The Next Best Thing

by Jennifer Weiner

  Ten minutes later, I’d pulled up to the curb in front of The Alcove and relinquished my key fob to the valet, who’d looked me up and down before visibly dismissing me as no one worthy of a greeting, let alone a call to the paparazzi. I bought myself a cup of tea, found a table in the front courtyard shaded by an umbrella, and sat there, sipping and waiting.

  Cady and Justin were late, of course. Just as I was finishing my second mug of milky tea, sweetened with agave (a place like this knew its clientele and offered an array of non-sugar sweeteners), a black SUV rolled up to the valet stand. Justin got out first, dressed, as usual, in dark-rinse jeans and suede sneakers and an ironic T-shirt. Today’s was bright green. I CAN DO ANYTHING! it read, with a trefoil logo and the words GIRL SCOUTS OF AMERICA underneath. The passenger-side door opened and a wraith in high heels eased herself out of the seat and down to the sidewalk. Denim leggings clung to her stick-thin legs. Beneath them were five-inch stilettos, the kind that would turn even a casual stroll into an oversexed, swivel-hipped strut down an invisible runway. The young woman wore a shirt made of fine cotton that clung to her torso, the better for viewers to appreciate every bone of her rib cage. A dozen thin steel bangles chimed and rattled around one wispy forearm, and she wore a straw hat with a red satin band, a hipster’s wink that said, I’m too young and too cool for this hat, but look at me wearing it anyhow!

  The stranger whispered something to Justin, and then came teetering toward me with a smile on her fleshless face. It wasn’t until she’d thrown her arms around me that I realized this starveling ghost-girl was my formerly robust star. I was hugging Cady Stratton.

  I rocked back on my heels. My throat clenched, and I made a strangled sound, my attempt to say, then swallow, the words What the fucking fuck?

  “Hi, Ruth!” she said, and let me go. She smelled like cigarettes, and was so emaciated that I could see veins pulsing on the undersides of her pale wrists.

  “Cady?” I said. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Justin standing off to the side, hands clasped in front of his groin as if he thought I’d try to kick him, with a timid, placating expression on his face. “What happened?”

  She danced away from me and whirled in a circle. “TrimQuick! I’m their new celebrity spokeswoman!” She dropped her tiny bottom into a metal chair—given the lack of padding, it must have hurt—and smiled. “I haven’t been out in, like, forever, because nobody’s supposed to see me until they unveil the new ads. It was like I had the plague or something. I missed three different premieres . . .”

  “Coffee?” asked Justin, that dopey, please-Hammer-don’t-hurt-me grin plastered to his face, his body still hunched in a defensive crouch.

  “Espresso,” Cady rapped. I shook my head. Justin pranced away. Cady leaned forward, the better to regale me with the details of her diet.

  “They sent me this trainer who was, like, completely sadistic. Do you know what a kettlebell is? Anyhow,” she prattled, either ignoring my silence or failing to notice it, “obvs, not everyone who does the program gets a trainer twice a day, so they’ll, like, have to put a disclaimer at the bottom of the ads. ‘Results Not Typical.’ Something like that.” She eyed me. “Hey, you know, I bet I could get you on the program for free.”

  “Cady.” My voice was low, and it must have sounded, if not scary, then arresting enough to get her to quit babbling about resistance bands and the glycemic index. “Why did you . . . what did you . . .” She was staring at me, obviously confused. She’d been expecting compliments, and I was failing to deliver. This constituted an inexplicable glitch in her personal Matrix. “This isn’t going to work.”

  She blinked, with the first hint of a frown marring her smooth brow. “Huh?”

  “The character you’re playing. Daphne. She’s supposed to be . . . you know. A normal-looking girl. A regular girl. An everygirl.” I felt my fingers moving to my cheek, my scars, and made myself rest them in my lap. “That’s why we cast you.”

  “You cast me ’cause I was fat?” Now she wasn’t frowning, she was full-on scowling, her pretty features pretzeled in a sneer. “Wow. Really? Because I thought you hired me because you liked my acting. Because you thought I was funny.”

  “Of course I liked your acting. Of course I think you’re funny. I’ve been a fan of yours for years.” Her expression softened with an actress’s reflexive pleasure at being praised, and I was amazed at myself. I lied as if I’d been living in L.A. for decades. “But this . . .” I waved my hands at her body, or what was left of it. “I don’t know what we’re going to do. We start filming next week, and you can’t . . .”

  “I’m not gaining the weight back.” Cady spoke flatly, in a tone that left no room for compromise. Justin, who’d been approaching with a dainty espresso cup in one hand, veered off sharply to the left, like a pilot who’d just gotten word from air traffic control about an explosion on the runway. Thanks for your help, I thought. “Do you know how long I’ve been the fat chick?” Cady demanded.

  “Oh, come on! You were never fat! You just looked . . .” Normal, I was going to say, but Cady didn’t give me a chance to say it.

  “Do you know how many movies I went out for where they’d say, ‘You need to lose twenty pounds’? Do you know how long I’ve been hearing that?” Her lips trembled. Her eyes filled with tears. It could have been acting, or it might have been actual pain, an up-close look at what happened to a Hollywood dream deferred. “I want to work, you know?”

  My lips were numb as I forced out the words. “You are working. You have work. I gave you a job.”

  She swiped one hand through the air, dismissing the show, my baby, my dream. “That’s nothing. That’s not where it’s at. The real money’s in movies. Endorsement deals. Do you know how much that bitch Kim Kardashian gets to tweet shit about her trainer on Twitter?”

  I shook my head. I was not one of Miss Kardashian’s numerous Twitter followers.

  “Fifty . . . thousand . . . dollars,” Cady said. She crossed her arms over her chest and sat back smugly. “That adds up.”

  “I’m sure it does. And you can do whatever you want with yourself after the show. But for now, for the show, I need you to look the way you did when you were hired,” I said. Even as I spoke in my scolding schoolteacher’s voice, I knew it was impossible. Network executives could move Cady into a Krispy Kreme shop and make her drink lard for dinner, and there’d still be no way she could gain enough weight back in time for the show’s start date . . . and that date, I knew, was nonnegotiable. If we didn’t start filming on time, we wouldn’t wrap on time, we wouldn’t deliver our episodes on time, and we’d have to give up our premiere slot, which had already been announced and published all over the Internet.

  “I don’t see what the big deal is, you know? Whether the character’s a size ten or a . . .” She shot an admiring glance at her diminished hips and thighs. “A zero. She’s still, you know, the same girl.”

  Oh my God. This was bananas. Did she really not understand the problem she’d created? How every single show, every scene we’d pitched, every joke, every line, would have to be rewritten to reflect that Daphne no longer had any reason to be insecure, to doubt her own beauty or her place in the world? And how on earth would we handle the pilot reshoots, the scenes where we’d add in Pete? How could she not see what she’d done? Maybe, I thought, she was in the grip of some weight-loss-induced delusion. Maybe during one of her twice-a-days she’d bonked her head with a kettlebell.

  I stared at her as she sat, arms crossed, glaring, one foot bobbing rapidly up and down, and considered my options. I could wrap her in a blanket—even the towel that I kept in the back of my car for swims would do the trick—pick her up, drive her home, and let Grandma cook for her. I could have her jaws wired open and force-feed her like a foie gras goose. I could tell the network that she’d been kidnapped, or that she needed to go to rehab; I could force them to change our start date . . . but even as I conjured increasingly far-fetched possibilities, I knew they�
�d never happen. Time was money, and I couldn’t waste either one.

  “Cady,” I croaked. My hand was at my cheek again, and I could feel myself blushing. What I was going to try to tell her felt as fundamental to me as explaining why humans needed to keep breathing or sleep at night. “The way you looked when we shot the pilot. It meant something.”

  She stared at me, eyebrows raised. Even her eyebrows were thinner than they’d been when I’d last seen her. I kept on.

  “The world is full of girls who don’t look like”—I groped for a name that would mean something to her—“Blake Lively, girls who never see themselves on television. For those girls, seeing you would mean something. Watching you get the guys, and wear the great clothes, and have the funniest lines, and be the leading lady . . .”

  Cady reached across the table to seize my hand with her skeletal fingers. “I hear you,” she said, sounding like a very young, very thin network executive. “I hear what you’re saying. But the thing is, out here, there’s only one right way to look, and I was never it. I never was, and now I am.”

  Justin took that moment to waltz over to our table with a cheery “Hi-i-i-i!” He set down the espresso as if it were a grenade and eased himself into a seat. I gave him a black look, a glare promising that he and I would be discussing this later, one that implied that he’d had a duty to tell me what was going on, and that he’d dropped the ball. Then I returned my attention to the star of my show.

  “Cady,” I said. I realized that I was using her trick of saying my first name all the time. Maybe it would work. Maybe she’d be flattered enough to actually hear what I was saying. “Cady. This is going to create some problems.”

  She gave me a sullen look from beneath the brim of her hipster hat. “I don’t have any problems. I feel great.” I could practically hear the click as she remembered something she’d probably meant to tell me at the start of our conversation. “You know, I did this for my health.” Bullshit, I thought. Bull-fucking-shit you did this for your health. “Diabetes runs in my family. My doctor told me I was pre-pre-diabetic.” She pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her bag, looked at them wistfully, and then replaced them. Ah yes, I thought, Healthy Living’s new poster girl.

  “We’re going to have to do pilot reshoots,” I said, thinking out loud.

  Justin made his first contribution to the conversation. “Oh? Did you end up recasting Annie Tait?”

  “What?” I asked, startled.

  “Oh, nothing, nothing,” he said, and gave a fluty giggle. “I just heard the network’s not happy with her.”

  “If it’s true, they haven’t told me,” I said, filing that news nugget away for future contemplation. “But now . . . how are we supposed to match shots?” We could put Cady in the same costumes, put her on the same sets, film her with the same cameras underneath the same lights, and of course, she wouldn’t look anything like she had the night we’d shot the pilot.

  “Padding?” Justin suggested.

  Oh, sure, I thought, and gave a hysterical giggle. Pad her. But padding wouldn’t turn her into a big girl any more than concealer could make me a pretty one. Before I could say any of that, Cady turned her evil glare at him.

  “Hello! I don’t think so! I worked too hard to get here. I’m not going to wear a fat suit and pretend I’m that girl again.” She shuddered at the thought of being that girl, the girl she’d been six weeks ago, even as a fake.

  “We’re going to have to do something. Or else it’s going to be a mess,” I said.

  “Let’s just shoot the whole thing again!” Pleased with her solution and, apparently, ignorant as to how much implementing it would cost, Cady ripped open a packet of sugar substitute and tapped it, with ritualistic precision, three times over her espresso cup. I sat back, certain that my mouth was hanging open and that I looked, as Grandma would put it, like a stunned trout. Call the network. I had to call the network. Or, no, maybe I should try the studio first, they’d help me think of a game plan. Or maybe Dave would have some ideas about what to do if your lead actress had completely transformed her appearance. Maybe this had happened on Bunk Eight in the years before I’d arrived, and he’d know exactly how to handle it.

  “Wait a minute,” I blurted. Too loud. The couple cooing over their toddler at the next table stared at us. I lowered my voice. “Isn’t there a clause in your contract about changing your appearance? Didn’t you have to promise not to get tattoos, or dye your hair, or . . .”

  “No clause,” said Cady.

  “We checked,” said Justin.

  Of course, I thought. Why would there be a clause? Cady’s appearance hadn’t changed at all in the years she’d been working. She’d always been bubbly and bouncy and noticeably bigger than the other actresses. She’d talked about it in interviews, laughing about how she was descended from a line of Scandinavian farmers’ wives, and how, in her family of proudly plus-size women, she was actually the thin one, and how she’d worked hard to become comfortable in her own skin. My hero, I’d thought when I’d read those quotes and seen her pictures. Silly me.

  Now Miss Comfortable in Her Own Skin was glaring at me, bony shoulders hunched, lean legs crossed, one narrow foot twitching like a metronome, the better to burn calories, even while seated. “It’s too late,” Cady said. “It’s done. Cat’s out of the bag.” She giggled. “So to speak.”

  Justin reached across the table to give my hand an unwelcome squeeze. “There’s a plus side to all of this.”

  “Pun intended,” I said. Neither one of them laughed.

  “You would not believe the press interest,” Justin gushed. “People, Us, TMZ, Life & Style . . . they all want to do features on Cady.”

  “On Cady’s body,” I corrected. “On Cady’s weight loss.” I felt as if someone had parked a bus on top of my heart. Daphne had been the lantern that I had wanted to hold up to all the girls in the world, the girls who weren’t thin, the girls who weren’t pretty, the ones who never saw anyone who looked like them on television unless they were the best friend or the butt of a joke. I had wanted a show like The Golden Girls, where it wasn’t about being thin or young or beautiful, but about who you were underneath your skin, and whether you were loyal, funny, smart, compassionate, a good friend. And now my light had extinguished herself. The actress chosen to represent all the invisible girls of the world was going to be cavorting on the pages of the tabloids, showing off her brand-new bangin’ bikini body and, undoubtedly, giving interviews about how miserable she’d been back in the dark days when she’d looked just like them.

  Justin was watching me uncertainly. “She’ll plug the show, of course,” he said. I looked down at my lap, unwilling to trust myself to answer. I was imagining myself at eight years old, face bandaged, an IV needle in the back of my hand, a travel alarm clock in a pink leather case on the bedside table, counting down the minutes until The Golden Girls came on and I could see my friends, and visit a world where nothing hurt. “Barbara Walters’s people called,” he said. “They want her on The View.”

  I pushed myself away from the table. “Excuse me,” I said. As I got to my feet, I saw a girl sidle across the bricked courtyard and work up the nerve to tap Cady’s shoulder. She was maybe ten years old, with a rounded belly poking at the front of her plum-colored T-shirt, and she held an iPhone in one hand.

  “Excuse me?” she said in a voice barely above a whisper. “You’re Cady Stratton, right?”

  Cady’s face, formerly pouty and blank, lit up as if someone had clicked a switch. She gave the girl a brilliant smile. “I am!” she said with more animation than I’d ever heard from her when she wasn’t onstage. “What’s your name?”

  “Ava,” the girl whispered.

  “Hi, Ava!” Cady smiled and reached across the table with one of her bony claws to take the girl’s free hand. “Do you want a picture? You and me together? What do you say?”

  Ava could barely say anything. She handed me her phone and got into position, cheek to cheek with Cady
.

  “Say cheese!” Justin caroled. Cheese was said. Cady smiled brilliantly. Ava looked faint. I snapped the shot and handed over the camera, which Ava accepted as if receiving a holy relic.

  “You look so pretty,” she whispered to Cady, who looked at me with an I told you so smirk. Ava hurried off, clutching her prize.

  “You see that?” Cady asked. “They love me.”

  “I wonder if she’d love you more if you’d looked the way you used to.” It was a clumsy thing to say, but why not put my cards on the table? I had nothing to lose.

  “You’d think that, right?” said Cady. “But you’d be wrong.” She flicked her hand at the patio, at the couples sharing pancakes, the single ladies lingering over lattes and mimosas, the children poking at plates of scrambled eggs, the women in yoga pants sipping smoothies. “All the girls. They don’t want me to look like they look, they want me to look the way they wish they could look.” She took off her hat, shook out her hair, and took a single tiny sip from her espresso cup. “You thought you were doing them a favor, giving them what they wanted. But that’s not what they wanted.” She ran her hands along her diminished torso, down to her narrow hips. “You’ll see.” She smiled merrily and then raised her head, looking past me. Evidently, Ava had told her friends. More girls were approaching, girls and young women and a few hand-holding dads and boyfriends. They came carrying cell phones, iPhones, flipcams, and BlackBerrys. They were whispering to one another when they weren’t looking down at their devices, fingers flying, texting and tweeting the news into the world.

  I pushed a five-dollar bill at Justin and dug my valet ticket out of my pocket. “I have to go. We’ll talk soon,” I said.

  “Bye-eee!” he called, waggling his fingers. I handed over my ticket, tipped the valet, drove to the end of the street, and then pulled into a parking lot in front of a supermarket and collapsed with my head on the wheel, my heart pounding, eyes stinging. The network first? The studio? No, Dave. Before I could stop myself or overthink, I dialed his number. “Can I come over?” I rasped as soon as he’d said hello. “I need to talk to you.”