Messy

by Cocks, Heather

  Max felt a crackle in her veins. She envied these people. It made her want to go home and type something. Even if that something sucked. It couldn’t be any worse than featuring a lactose-intolerant Nancy Drew—like, who wanted a subplot about a teen sleuth’s intestinal drama? That would be like giving Dirk Venom a sinus infection in the long-rumored sequel Dirk Venom: V Is for Five.

  “Wow,” Brady breathed, backing out into the stairwell. “I’m… kind of nervous.”

  “Really? You?”

  “Yeah, I mean, I always wanted to be a behind-the-scenes guy,” he said, pointing to his laptop. “I snuck on the lot three hours early so I could work on my script at the commissary, because I always get good ideas from the extras milling around.” He glanced queasily at the office door. “I’ve never done something like this. Usually I just show up in the middle of a shoot and say two lines and then go home to my Easy Mac.”

  “Well, the good news is you can probably afford spaghetti now,” Max said. “Maybe even some sauce.”

  “Let’s not get crazy,” Brady said, taking off his glasses and nervously cleaning the lenses on his shirttails. “This is just big. And suddenly it feels big. Is it too late to blow this off and take up farming instead?”

  “Relax. They hired you. They know what they were looking for,” Max told him. “And when you become so famous that you can’t leave the house without putting on dude-makeup, you can dry your tears with hundred-dollar bills. Now man up.”

  Brady blinked. “You’re good,” he said.

  Max dragged him back into the production office and scanned the room for Brooke, who was in the middle of a circle of people, Carla Callahan among them. Brooke waved, then cocked an eyebrow at the sight of Brady and Max together and excused herself, making a beeline for them. Carla seemed surprised and slightly off-kilter, as if she’d been sure Brady was lying.

  “I hope you brought a notebook,” Brooke said cheerfully. “I need—” She caught herself, flicking her eyes over at Brady. “Um, I mean, Daddy needs you here as his proxy to take notes.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Max said, opening her bag and digging through it, trying to hide the fact that she was carrying a copy of The Awakening, a giant biography of Truman Capote, and In Touch magazine’s issue devoted to all the reasons Brad and Angelina were going to break up this week. Max felt like the contents of a girl’s bag were as private as the contents of her bra. More so, maybe, because at least all boobs were variations on a theme.

  Brady didn’t miss a thing. “Just a little light reading?”

  Max didn’t like admitting to people what a bookworm she really was. It gave them ammo. “Um, you know, school stuff,” she lied. “Brooke and I run… uh, a book club.”

  Brooke cleared her throat loudly, looking expectantly back and forth between Max and Brady.

  “Oh, sorry, Brooke,” Max said. “This is Brady. He’s your boyfriend.” Wait, that didn’t come out right. “I mean, your fake boyfriend. He’s Ned Nickerson.”

  Why are you so lame in public? Max scolded herself.

  Brooke glanced down at Brady, bemused.

  “Yeah, I’m short, but that’s why God invented apple crates,” he said.

  “Either God or Ben Stiller,” Max quipped. “Where are all the tall actors, anyway?”

  “Tall guys have too much self-esteem to become actors,” Brady said, with faux-seriousness. “You need self-loathing to vacate your own life so often. Look at Rob Pattinson. He seems miserable most of the time.”

  After a beat, Brooke gave him a warm smile. “Self-loathing. You’re funny,” she said, shaking his hand between both of hers.

  “Thanks. Your blog cracks me up,” Brady said. “It’s much more satisfying than those celebrity Twitters that are all, like, barely concealed ads for weird weight-loss pills.”

  “Thank you, Brody,” Brooke said.

  Max bit back a correction.

  “It makes sense that you’re a big reader,” Brady said to Brooke, nodding at the books Max was stuffing back into her purse. “That Catcher in the Rye comment was great. What other Salinger have you read?”

  Brooke blinked. “Well, you know,” she hedged, “is there any other Salinger, really?”

  Max held her breath. But Brady just laughed. “True,” he said. “It was never quite the same with his other stuff.”

  Phew. Maybe this would work yet.

  “Well, I’d better go in and say hi before they start this thing,” Brady said. “Awesome to meet you, Brooke, and awesome to see you, Max.”

  “Sure thing. And thanks for rescuing me back there,” she said. “Enjoy your big-boy pasta.”

  Brady gave her a thumbs-up right before he got swarmed by people. They all took turns thumping him on the back and shaking his hand. Brady looked cutely bewildered by all the attention. Max guessed he was about eighteen, maybe nineteen, but he looked like a little kid on a playground for the first time. Complete with dimples. Deep ones.

  “Well, well, well,” Brooke said, a grin playing at her lips. “Somebody has a crush.”

  “What?” Max asked, snapping back to attention. “Who?”

  “Oh, Maxine,” Brooke said. “You are adorable.”

  “What?” Max protested.

  “Big-boy pasta?”

  “It was a joke from before, when—”

  “ ‘Thanks for rescuing me’?” Brooke quoted in an exaggerated femme fatale voice.

  “I did not—”

  “And he loves the blog.”

  “That’s right. Your blog,” Max said, feeling her neck get hot. “He thinks you are really smart and funny. Maybe you should have a crush on him.”

  “Please. He wears glasses, and he’s, like, two feet shorter than me.” Brooke shuddered. “Plus, I could never date another actor. They are way too self-involved. They always want the last word, and that totally flies in the face of all my best-planned exit lines.” She smirked. “He’s all yours.”

  For some reason Max felt itchy. “In case you haven’t forgotten, I’m already married to my own sense of superiority.”

  Brooke snickered. Then she fell silent for a second. Max watched her as she gazed around the office, transfixed, as if she were already writing her memoir and didn’t want to miss a single detail.

  “I told you they hired me because they liked my point of view,” she said softly. “And I know they think my blog is good PR for the movie. But just now, one of the writers told me that the fact that I’m smart gives my Nancy real credibility.” Brooke cast a sidelong glance at Max. “They actually used the word geek-chic just now.”

  “I’m the geek and you’re the chic,” Max said. “That would be the tagline for our romantic comedy.”

  Brooke laughed again, and then let out a happy little sigh. “Daddy is making time to come to the set to watch some of the shooting,” she said. “He told me last night that he wants to invest in my future.” There was awe in her voice. Impulsively, she threw out an arm and squeezed Max around the shoulders. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Oh, uh… sure,” Max said, taken aback. She could never read when someone was going to have a moment with her, and it made her feel like she wasn’t holding up her end of the emotional bargain.

  “Brooke!” said one of the executive producers, walking over and extending his hand. Despite the fact that he was easily in his midthirties, he was wearing a size-too-small T-shirt for Hall & Oates, accessorized with a wild thicket of dark hair and glasses with very chunky black frames, almost like Ray-Bans with the lenses popped out—a trend Max believed should have ended before it began.

  “Zander Raymond. We met at the audition,” said the hipster. “Let’s get started. Here, I want you to take this CD. It’s inspired by the script and it’s a bunch of local Silver Lake bands and I really think it’ll help you….”

  As he led Brooke away, Brooke turned back and beckoned Max forward with a shining, joyful smile. Max couldn’t help but return it. She might not be the one in the movie, but she couldn’t h
elp feeling like a piece of the success was hers.

  twelve

  “I SWEAR TO GOD, I will choke you to death with my bare hands,” Max said.

  “I’m not scared of you,” Brooke responded.

  “Wrong,” Max said.

  “What?” Brooke asked, sitting up on the green-and-white striped patio lounger and shooting Max an incredulous look, shading her eyes against the sun glinting off the Beverly Hills Hotel’s swimming pool.

  Max looked down at the chlorine-splattered script in her hands. “The line is, ‘You don’t scare me,’ ” she said. In front of them, two small children wearing floaties were beating each other with large, inflatable pigs.

  Brooke groaned. “Close enough…?” she said, flopping back on the chair, her hands beating a nervous tattoo on her flat, tanned stomach. “What if it turns out that I have some kind of rare learning disability that prevents me from memorizing things?”

  “You learned your lines for My Fair Lady without any problems.”

  Brooke jammed her sunglasses onto her face. “Maybe it’s something that comes on suddenly,” she mumbled. “Like appendicitis.”

  When Brooke had asked Max to run lines with her “by the pool,” Max had assumed she meant the Berlins’ own enormous one. But no, that would be too logical. Brooke had been waiting for her with a beach bag in one hand, the keys to the Lexus in the other, and the ready explanation that in order to play one of the people she needed to be among the people: “Daddy has a cabana permanently reserved for times like these.” Apparently Brooke’s version of “the people” was rich kids, models, and actors lounging poolside at the iconic, exclusive, and very pink hotel.

  “Maybe you just need to go home and take a break. We’ve been at this since breakfast,” Max said. Although, as it turned out, she didn’t particularly want to go home. Being the plus-one of someone who had a permanent poolside hotel cabana wasn’t exactly a hardship, even when that someone was Brooke, who Max suspected would faint in horror at her usual weekend view—namely, the McCormacks’ weed-choked backyard. Every time Max stopped to take in these surroundings, she felt like she was living in a very elaborate chlorine-scented hallucination. If Max stopped moving long enough to take it all in, it felt a lot like she’d taken crazy pills.

  Brooke stood. “What I need is another virgin daiquiri, but Sven is on break. I guess I’ll just go to the pool bar.” She slid on her espadrille wedges and pulled a robin’s-egg blue cover-up over her tiny Missoni bikini. “Do you want another Arnold Palmer?”

  Max eyed the tray table between them, which was littered with the detritus of the afternoon—the cap from a bottle of sunscreen, two lemon wedges, a chewed-on bendy straw, four empty glasses, the top page of Brooke’s Nancy Drew script (which had gotten torn off in Max’s backpack), and the most recent Us Weekly, which had a small piece about Brooke’s casting coup.

  “I think I’m good,” she said.

  “Are you sure? Dehydration is the number one cause of premature aging in women seventeen to twenty-four,” Brooke said.

  “I’ll live on the edge.”

  “Suit yourself,” Brooke said, and walked away toward the bar. Nearly everyone at the pool eyeballed her while pretending to be completely disinterested—exactly what Max and Molly used to do during their morning breakfast/celeb-spotting sessions, except more openly—which was odd considering one of the gawkers looked eerily like Kate Bosworth.

  Guess it’s no surprise that everyone at the Beverly Hills Hotel has read Us Weekly.

  Max was mentally writing her next blog post—something about how everyone in Hollywood spent most of their time pretending they weren’t interested in the very thing they actually found most interesting—when someone sat down on the chaise next to her with a thump.

  “Okay, this is just getting eerie,” Brady Swift said.

  Max jumped. “Whoa. What are you doing here? Um. I mean… hi, Skippy.”

  Brady laughed as he shrugged off a navy blue suit jacket. “Are you sure we’re not secretly stalking each other? Or are you just a regular here? I guess you grew up around these parts, huh.”

  Max became acutely aware that she was wearing a four-year-old one-piece swimsuit and Umbros, as if this were summer camp and not the Beverly Freaking Hills Hotel.

  “Only in a vague geographic sense,” she said, self-consciously crossing her arms over her chest. “I’ve never been here before. Brooke brought me. She, um, likes the people-watching. Keen observer of humanity and all that.”

  “Nice work if you can get it,” Brady said, loosening his necktie.

  “I’m not complaining,” Max admitted. “This is way nicer than being home working on my history paper. But seriously, what are you doing here?”

  Brady raked a hand through his spiky black hair. “Valet-parking cars.”

  “Not in that suit.”

  “You’re right. The valets here dress way nicer than I do.” Brady grinned, one half of his mouth twisting up sardonically. “But I think I’d be more at home here if I were on staff. My agent wanted to buy me lunch to celebrate signing my contract. I suggested Swingers diner. He laughed. So here I am. I saw your hair on my way out.” He lowered his voice. “We were at the table next to Jack Nicholson.”

  “I would have spent the whole time trying to eavesdrop.”

  “I did,” Brady said. “He was talking about the Lakers. The entire lunch.” He fished around for some aviator sunglasses in his jacket pocket. “How am I doing, trying to fit in?” he asked, putting them on and giving her some cheesy finger guns. “Do I look like an up-and-coming actor, or do I look like some dumbass whose hideous apartment in Marina del Rey doesn’t have a coffee table or working air-conditioning?”

  Max laughed and relaxed a little, scooting back on her chaise until they were sitting level with each other. “You’re pulling it off,” she said. “Just don’t do an episode of Cribs.”

  One of Brady’s brows cocked itself above the rims of his Ray-Bans. “Funny you should say that. My crazy manager wants Warner Brothers to rent a bungalow for me because the L.A. Times wants to write about actor bachelor pads.” He took off his sunglasses and stared out at the pool. “I know Hollywood has a reputation for being appearance-obsessed, but I had hoped it was an exaggeration.”

  As if on cue, a fiftysomething blonde woman with huge fake breasts sauntered past them.

  “Exhibit A,” Max offered.

  Brady shielded his eyes. “Horrifying,” he said. “How’d you turn out so normal, growing up here?”

  “It helps that my parents aren’t in the business,” she said. “But I still don’t feel that normal.”

  He smiled. “I guess no one really feels normal. I never did, even back in Pittsburgh, where I was, like, terminally normal. Except for how I was That Freckled Eleven-Year-Old in the Life Cereal Ad.” He sighed. “I was actually fourteen. Being short sucks.”

  “No kidding,” Max deadpanned. “Just another apology my parents owe me.” She curled up her legs and hugged them to her chest. “Living here, it sometimes feels like if you’re not constantly trying to sell yourself, nobody thinks you’re worth anything. I always feel like a sore thumb.” She let out a harsh laugh. “A sore thumb on a fist that keeps punching people.”

  He looked sympathetic. “As someone who fell into this business ass-backward, I can say it doesn’t feel much better from this side of things. I’d so much rather chuck it all and go write a book or something. But I kept telling myself I had to put myself through UCLA first, and now…” He gestured at the pool area, which was now pulsing with some trendy deejay’s mash-up of Rihanna’s latest with the German version of that old eighties song about red balloons.

  “I’m doing the same thing,” Max confessed before she even knew what she was doing. “I want to go to NYU this summer for a writing seminar, so I’m on Brooke’s payroll.”

  She paused when he looked surprised. Damn. I said too much.

  Brady looked at her for a long moment, his face inscrut
able.

  “That’s fantastic,” he finally said. “I think you’d be great at that, and Brooke’s a good person to be hanging out with. She wrote something really funny the other day about how Elton John needs more friends his own age.”

  “Yes, right,” Max said, hoping she successfully restrained herself from making a face.

  “It’s cool of her to do that for you,” he said. “You guys must be really good friends.”

  “The best,” Max said through clenched teeth.

  “And it’s great that you have each other,” he said, fiddling with his cuffs. “I kind of miss that. My roommates are just random actors I got paired up with by my agency. We live together out of habit.” He cocked his head as one of the guys in Kate Bosworth’s posse stood up and rubbed Clarins tanner on his left pec. “It’d be nice to have a close friend out here to help keep me from freaking out.”

  “I don’t mean to freak you out more, but that chick over there who looks like Jessica Biel is checking you out,” Max noted, nodding to their left. “Nancy Drew is going to be big.”

  “Nobody cares that much about me, though. It’s not my movie. I’m just… in it.”

  Max looked down at her unpedicured feet, resting on top of a monogrammed Beverly Hills Hotel towel. “I think I know how you feel.”

  Brady tilted his head to the side, regarding her with… with what, exactly?

  “Hey, do you like bad movies?” he asked suddenly.

  “I almost exclusively like bad movies,” Max said. “I watched Wolf Trout on Syfy last weekend twice in a row.”

  “Great, because I haven’t been able to convince anyone to go see The Room with me, and I heard it’s one of L.A.’s most iconic awful movies.”