Watch Out, Hollywood!: More Confessions of a So-called Middle Child

by Maria T. Lennon

  Mom gets this weird look on her face. “Family party?”

  “Yeah, and some trick-or-treaters, but nothing big. No invitations. Just some good family time, Mom.”

  “All right, well . . . it’s this weekend,” she says, still surprised. “But I’ll talk to Dad, Pen, and Felix. It’s fine with me.”

  “Thanks, Mom.” No way would I suffer a boycotted Halloween party. No way would I stand there watching no one arrive. I check out the Country Store on our left, and feel my nerves smooth as we get farther and farther away from the horror that is my life.

  Mom starts nodding like she’s just figured it out. “I think it’s smart of you not to do too much. You’re taking care of you, and that’s good.” She rubs my knee, turns up NPR, and thankfully says nothing for the rest of the way.

  Fifteen minutes later, we pull up to the photography studio. It’s on Sunset Boulevard, of course. “All right.” She grins like it’s a defining moment. “This is it. I called him before we left. He’s expecting you.” She turns off the engine. “I’ll be right here.”

  I open my bag, pull out my MAC Rock and Roll lip crayon, apply it in the broken mirror. Then I tease my hair. I paint my nails black with whatever Sharpie I can find.

  I throw my arms around her and hug her. “Thanks, Mom.” I’m nervous as heck, but there’s no place I’d rather be. This is it. A new beginning. A new me. I so have to nail this. During this hour, I have to make sure all aspects of my personality are captured so that there is no way the producers can say no. I get out, tie the shirt around my waist, and kiss my mom one more time. I take a massive cleansing breath and walk through the door. To new beginnings.

  My First Photo Shoot

  It’s so dark in here, my eyes burn. But slowly, the details emerge. The black lobby is covered in photographs of Hollywood stars. I go up to their pictures to check it out, but the closer I get, the more I notice that most of them are in black-and-white, which, of course, means that these stars are all probably dead. The guy should seriously consider taking them down and putting up color pictures.

  The door opens. A small man comes out. He’s got a huge orange afro and matching curly beard that looks like it’s attacking his face. And he’s got all these weird, broken yellow teeth. He’s wearing a dress with a scarf and slippers. He’s looking at me in a way I don’t understand. He’s coming near me. I ball up both fists, ready to punch.

  “Perfection! You must be Charlie!” He puts his hands together like he’s praying. “Chad told me—he told me. Divine, you are divine.” He closes his eyes for a really long time, then announces, “I am Morris the Great. Come, come into my studio. Let me study you.” I follow him inside. The place is like a tomb, black, cold as a fridge. For a second I want to get my mom. “Chad told me,” he squeals, “but I had no idea!”

  I peel off my clothes to reveal the truly remarkable black-and-rhinestone leotard that I have underneath my pants. It’s both shiny and scaly at the same time, and it actually sucks in my stomach for me.

  “Stand there.” He points. “Perfect! Fantastic!” He starts to click. “Now, do some moves.”

  I freeze. “Moves?”

  “Think gymnast. Think, I’m clawing my way to the top.”

  Right. I touch the sequins on my top and I concentrate. What do I want to show Chad most of all?

  That I can look like a gymnast.

  That I can look evil and cute while doing it.

  First I do cartwheels, splits, and back bends. Thanks to Marta, they’re pretty dang good.

  “Impressive!”

  He snaps away for an hour. “Awesome!” I do as many cutthroat-sister looks as I can muster. Then I throw in some highly competitive glares by imagining just how much I hate Lillian.

  “Punch!” he cries out. “Punch the air in front of you. You’re a fighter, Charlie, a fighter.”

  “Lord, ain’t that the truth.” And so I punch. I kick. I karate chop until he’s done clicking.

  “Funny. Do funny,” he commands. I run headfirst into the black wall and fall down. I am so in the zone that I don’t even realize time has gone by until he falls like a giant lump of pumpkin goo onto the black carpet, rolls onto his stomach, and laughs.

  I walk over and look at him. “Are you all right, mister?”

  “All right?” He laughs. “That was the best photo shoot I’ve done since Depp. You are a beacon of light in this horribly bland, this mediocre world of falsehoods. You are truth, Charlie! Ah!” He rubs his face. “These are going to be out of this world.”

  I hold on to his every word. “So you think I’ll get the job?”

  “Oh, yes,” he says, totally seriously. “Yes, I do.”

  “Please send them as fast as you can.” I can’t wait for Chad to get them! I can’t wait for the next chapter of my life to begin. Good-bye, Happy Canyon. Hello, Hollywood! “Where can I pay?”

  “Pay? You?” He jumps up, now drenched with sweat. “Never, never. Just let me put one on my wall. Let me be the one who says I discovered you, please.”

  All that pumpkin schlepping for nothing, the rotten insides, the goo. I want to kill my mother.

  Mr. Morris the Great walks me to the door and turns the sign to read CLOSED. “I’m downloading your images for the rest of the day. I cannot let anything else enter into my visual field, just you.”

  He opens the door and shields his eyes. “You’re a star, Charlie Cooper, a star.”

  I emerge onto the Sunset Strip a new woman. Mom’s Volvo is right there. I practically throw myself into the car. “Mom!” I grab her.

  She jumps. “What? What?”

  “First of all,” I point out immediately, “I don’t even have to pay.”

  “What do you mean?” She puts on her glasses and looks me over. “Why don’t you have to pay?”

  “He said I was so amazing, so gifted, so perfect, he was happy to do it for free as long as I let him put up a picture on his wall, and believe me, he needs a little color up there.”

  “So it went well?”

  “Well?” I’m out of my mind. “It was amazing! Phenomenal, fun. Did I say amazing?” I can barely contain myself. I don’t recall ever being this happy in my whole entire life. “Now I know I was born to do this.” I look up at the billboards and see my face up there.

  Mom kisses me. “You hungry?”

  “Starved.” Pumped. I’m on the brink, I can feel it.

  Mom pulls a U-turn on Sunset. “How about we grab something to eat before you go to work?”

  Whoa, whoa, put the brakes on, lady. “Didn’t you hear me? The pictures are free. Free, as in no more slave labor.”

  Mom puts on her lip gloss. “But they’re counting on you to come today, Charlie.”

  I can’t even believe she’s saying this. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “Wrong.” She pulls her hair into a loose ponytail.

  I’m about to argue when I realize that the longer I stay away from home, the longer I can put off answering any questions about what happened today at school. “But I get McDonald’s, all right?”

  “That’s not real food.” Her voice gets all low. “But”—she squeezes my knee—“as a special celebration. I’m so proud of you.”

  TRUE FACT: When I’m rich and famous, I’m eating McDonald’s every day.

  I stare at myself in the side mirror, suddenly seeing everything that he saw. My playfulness, my serious jawline, wise eyes, mischievous smile. “He said I’m a natural.” Me, C.C. Cooper. Maybe I’ll change my name to just C.C.

  We drive for a while. I’m lost in my world, putting my middle-school past behind me and thinking of my future, when Mom breaks the silence. “Pen called while you were in there.” She drops it like that.

  I curse the day she got a cell phone.

  “She said something about you having a tough day at school today. Is that right?”

  Great, Pen knows. Of course she knows; everyone in the entire school, canyon, and possibly the city of Los Angeles p
robably knows. “Kinda.” I turn away from her. “Do we really have to talk about it?”

  “No.” Mom shakes her head. “We don’t.”

  Thank God she learned about parental boundaries at Dr. Scales’s office. She drives down Sunset Boulevard for a few minutes without saying a word, and I think I’m off the hook.

  Then she says, “Is this why you want to cancel the Halloween party?”

  Clearly she’d forgotten the boundary talk. “No, no, Mom.”

  “If you need to, we can talk to Dr. Scales.” She points to where his office is. “I’m sure he’d love to see you.”

  TRUE FACT: This is called blackmail. Plain and simple.

  I look over at her. I can see the vein throbbing in the middle of her forehead. “It’s nothing, Mom, no big deal, all right?” I shift my leg so I am practically on the door.

  “According to your sister, they’re calling you the scorpion at school.” She’s got that concerned look. “Doesn’t sound like a compliment.”

  “Well, you’re wrong.” I pull my legs under me. “Didn’t you know scorpions symbolize luck? And the moms carry their babies on their backs,” I explain. “They’re actually supernice little animals.”

  She turns. Her left eyebrow is up like a giant question mark. “Really?”

  “Okay, fine!” I yell. “I told a lie, all right?” I slap my thigh. “I didn’t want Marta to audition for this stupid part, so I told a lie. And now it’s coming back and biting me on the butt, big-time.” I turn to the window to avoid her look of total disappointment.

  We’re stalled in traffic. Mom’s voice is strangely calm. “So what are you gonna do about it?”

  “I already got Pickler to pay for Marta’s flight to the JOs, which is her dream, by the way.” She says nothing, just shakes her head. “I didn’t buy her off!” I yell. “I got her the Junior Olympics—”

  “But”—she stops me—“you did it because you, Charlie, wanted her to stay away from the audition. That’s called manipulation.”

  “I know.”

  “And it’s wrong.”

  “I know.” But guess what. This is my destiny, and there’s nothing Lillian can do to stop it.

  Shut Pen Up

  Mom pulls into our driveway.

  The car comes to a stop. “Be careful.” Mom turns off the ignition and we sit there in the creaking old Volvo under a sky of stars.

  I look up at the house. I say a silent prayer that Pen isn’t waiting for us downstairs. I see Houdini looking at me from up above, perched on the mountain, and feel sad. “You don’t know what it’s like for me.”

  She shakes her head. It’s so still in the car. “You’re right, I don’t. But I do know it’s the same everywhere you go.”

  “Say what?”

  “Because it’s inside you, Charlie,” she says. “The craziness that follows you is in you.”

  “Great, thanks a lot.” I kick open the car door, about to leave, when she touches my back.

  “Don’t you see?” Her voice is soft but has a heaviness to it. “Hollywood, Happy Canyon, it doesn’t matter where you go—”

  But this is too much. “I have to go.” I grab my stuff and run.

  “Charlie!”

  But I don’t want to listen. I run through the door and drop my backpack in the middle of the floor the second I get in. The kitchen is empty. Mom comes in behind me, balancing bags from the market on her hips. I’m about to launch myself up the stairs when Mom announces,

  “Stop right there.”

  I turn. Mom’s pointing to my backpack, and she’s turning red. She hands it to me. “Put it away, Charlie.”

  “Fine.” I climb the stairs. All I want is a quiet space and my laptop. I throw open my door, about to launch myself onto my bed, when Pen spins around. She’s at her desk in her pj’s, doing homework. “I stood up for you.” She hisses like she’s been waiting hours for this. “I even told Lillian you had Marta’s back. Jesus, Charlie, when, when will you ever change?”

  Felix is on his bed, reading a comic book. He puts it down and asks, “Is that why everyone hates you again, Charlie?”

  I grab my laptop. “No more lectures, all right?” I take a deep breath and turn on my machine. “Plus, if you really want to know, I got her into the Junior Olympics. I was the one who got Pickler to pay for it. Me.”

  Pen looks almost speechless. “Then why are they all saying you’re a scorpion?” She taps her pencil. “You’re lying.”

  “Don’t you get what this is all about?” I stare at her. “It’s pretty simple, Pen. They want her out of the JOs. Lillian promised me if I kept her out, she’d leave me alone. But I didn’t. I did the so-called right thing and got Pickler to pay for Marta. And now they’re making me pay.”

  For the moment, Pen’s silent, which is great, because all I want is to hear from Chad and book the job. I open my email and scan as fast as I can. If he hasn’t written, I swear to God I’m going over there by bus. But there’s nothing there. Not a peep. Is it possible he’s seen the note Lillian posted on Instagram and now wants nothing to do with me? I’m freaking out. Morris said they were perfect. What’s happening?

  “Charlie!” Dad yells up. “Come down here, please.”

  I look up at Pen. “Did you tell him?”

  She shakes her head. “Not yet.”

  I almost can’t believe it. “Why not?”

  “I wanted to see if you’d have the guts to tell them yourself.” She folds her arms like she’s my mother. I feel like throwing my pillow at her face. I close the computer. “For your information, I already told Mom and will tell Dad myself.” I slam the door and run down the stairs.

  Dad’s standing there slapping the phone against his hand. He’s not laughing. I’m getting a bad feeling. “What’s wrong, Dad?”

  He shakes his head. “This has to be the twentieth time that pain in the butt, Chad, has called.” The phone’s in his hand, and he looks like he wants to kill it. He hands it to me. “Tell him once is enough.”

  My jaw drops. I take a calm breath. I don’t want to sound overeager. Desperate. I take the phone. “Hey Chad, how are ya?” I ask casually, though my heart is pounding.

  “I got your head shots.” His voice sounds so dead. Like he, like he hates them.

  “Do you . . .” I start to panic. I don’t know what to say. “Well, do you like them?”

  “Like them?” he squeals. “I don’t like them. I love them. I want to marry them. I want to gaze at them like fat American tourists gaze at the Mona Lisa.”

  So he doesn’t know about Marta.

  He clears his throat, his voice gets real smooth, and then he says, “And my dear girl, it’s not just me who likes them. The people at ABC Family love them. They want you to know you’re their number-one pick for the part.

  “Really?” I turn and whisper. I’m freaking out. I can’t hide how happy I am, how relieved I am. “Seriously, their first pick?”

  “They’re drooling, baby. They see star written all over you. Those shots are beyond fab. They’re epic.”

  “Get the heck out of here!” I squeal. Dad gives me a look. I know that look. That’s the don’t-get-too-excited-because-your-heart’s-going-to-get-snapped-into-little-pieces look.

  “It’s your realness, Cooper. Plain and simple.” It rolls off his tongue so quickly it sounds like a line he gives to everyone. “They like that you don’t care about your looks. They like that you are not bothered by your weight. And, and . . .” He’s laughing. “Get this, they love, love, love your fashion. Apparently the character they want you to play has an equally quirky fashion sense.”

  “I’ve been making up my own designs since I was three.”

  Dead silence.

  “Since I was three,” I repeat.

  “So,” Chad says, “there’s only two things left. How’s your acting?”

  I stare at myself in the window. “Ever heard of Meryl Streep?”

  “Misplaced confidence. I love it!” he yells. “I�
�m messengering over a scene from one of their scripts for you to read on camera. Practice with a friend so you’re all set for the audition.”

  I don’t have any friends.

  “And your gymnastics. You have your routine down?”

  “Absolutely.” I do a stretch in front of the mirror.

  “How bad do you want this?” he asks.

  Is he taunting me? “I want it more than anything else in the world,” I say with complete honesty.

  “Then you’re the right girl for the part,” he says. “Practice your lines. I’ll call you Monday.”

  The doorbell rings. “Charlie!” Dad calls me. I can tell he’s beginning to get mad. “You’re needed for a signature.”

  I run for it.

  A signature? I peek through the door to see a man in black leather, black helmet, holding a seriously thick manila envelope. He hands me a pen. I don’t even have a signature yet, so I just kinda pretend to have a super-fancy cursive signature. Note to self: start practicing autograph. The man hands me the huge pack and hops on his bike. “Cool pad you got here,” he says to me like it’s mine. I see my dad’s face and can’t really tell what he’s thinking, but he’s thinking of something, all right. On the package it says my name, typed, and above it there’s a big CONFIDENTIAL. I rub my hands over it. It feels so real, like it’s already mine.

  “Is this for your audition?” Dad leans in.

  I throw my arms around him. My middle-school horror is lessening by the second. “If I can get this show, Dad, we’ll buy this place.”

  He squeezes me tight and kisses the top of my head. “You’re a thoughtful girl, Charlie, no matter what they say.”

  Destiny Comes Early

  The call comes early on Monday morning. I trip over a few hundred stuffed animals, wipe the drool from my lips, the sleep from my eyes. I run down the stairs, grab the phone, and clear my throat.

  “Hello?” my voice croaks.

  “Good morning, Superstar!” Chad’s had a few espressos.

  Suddenly I’m wide-awake. I open the fridge, hunt down some leftover Domino’s, and eat it cold, like a little slice of heaven.