“Crikey, you look awful, Killer.”
Freddie’s voice and image burst out of her computer. It was jarring that he should be so much the same when nothing else was.
“For your information, I’ve been sick,” I lied.
“If it helps, Knickers was in a complete glump before he went back down to the base,” Freddie said. “I couldn’t jolly him out of it. He didn’t tease me about my new girlfriend Persimmon. I faxed a photocopy of my bum to Marj, and put her on speaker when she called to scream at me about pornography, and then I prank-called Barnes, pretending to be the Royal College of Taxidermy inquiring about his new hairpiece. Nothing.”
That got a laugh out of me, at least. “Aren’t you supposed to be on Team Nick?”
“He knows I am,” Freddie said. “But he’s also not in London, so get your arse back home and let me help with the healing process. I am unofficially a PhD in Medicinal Misbehavior.”
In fact, other than one Beatrix Larchmont-Kent-Smythe—whose investment in me did not seem to extend past her sense of aristocratic duty—my English friends all tried to jolt my flatlining spirits. Cilla and Gaz gave raucous, amusingly divergent accounts of his attempts to give her cooking lessons; Joss shared that Tom Huntington-Jones wanted to bankroll an entire Soj store after the paps identified me wearing one of her shirts (I’d forgotten to button my peacoat when I ran out for cheese puffs). Clive gossiped that Prince Edwin ran over an endangered gopher on a golf outing, and Penelope Six-Names now hosted a children’s TV show called Morning Zoo that involved her dressing up as animals and visiting them in their habitats to promote better interspecies relations. Apparently, a certain group of hens hadn’t liked the cut of her jib at all. It was heartening to be included even though I’d decamped to American soil, but all I wanted was to laugh at those dishy stories with Nick. After all, he had been my best friend out of all of them.
Three days before Christmas, with no end to my sloth in sight, my parents decided it was their turn to intervene. I was digging around in the Coucherator for a Diet Coke when the two of them descended, Dad parking on the coffee table, and Mom to my right.
“Bex,” Mom began. “Honey, this has gotten—”
“You are a disaster, Bex,” Dad interrupted, patting my knee.
“Earl!” Mom hissed. “We rehearsed this.”
“Well, rehearsal was sort of boring,” Dad admitted. “Let’s just give it to her straight.”
“Give what to me?” I asked.
“It’s in the script,” Mom said huffily. “You’d know by now if he’d just stuck to it.”
“There is a script?” I was confused. “Wait. Is this an intervention?”
“No,” Mom said.
“Yes,” Dad said.
“Don’t take offense, but it’s not a very good one,” I said, folding my legs up under me.
“You’re loafing, Bex,” Dad said, smacking his lap. “All day, all night, you loaf. You loaf so much you’ve become a loaf. I could slice you up and use you for sandwiches.”
“What your father is trying to say is that we’re worried,” Mom translated, shooting him a dirty look.
“What I’m really trying to say is that you need to go back to England,” he said.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Mom said. “That boy ran roughshod all over her feelings, Earl.”
I put up my hand and wiggled it around. “Do I get a vote?”
“Yes,” Mom said.
“No,” Dad said. “You get to listen. Look, hon, I’m very sorry your relationship ended. But I don’t care if he was the Prince of England or the Prince of Persian Rugs down on the interstate. You can’t hide out here forever.”
I pulled a face. “That carpet guy is sort of cute, and in the commercials he does those one-armed push-ups. Maybe I should introduce myself.”
“He uses a body double. Costs them a fortune,” Dad said.
“What?” Mom and I were both unnaturally shocked.
Dad shrugged. “We all use the same camera-people. The things I know about Hardware Pete from Pete’s Hardware would make your toes curl.” He shook his head. “Don’t change the subject, Rebecca. You don’t get to become a mole-person. Pull yourself together and go back to London with your head held high.”
“I can’t,” I argued, faint with rising panic. “Everyone will be watching me, waiting to see if I’ll crack. I’m not making that up, Dad. The headline on In Touch this week was WILL SHE CRACK?”
“Honey, you said yourself that half the problem was Nick being afraid of the press,” Mom said gently, placing her hand over mine. “Don’t you make that same mistake.”
“Just go be, Bex,” Dad said. “And, go be Bex. Go find your life again. It’s not here anymore, and you know it.”
“But what if it’s not there, either?” I could barely do more than whisper. “Imagine what it’s like, living in the country he’s going to rule one day. He’s everywhere, Dad. And I don’t know if I’m strong enough.” A tear slid down my cheek. “It’s one thing to crack over here, but if I do it over there, everyone sees. He sees.”
Dad slid off the table and knelt down in front of me, putting his hands on my face. “The Bex who dumped her prom date into the garbage is strong enough,” he said. “The Bex who climbed over a barbwire fence is strong enough.”
“That report is still unconfirmed,” I muttered.
He kissed my forehead. “Sweetie, it all makes you who you are, which is someone real special, and also maybe a little crazy,” he said.
“But—”
My mother stopped me. “I have never worried about you,” she said. “Not really. We used to joke you could stand in the middle of a tornado and find a way to enjoy the breeze.”
I cracked a tiny smile.
“That’s a good thing, Bex,” she said. “But it doesn’t give you license to sit here and wait for life to find you. It just means you can survive whatever is out there.”
This is one of my favorite memories of my parents, because in their faces I saw the most naked love and concern and support—and faith. They believed that I was brave. They believed I was tough. They believed in me, period. The original Bex Brigade.
“You win,” I said. “I’ll go back.”
Dad stood with a groan. “Thank goodness. My knees couldn’t take much more.”
I scooted over so he could sit on my other side. “I just hope I don’t do anything stupid while I’m trying to reconnect with my inner awesomeness.”
“You won’t,” Mom said.
“You will,” Dad said.
“Earl, really.” That one was me.
“What? Everyone does stupid stuff,” Dad said. “The Cubs have a rich history of it. But they never stop playing, and I love them anyway.”
We heard a throat clearing. “I have an idea, if I may,” Lacey said from the stairwell. A thumping noise accompanied her hopping down the last few steps.
“Clive’s got a new girlfriend,” she began, coming around in front of us. “Her dad owns half the world, basically, and she’s throwing a New Year’s Eve party on their private island. Staying at their house is free, and he owns Luxe Airlines, so we can get there for like twenty bucks or something insane,” she said, at our mother’s expression. She bounced on the balls of her feet. “What do you say? Nick won’t be there. You can see everyone in a super-fun atmosphere and then we’ll all head back to England together.”
“Hell, I’d go, if I didn’t think you’d rather die than party with your old man,” Dad said.
I threw my arm around his neck and kissed his cheek. “You’d be great company, but I should probably brave this one on my own.”
Lacey’s eyes sparkled. “So you’re in?”
“I’m in.”
And that’s how the debauchery started.
Chapter Two
The room reeked of booze and smoke and stale sweat. My mouth felt like I’d eaten a stick of paste, and tasted about as compelling. My head throbbed. My stomach churned.
I was clammy and cold, which I quickly realized was because I was naked other than a sheet covering my ankles.
And some guy’s leg was thrown over mine.
His breathing was slow, heavy, rhythmic; whoever he was, he was asleep. I pried open my eyes and saw a very posh hotel room that a cyclone of hedonism had torn to bits. The carcasses of the minibar blanketed the floor alongside heavy glass ashtrays full of cigarette stubs and ashes. Clothes dangled from anything they could; a deck of cards lay scattered as if someone had hurled it up into the air. A trail of powder led to the suite’s second room, where I could see a slumbering couple I didn’t recognize. Carefully, so as not to stir him, I lifted my head and looked my mystery companion in the face.
It was Clive.
* * *
New Year’s Eve on Wayne Hanson’s island reawakened a sleeping beast in me that would have given my selective biographer Aurelia Maupassant a stroke. I flirted with inappropriate guys. I gave out absurd fake names like Picasso Von Trapp and lied elaborately about my job—neurosurgeon, buttock-implant technician, party planner—while wearing tight shirts and tighter skirts provided by Joss, who seemed to like me a whole lot more now that I was feeling, as Bea might’ve said, more experimental and psychotic. Clive’s new girlfriend, an old ex of Nick’s called Davinia Cathcart-Hanson, was generous with the perks of her father’s conglomerate and routinely booked us cheap airfare and gratis suites anywhere that had a warm beach, strong drinks, and a throng of people who either didn’t know who I was or didn’t care. And I went, again and again, to escape the memories that were boxed up in my Chelsea love nest along with a great deal of Nick’s stuff. Which apparently he didn’t want. He’d simply dropped away without so much as a note to tell me I should toss the chartreuse tie he left behind, which was a gift from the Queen, and which he hated. Of course, I hadn’t texted him either to return his cashmere sweater that I was still sleeping in, even though it didn’t even smell like him anymore.
Instead, we engaged in a screamingly immature game of cat and mouse. Photos of Nick and Gemma had given way to a mix of reports that he was exceedingly popular at the Royal Naval College, and grainy stills of him inside nightclubs, or leaving them, with a series of pretty women. I insisted I didn’t care, that it was all gossip for sport—and yet, when the paparazzi caught me bodysurfing in Portugal, the surf ripping off my ill-advised string bikini top, I didn’t hate the gloriously carefree shot of me that made the paper. Nor did I mind when the photographers found me in an even more tenuous Joss-designed bikini in Cinque Terre, the week after the press had hotly dissected snaps of Nick at an Eton friend’s wedding reception, his arm wrapped around a gorgeous brunette so that his hand appeared to rest on her breast. And when Nick’s ship docked in Majorca (the last phase of his Naval training) and the Daily Mail’s Xandra Deane reported he’d done body shots off a bevy of exotic beauties while shouting, “It’s good to be free,” I was particularly okay with the paparazzi catching me in Cannes perched on the lap of a hot young beefcake promoting his action flick Venom Has a New Face. None of it was choreographed—I hadn’t alerted the paps, and Marj would never sign off on Nick publicly licking tequila from a stranger’s clavicle—but it was definitely satisfying.
But once the pictures of me with the actor hit the Internet, the press decided I was a calculating fame addict, trading a future actual king for a future king of Hollywood (or any other title-adjacent guy who dared to be seen near me). In the following months, the paparazzi’s formerly genial tone became toxic: I can still describe with laser accuracy the carpet in Heathrow’s terminals, because of how often I hung my head and plowed over it while they took my picture and hissed things like, “Oi, nasty tart, look up,” and, “Where’s this weekend’s shag, you dirty bird?” There was even a new nickname: the Ivy League, a pun on Lacey’s and my Cornell educations and the fact that the press believed we were, in Xandra Deane’s words, “attractive, creeping, climbing, and pernicious,” like the vine itself. Lacey thought this was catchy, but I could hear Lady Bollocks’s voice in my head: It’s not a compliment.
“Honey, don’t you think you should slow down?” Mom asked about six months into my bender, putting me on speakerphone. “All those trips. That actor. You’re looking peaky.”
“Never believe what you see in the papers, Mom.”
“I believe what I hear, which is that you’re exhausted and defensive,” Dad opined. “You’re never home. You’re always with strangers. What the heck are you doing over there?”
“Exactly what you told me to do,” I said. “Finding myself.”
“No,” he said. “All you found was another way to escape.”
The sadness in his voice filled up my chest and exploded in a way that did not look especially good on me.
“You wanted me to come back and stick it to them,” I said. “You told me to act like I don’t care. Mission accomplished.”
“You should still act like you care about yourself,” Mom said.
“Oh, please,” I snapped. “I’m just having fun. So is Lacey. Somehow I suspect you’re not calling to tell her she’s acting like a skank.”
“Young lady, I don’t care how screwed up you are right now, you will not speak to your mother that way,” Dad said. “We are worried, and we want better for you, and that is that.”
And he’d hung up; in a fit of pique, so had I.
Of all people, it was Freddie who came the closest to getting through to me. Lacey and I often ran into him at various clubs of Tony’s, where it was too loud to discuss anything but our drink orders, and I knew the two of them had stayed in more constant contact. But I was still surprised when, one Monday in August about two hours after I’d called in sick with another abysmal hangover, he showed up at my flat with a restorative bag of Cornish pasties.
“This is obviously a total nonsense suggestion,” he’d said, handing me a warm puff-pastry pocket. “But what if you tried not getting pissed off your tree all the time?”
I flopped back onto my sofa and took a bite. “This country’s best quality is its belief in butter,” I said, pastry debris shooting into the air like greasy snowflakes.
“And its worst quality is that its third in line to the throne will not be diverted from the topic at hand,” he said, pulling a newspaper from his bag and unfurling it with a flourish. The front page read IVY LEAGUE VALEDICTORIAN?, with five images—styled to look like they’d been torn from an album—of me dashing in or out of clubs, shaky and smeared.
“Hang on,” I said, sitting up and grabbing it from him. “Some of those are from the same night, and one is like two years old. They’re making it sound like I did all of this last week.”
“Clever, I know,” Freddie said, nonchalantly propping his feet up on my coffee table. “But you are going rather hard.”
“This from a guy who goes rather hard with a new girl every week, just to piss off his father,” I said. “At least I’m not dragging anyone else into this.”
“Touché,” Freddie said. “But all my relationships are mutually beneficial. Trust me, I haven’t broken a single heart in England.”
“If you say so. But you’ve never had yours broken, either, so you don’t get to tell me how to deal with it,” I said, heating up. “You and Nick have whatever fun you want. You don’t judge your own girlfriends for it. So you damn well don’t get to judge me.”
Freddie let that settle for a second. “I didn’t say I’ve never had my heart broken,” he said calmly. “And I didn’t tell you not to have fun. You’ve always been fun. Just not reckless.”
We chewed quietly until I couldn’t stand it anymore. “How is he?”
“Rather well,” Freddie said. “He’s started training as a warfare officer down near Portsmouth. It’s all weapons and navigation and whatnot. He’s chuffed.”
I’d seen pictures of the parade when Nick finally finished at the Naval College and became an officer. He’d been so hot in his gold-and-red-trimmed black uniform and white hat tha
t I’d fallen into a box of wine and watched Bridget Jones’s Diary three times in a row.
“He’d want to know you’re getting on all right,” Freddie added gingerly.
I bristled. “If you’re just here to absolve his conscience or something—”
“Don’t be so testy, Killer,” he said, holding up a hand. “I’m here on my own behalf.”
“Good. Because I would love to tell you that I’m doing great,” I said. “I would love to tell you that I’m seeing someone awesome, and we’re allowed to touch in public, and I’ve never been happier. But it would be lies, and the only thing that helps is getting far away from Nick and pretending I’m Leona Da Vinci, who wears huge hats and doesn’t have any problems. And I’m going to keep doing it until I don’t have any problems.”
Freddie looked at me intently. Then he smiled. “I was Jock Weapon once at a hotel.”
“In more ways than one, I bet.”
He chuckled. “Well, Killer, this was a terrible talk,” he said, clapping his hands together and then standing up. “Just promise you won’t go completely ’round the bend. No face tattoos, no running off with a pool boy to Belize.”
“I’ll try, but Leona Da Vinci wants what she wants.”
He chewed on his lip, then added, “Maybe you and Knickers should just have tea and get it over with. Wouldn’t it be worse if you just bumped into him?”
“Probably,” I said. “But I’m not ready to see him, Freddie. Not yet.”
Turns out we were both right: It was way worse, and I wasn’t ready.
That particular drizzly, doomed Friday in mid-October was the red carpet opening of Joss’s new store on Kensington High Street. I’d worn a series of outrageous Soj bikinis in Cannes that had stirred up even more interest in her as a designer, so she and her walking midlife crisis of a business partner decided they should strike while the proverbial iron was still…if not hot, then at least plugged in, and so they rushed the shop and her clothing line to market. She’d invited socialites, pop stars, party reporters, and any of Tom Huntington-Jones’s crew who were still speaking to him—which, for the moment anyway, included his daughter Philippa, who’d recently begun seeing Gaz.
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