Messy

by Cocks, Heather

  Max stopped by the door and pretended to look for something in her bag. She stole a peek. Brady had vanished. I told him to leave me alone. What did I expect? But her heart sank anyway, and a tear squeaked out of her left eye.

  See? she told herself. Beginnings aren’t worth it.

  Her hand closed on her printed NYU essay, clipped to her application. Max pulled it out and gave one last glance up to the set. Everyone had swarmed Brooke like worker bees to their monarch, with Max just a faint memory, an unpleasant speed bump on the road to the festival circuit. A tear slipped down Max’s cheek, and then another. They left ugly splashes on the printed pages in her hand. What had she been thinking? She couldn’t turn the essay in, certainly not now. So much for being herself. Abruptly Max crumpled up the application, dropped it in the trash, and left, swatting at her streaming eyes with the sleeve of her hoodie.

  Brooke wriggled so that her nose was no longer buried in her father’s armpit. She was trying to piece together what had just happened, and if she wasn’t mistaken, it went like this: She had been stinking up the joint on set, and then Max appeared out of nowhere and said exactly the right thing to get everyone to stop giving Brooke a hard time and start trying to cuddle her into mental wellness. Ergo, just as Brooke was about to be hoisted on her own petard, Max had thrown herself onto it.

  She felt a swell of joy. Max had saved her. It was the perfect white lie—nobody got hurt.

  Except for Max.

  This all reminded Brooke very keenly of what had gone down last fall, when Brooke’s inadvertent betrayal of Molly had been revealed right before the curtain went up on the opening night of My Fair Lady. Brooke had a visceral memory of being paralyzed by deciding between running after her sister to set things right or going onstage and claiming Brick’s long-sought undivided attention. A timely shove from Jennifer Parker had made the choice for her, but Brooke had kept on making it, over and over, with every subsequent entrance and exit. She’d picked fame over family, and when it was all said and done, she had felt rotten about it. She couldn’t make that mistake again. Could she?

  She’s not Molly, her inner voice argued. It’s not the same thing.

  Shifting until she found a small pocket of air to use as a window, Brooke saw Max running away from a distraught-looking Brady. Something else was nagging at her. Where had Max come from, and why? What had she known? It felt like a giant piece of this puzzle was still missing, which was only okay on Lust for Life, where that piece was Pip’s now unrecapitated head.

  “Well I don’t know about you guys but I feel about a thousand times better,” said Tad, popping two Red Bull cans in one hand. “After this week I was starting to think maybe y’all were drunk when you cast this one.”

  “We were all wondering what the f’ we were thinking,” Kyle agreed. “Okay, so, we have an f’load to do here. Tad, figure out when we can redo those scenes Brooke totally f’ing blew the other day. Elena can jigger the schedule so Brooke gets a little time to rest up, take a break from the blog, get some sleep. F’ing rejuvenate, girl.”

  “Have Elena cancel the casting session, too,” Zander added. “Man, this is going to be so much cheaper than redoing everything with a different girl.”

  “Right?” Kyle crowed. “Thank f’ing god!”

  Rewind. A different girl?

  Brooke looked up and searched Brick’s face. But she couldn’t find any trace of anything except… well, there it was: relief.

  “Daddy,” she whispered, “were they going to fire me?”

  Brick looked down at her fondly. “It is a moot point, Sunshine. The truth is out there now. Let’s cheat on our diets and get some ice cream on the way home.”

  Brooke slowly pulled away from her father. Not even illicit dairy could distract her. “Just like that? They weren’t even going to talk to me about it?”

  “Well, Sunshine…” Brick looked uncomfortable.

  Suddenly Brooke wanted to cry so badly, it felt like her whole face was going to implode. She gazed around at the set and saw people celebrating, essentially, that she was not secretly a worthless waste of space. People who, somehow, thought her blog represented the sum of who she was, which—unbeknownst to them—meant that they actually thought the real Brooke Berlin truly was worthless. And that felt rotten. It was not okay for them to think it about her, and it was doubly not okay to sit back and let them think it about Max.

  “If I could interrupt your revelry for a second,” Brooke said coldly. “This won’t take long.”

  Kyle paused in the midst of high-fiving one of the gaffers. Zander put down his iPad, and Tad almost spat out the mouthful of energy drink he’d been chugging.

  “Brookie, I don’t think—” Brick began.

  “Don’t worry, Daddy, I know what I’m doing,” she said, steeling herself as much as she could so that her voice didn’t tremble. “It’s just that I’m watching you all basically celebrate that I was simply burned out, and not a total dumbass, and I’d like to address a couple points about that.”

  “Oh, um, okay,” Kyle said, caught off guard. “Sure.”

  “Point one is that you apparently were never going to sit down with me and ask what was wrong,” Brooke said, tossing back her hair in what she hoped was a supremely confident gesture. “Frankly, it is inhumane to just fire your lead actress without talking to her about what might be going on in her life. You’re supposed to have my back, but instead you were going to sweep me under the rug and pretend I never happened. I am disgusted.”

  That felt good—even better when she saw Zander’s eyes bug out so hard they nearly popped the lenses out of his thick-framed glasses. Everyone was hooked on her every word. It was glorious. So glorious. Like My Fair Lady all over again, except no pressure to fake an accent.

  “Point two is that you are placing an insane amount of importance on this blog,” she continued, starting to pace as she warmed up to her speech. “If I’m not mistaken, you hired me to act, not write. If you wanted a glorified typist to play Nancy, you could’ve hired someone from a temp pool for a lot cheaper.”

  “This is seriously ballsy,” Kyle said under his breath.

  Brooke inhaled deeply and surveyed the room. As she processed the group’s rapt, shocked faces, she realized anew that she didn’t want to be associated with any of these people if they thought Brooke Berlin, the real Brooke Berlin, was so freaking inferior.

  “Point three, pursuant to point two, is that you’re assuming that if I can’t write a blog, I can’t act,” she concluded. “And yet, I’ve been acting since before the blog existed, I auditioned for you when it barely existed, and I’ve been awesome for most of this shoot and, in fact, my whole life. All despite the fact that I never wrote a word of that blog myself.”

  Everyone gasped like they were in a courtroom scene on Lust for Life. Max would’ve loved it, a fact that made Brooke miss her a little bit. But she didn’t dwell on it, because her audience was still hungry. And Brooke knew exactly what to feed them.

  “That’s right,” she said triumphantly. “Max didn’t write the recent entries. She wrote the other ones—the ones you were drooling over, the ones you said made me seem so unexpectedly smart.” She poured a little extra venom into her voice for that one, and it worked. Everyone, including Brick, winced. Brooke felt more in her element than she had in weeks.

  Now, a little humble pie…

  “Max was using her talents to be an incredible friend. Then she took a bullet for me today, and I owe her for that. But I couldn’t let her leave you thinking she’s less than she is. It’s not right.” Brooke dropped her gaze to the floor. “When Max and I had a falling out, the blog was one ball too many for me to juggle, and in the end I dropped them all.”

  Brick’s expression was one of pride. Of course. Because that sounded just like him.

  Zander leaned against a desk, ostensibly wobbly at the knees. Tad was doing that dumb director thing where he held up his hands to frame her face. Carla Callahan, that suck
-up, looked gobsmacked. Suddenly, Brooke wondered why she hadn’t done this sooner. It felt really good to be honest, finally—mostly about Max, after she’d watched Max lie for her like that, but also because for the first time in a while Brooke had this room in the palm of her hand. And there was nothing she loved more than an audience.

  “I admit, it was a deception, and I’m sorry for that. But the popularity of the lie took over my life,” Brooke said softly, sensing it was time to take things down a notch. She allowed her eyes to moisten. “You all were so shocked that someone like me could have something worthwhile to say. It made me feel like the real Brooke Berlin had nothing to offer. That I was… expendable. And apparently, I was.”

  She let out a calculatedly shaky breath and wiped the deliciously punctual tear that trickled out of her eye. “But one thing I am not is worthless,” Brooke insisted, strengthening her tone. “And I only struggled when I tried to become someone else, to please masters who, as it turned out, never had faith in me to begin with.”

  One of the makeup ladies let out a sob. Brooke took a moment to bless the gods of genetics for giving her Brick’s penchant for melodrama, and for having a best friend like Arugula who handed out multisyllabic words like breath mints.

  “If you want to fire me, that’s your prerogative,” she finished. “But you cast me because I can act, not because I can blog. Some of us are lyrical on paper, and others, like me, deal in the power of emotive speech. And your pro-prose bias punishes those of us who still believe that the ability to move others by baring our feelings without hiding behind a computer is our most powerful tool as a people. If you judge me for being more gifted at that than I am at typing, then I am not your Nancy Drew, and I never was.”

  Brooke realized she had, unconsciously, moved to the center of the room and was all but raising her fist aloft, as if calling her comrades to arms. If she’d had the national anthem on her iPhone, she’d have cued it up right then and there.

  Instead, silence.

  “Well, I feel like an f’ing f’head,” Kyle eventually said.

  “That was better than half of what’s in the script,” Tad mused. “That is my Nancy.”

  “Stirring!” Brick clapped. “A tour de force!”

  “You got me, Brooke,” Zander said apologetically. “I don’t like being lied to, but, yeah. We could have handled this better. And you’re right. You were our pick, and you earned it in your audition, not on the Internet.” He ran a hand through his hair, which fluffed it out to John Mayer levels. “We’re gonna get you those days off, and then we’ll all come back in here and shoot this week’s stuff over again. Fresh start.”

  He hopped off the desk and walked over to Brooke to extend his hand. Brooke took a second to collect herself—her roiling emotions, most of them jubilant, were somewhat at war with the ones she had just unleashed on the room—and then shook it firmly.

  “I will not let you down,” she said.

  Brick let out a shout of glee and hugged her and Zander, bemusing the latter so thoroughly that his glasses actually dropped to the ground.

  “Oh, and, uh, Brooke,” Zander said through Brick’s biceps. “Listen, you don’t have to, but if you want to have Max… I mean, she could keep… if you want.”

  Brooke was tempted. Continuing as they had begun, with the rest of the world none the wiser, seemed like the easiest Band-Aid. But then she thought of the toll the situation had taken on Max, and of all the people on that set who knew the truth. Lies were like zits: They always exploded eventually, and concealer never worked.

  “No,” Brooke said. “Fresh start, right? If I keep blogging, it’ll be me doing me. But better. No pressure to copy the way it used to be.”

  Zander nodded. “Fair enough,” he said. “God, I really need a latte right now. With a shot of whiskey in it.”

  Brick clapped him on the back. “I’m buying,” he said. But first, he turned to Brooke and placed his hands on her shoulders. “Sunshine, I’m proud of you for being honest. You didn’t have to be, but you did the right thing. And that, to me, says more about your heart and soul and mind than any blog ever could.”

  Brick stretched and slung an arm around Zander’s bony shoulders. “Zander, buddy, we need to talk about your deltoids,” he said. “Have you ever used a climbing wall?”

  As Brick launched into a sales pitch for his Berlin Wall idea to a nonplussed Zander, Brooke sat down in one of the cold metal chairs on the police-station set. The crew killed the lights and everyone dispersed, some stopping to squeeze Brooke’s arm supportively, others merely whispering to one another about the brouhaha. Brooke tried to stay cheerful, but she shivered. Maybe people hadn’t liked that entry, but it was accurate. It was always freezing once the spotlights went off—a metaphor if Brooke had ever heard one. She’d have to remember that one for her blog. Her new, real blog.

  A lean shadow fell across her feet. Brooke knew who it was without looking.

  “Hi, Brady,” she said.

  “Hi,” he said, dropping into the chair opposite her. “So, that happened.”

  “It did,” Brooke said, forcing herself to make eye contact with him. “And so did a lot of other stuff, which I guess we should talk about.”

  “Probably,” he said. “Come on, let’s bust out of here and get some In-N-Out. We’ve earned it today, and also, I just found out I can order my fries animal-style, which blew my mind. You in?”

  Brooke let out a happy sigh. “Yes, please,” she said, taking his outstretched hand as he helped her out of her seat. His was warm, which, weirdly, made her shiver again.

  “It’s going to be okay, Brooke,” he said, interpreting her tremor as jitters.

  Looking into his kind eyes, which were refreshingly devoid of judgment or disappointment, Brooke felt hope rise up in her chest like a balloon. Maybe none of this mattered to him. Maybe Brady had seen enough of the real Brooke that he didn’t care how much of the other stuff was true. Maybe her fresh start could be with everyone.

  twenty-five

  THE MORNING DAWNED unbearably stuffy in Max’s room, which had not contained fresh air since she’d stormed home from the studio Wednesday night.

  “Eileen, I told you, I used the immersion blender to fix the sprinklers!” her dad boomed somewhere in the vicinity of the kitchen.

  Max cracked an eye.

  “I thought that was the SaladShooter!” her mother replied, exasperated.

  Max’s open eye rolled.

  “No, that went toward trying to make a new immersion blender,” her father said, sounding as though he were trying to explain math to a fifth grader.

  What day is it, even? Max wondered. It felt like two weeks had passed, but her phone said it was the first Saturday of May, so it had really only been three days since she’d bolted from the set of Nancy Drew. She’d driven home that night feeling more upset than she could really explain, even to herself. At the studio, the decision not to apply to NYU had felt right: Max was sick of caring about things that were obviously beyond her reach. But in the car that night she’d been unable to convince her tear ducts of that.

  Luckily, no one had been home when she arrived. So Max took her red, splotchy face to bed, and then begged off school the next day, claiming cramps and a demi-migraine. Her mother had just eyeballed her for a moment and then nodded, which is how Max knew she must have looked as miserable as she felt.

  And then she had mostly just… lain there and tried not to think about anything. One day stretched into two, and now into this morning. She slept occasionally, she stared at the wall, she stared at a different wall, she counted cracks in the ceiling. She was beginning to understand how people became shut-ins. It was so much easier than dealing with other people, and all their feelings and reactions. Molly had called her five times, and Teddy twice (even though he lived upstairs). Even Brooke phoned, and Jake texted, but Max ignored them all. She didn’t feel up to talking to anyone. She barely felt like talking to herself.

  There was a k
nock at the door. “Are you alive?” Teddy called.

  “Debatable,” Max muttered.

  “Can I come in?”

  Max ignored him. Teddy pushed her door open with his guitar case and stuck a concerned head into the room. He sniffed the air.

  “Debatable is right,” he said. “It smells like a corpse in here.”

  “I don’t recall inviting you in,” Max said, trying to pull the sheet over her face. But it got stuck around her stomach.

  “So,” Teddy said, sitting on the corner of her bed and untwisting the sheet. Max promptly burrowed underneath it. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” Max said, the bedding muffling her voice.

  “Liar. I heard what happened on the set.”

  “What happened on the set?”

  Teddy pulled down the corner of the sheet covering her eyes. “That was really solid of you to do that for Brooke. Most people would’ve let her fry.”

  “Where’d you hear this?” Max asked, trying to sound disinterested.

  “I guess you’ve been watching your wallpaper curl for so long you forgot that I have an in at the Berlin household.”

  “Oh, right,” Max said. “Well, hooray. A happy ending.”

  “Except for you, apparently.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I gathered that. This is taking antisocial to new levels, even for you.”

  “What do you want, Teddy?”

  He looked thoughtful for a moment, then shook his head as if trying to knock an impulse out of it. “Should we carpool to the carnival?” he asked instead.

  “Can’t you tell everyone I have Brain Fever and can’t come?”

  “Sure,” Teddy said, “but I don’t think Mom’s tolerance of your fake illness will extend much further.” He nodded at the floor, where Max noticed for the first time that he’d laid down his guitar case. “And you’ll miss the big Mental Hygienist show.”