. It was a favorite sentiment of hers. “The point is, my star is on the rise.”

  “My mother is sending Brooke’s headshots around town,” Arugula added.

  “I’m sure that has nothing to do with her also being Brick’s agent,” Max cracked.

  “There are two kinds of actors in this town,” Ari said. “Nepotists and the unemployed.”

  “But I want to get the parts on my own,” Brooke insisted. “So I need something that makes me stand out from all the other boring nepotists. Why not let people get to know me online? All the celebrities these days are pouring out their hearts on the Internet. Just look at what it’s done for Kanye.”

  “I did spend a week wondering whether he ever got that cherub rug,” Max admitted.

  Brooke made a check mark next to the box reading Comprehends the Magnitude of Celebrity Social Media Interaction vis-à-vis the Minutiae of Everyday Life. (Arugula had written that one.) “Exactly,” she said. “If I play this right, in a month, it could be my cherub rug people are worried about.”

  “I’m sure some lobotomized fan will find this job very fulfilling.”

  “That lobotomized fan could be you!” Brooke pointed out, waggling her pen in the direction of Max’s face. “But you never told me why you applied.”

  Max gritted her teeth. “Because my job at Fu’d is making me consider taking my own life by diving into the tofu liquefier, but I still need cash for… stuff.”

  Arugula stared at Max intently. “It’s not drugs, is it? I’ve always thought Teddy had a tweaker look about him.”

  “Was that before or after he rejected you?”

  “Seriously, why do you need the money?” Brooke said, holding up a silencing hand to the side of Arugula’s outraged-looking face. Her need for dish outweighed her need to defend Ari’s honor. Plus, it was after he rejected her. “This job pays very well. Not that it’s yours. I’m just saying.”

  Max was quiet again, staring at the countertop and tracing invisible things with her finger. Just in case, Brooke checked to make sure they weren’t satanic symbols. One never knew. Being under the sway of Dark Forces might explain why Max had done that to her hair.

  “I want to go to NYU’s summer writing program,” Max eventually admitted. “But it’s really expensive.”

  “So it’s true that you actually want to be a writer,” Brooke said thoughtfully.

  “Yeah, a writer. Not a tweeter.”

  “This is a writing job,” Brooke said. “If it were tweeting, I’d have called it tweetographer. Brooke Berlin’s essence is bigger than a hundred and forty characters, so I’m going old-school. I need someone to expose what a witty, enlightened asset to humanity I am, by writing blog entries as if they’re me.”

  “You don’t see the contradiction in that statement?”

  “The entries will all be rooted in fact,” Arugula said. “Brooke simply won’t have the time. She’ll be too busy going to auditions and assiduously maintaining her public persona.”

  “Also, I don’t like to type,” Brooke confided. “I inherited my mother’s groundbreaking modeling hands, and everyone knows typing warps them.”

  “So, you already have an assistant. Dictate them to Martha.”

  “Her name is Brie now,” Brooke scolded. “People are so callous not to respect that.”

  “Aga
in with the contradictions,” Max muttered into her malt. Brooke winced; every sip was, like, fifty crunches. “Can’t Brie do this?”

  Brooke shook her head. “She’s terrible at keeping secrets. Last Thanksgiving, as a test, I asked her what she was getting me for Christmas and she actually told me. I need someone who will be anonymous.”

  “Well, good luck with that,” said Max. “I’m sure pathetic minions are a dime a dozen in this town.”

  But her tone lacked its usual bite. Brooke tapped her pen on her clipboard a few times, deep in thought. She hadn’t expected honesty from Max, who was now sitting there looking a little bit nauseated and—was she imagining it?—kind of bummed. Maybe the little troll doll needed this more than Brooke realized.

  “I know we’re not exactly friends, but if Molly likes you there must be something redeeming about you,” Brooke allowed. “And you do share my controversial stance on Kate Hudson.”

  “Thanks…?”

  “Look, I know what you think of me,” Brooke said. “And if I were you, I might think it, too. But there’s a lot riding on this for me. I’m taking it very seriously. Maybe you should consider doing the same.”

  Brooke slid out of the booth, ripped off a piece of paper from her clipboard, and scribbled the job’s very generous salary on it. She handed it to Max. “That’s my cell number, and that is the amount I’m willing to pay my blogographer. If you decide you’re interested, and if the dozens of other applicants fail the Hudson test, maybe we can work something out.”

  Max took the paper and gazed at it, mutely. Ari reached around Brooke and slid a five-dollar bill onto the table.

  “For the milk shake,” she said. “Not drugs.”

  Max’s face was full of contempt. “Right, like I would do drugs that cheap,” she breezed, standing up and leaving the bill on the table for the waitress. She made a big show of dropping Brooke’s piece of paper in the trash on her way out.

  Well, I tried, Brooke thought, watching Max leave. Then she quickly snatched the paper out of the bin before any potential stalkers could do it. An It Girl had to be vigilant.

  Max left the diner worrying that it was only a matter of time before Brooke told the whole school that tacky, tragic misfit Max McCormack had feelings and aspirations and was so pathetic that she was answering ads on craigslist. Brooke was the queen bee. And in Max’s experience, stinging people was what queen bees did. She therefore avoided Brooke like the plague for the rest of the week, even attempting to feign the plague to get out of a carnival planning meeting.

  But as the week passed and Brooke said nothing about her at all, the job snuck back into the forefront of Max’s mind. When she saw the salary, she’d barely kept her eyes from vacating her skull. That amount made no sense. For a second Max thought it was still part of Brooke’s phone number. Like an extension. A really, really long extension. But no, it seemed that Brooke Berlin was in fact nutty enough—or rich enough; probably both—to pay someone handily to pretend to be her. NYU might be a reality.

  Why did it have to be Brooke Berlin? Why couldn’t it have been someone totally removed from her school life? Why hadn’t it been Dakota Fanning? And why had her subconscious decided that being some girl’s ghost-blogger sounded kind of fun, in the exact instant the job became so obviously untenable? It was an awfully rotten joke for her brain to play on her.

  Max was still bummed when she showed up for her double shift Saturday morning and saw that the line outside Fu’d—which wasn’t even open yet—wrapped around the building, despite the brisk early March air. Max had to claw her way to the door past two teens who screamed that she was cheating, and one fortysomething mom who was weeping onto a sign that said GIVE PIECE A CHANCE.

  Max slammed the door behind her and pressed her body against it to keep it closed while she flipped the lock. An apron promptly smacked her in the head. “What the hell?”

  “Hurry, put that on,” Pete whispered, tugging nervously on one of the three earrings in his right lobe. “He’s been on a rampage.”

  “What’s the line for?” Max hissed back.

  “Didn’t you get the e-mail?” asked Pete, helping her tie the apron. “He got Dime Piece to do a signing today.”

  Dime Piece was a ten-year-old cross between Lil’ Wayne and Eminem who made headlines by announcing he was going to rob a bank when his album dropped and then, unbelievably, actually attempting to do it.

  “I thought he was in juvenile hall,” Max said.

  “His lawyer got him off,” Dennis said, by way of announcing his arrival. “A legal masterstroke. Now he’s decided to embrace the meatless life, at least for today, and for a reasonable appearance fee.” He reached over and flicked Max’s left ear with his finger, hard. “Don’t think I didn’t notice you were late.”

  “My shift doesn’t even start for another five minutes,” Max protested, clasping a hand to her stinging lobe. This gig was getting more Dickensian by the minute.

  “I prefer you here fifteen minutes beforehand, which makes you ten minutes late,” Dennis said smugly. “And that means you mop the bathrooms. Congratulations. I hope your tardiness was worth it. Now, doors open in four minutes. Be fast, be polite, and push the veganami.”

  The first five hours of Max’s shift passed in a blur of shrieking, sobbing, and sweat. Dime Piece turned out to be a garden-variety brat who just wanted to trip up all the servers, ordered his bottled water decanted into an empty Sprite can before being poured over ice in a glass, and actually tried to tie Max’s shoelaces together while she was taking orders from the thirteen adults in his posse, whose chief concern was encouraging his repellent behavior. Fans alternately mobbed him and the counter; by the time Dime signed his last CD and left, half the chairs in the place were upturned, Fu’d was out of veganami, and the cops had come to escort away a grown woman who slapped a nine-year-old girl she thought had cut in line.

  Unbelievably, it went downhill from there: On their break, Dennis made them all learn how to brew a protein shake that had the texture of cake frosting and the taste of chicken teriyaki, which Max knew would lead to her bingeing on a giant Chipotle burrito full of revenge meat on her way home. And then, before she could even retie the kerchief keeping her sweaty, matted green hair off her face, Max had to work the afternoon rush, which was predictably full of people she didn’t want to see.

  “Kermit, you look like a wet lawn,” Chaz Kelly boomed. “Gimme a bratwurst with sauerkraut and a Dr Pepper.”

  He threw some money at Max’s face before plodding over to a table with his friends.

  “Okay, so what are you going to give him this time?” Jake Donovan asked.

  Max could hear the smile in his voice, but as she lifted her head to return it, she saw him standing next to a stone-faced Jennifer Parker. It was all Max could do not to groan in her face.

  “Notwurst with toham shavings and a Colon-Eze Tea latte,” she said instead. “You should probably stop coming here with him. It’s only going to get worse.”

  “Good advice. I’ll take one of those notwursts, though, but just with ketchup.”

  “No, Jake, they’re too greasy,” Jennifer said, shoving in front of him.

  Jake looked annoyed. “I can order what I want, Jen.”

  “Not if you enjoy my company,” she said.

  Jake seemed right on the verge of giving the sarcastic answer Max had already formulated for him in her head, but instead he just muttered, “Fine.” Max watched him slink to a table next to Chaz and fish his phone out of his pocket. This Twitter fight would be epic.

  “Um, hello, I’m still here,” Jennifer said, snapping her fingers in front of Max’s eyes. “Get him a baked sweet potato, and give me a fakon-lettuce-tomato sandwich on wheat, minus the wheat, hold the fakon, and absolutely no tofunnaise because I’ve got a really important audition in an hour and that stuff makes people’s breath smell like cardboard.”

  Max ignored that. “So basically you want a piece of lettuce and a slice of tomato on a
plate? Maybe just order a salad.”

  Jennifer narrowed her eyes. “Jake only talks to you because he feels sorry for you, you know. We all do. Because you’re so…” Jen cast her eyes up and down Max. “You know.”

  Max drummed her fingers on the counter and tried to keep calm. “Will that be all, Jennifer?” she asked. “That’s nineteen dollars and sixty-eight cents. It’s ‘Buy Two, Get One Public Emasculation of Your Boyfriend Free’ day.”

  Jennifer handed her some cash with a sneer. “No tip for you, Kermit,” she said.

  “I have one for you, though,” Max said. “Don’t blame the tofunnaise for your breath.”

  Jennifer turned purple. “I want to speak to the manager!”

  Dennis burst out of the kitchen, ready for battle. Jennifer started yelping about Max’s insubordination, and the whole room seemed to slow down as Dennis alternated between trying to appease Jen and yelling at Max, jabbing his finger violently in the vicinity of her nose.

  “… and you will apologize to this lovely young customer, and then I swear to God, McCormack, you will spend the rest of the day regrouting the urinals,” Dennis was ranting. “And you won’t be getting paid a cent.”

  Something inside Max snapped. She gazed at Jennifer’s smug face, then back at Dennis’s frothing visage, and broke into a beatific smile.

  “That’s illegal, Dennis, you sycophantic slime,” Max said.

  This stunned Dennis into silence.

  “And another thing,” Max continued. “You can take this job and shove it up your tofunnator. I’ll expect my last paycheck in the mail, or else I will report to the food safety inspectors that you only clean your liquefiers once every two weeks.”

  Max ripped her apron off, balled it up, and threw it square at Dennis’s face before sailing out the door to a round of applause from half the restaurant. As she unlocked her canary Chevy, she dug out her cell phone. If her dignity had to have a price, it might as well be a high one.

  “Molly?” she said when her friend answered. “Is Brooke with you? I need to talk to her about something.”

  five