Likely Story!

by David Levithan

  This might have been the closest Gina had ever come to saying something negative about my mother in my presence. But somehow she did it so that she seemed loyal to both of us at the same time. I wouldn’t have known that was possible.

  “Do you want to come home for dinner?” she asked me now.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’d like that.”

  Here I was, caught up in the make-believe world that I was making. But really what I wanted most of all was a home-cooked meal and the believing that could come of that. For a few hours, I wanted everything to be real. Then I could return to my life.

  I couldn’t avoid Keith forever (a) because we went to the same school and walked the same hallways and (b) because after the initial shock wore off, I didn’t want to.

  In this equation, the first reason pretty much ensured that we’d run into each other, and the second reason made me feel stupid. My anger was subsiding because I didn’t have enough kindling to fuel it. The old sense of missing him started to kick in, and I couldn’t kick it away.

  Most guys, I knew, would stop calling and texting after a few days. But not Keith. More than two weeks after I’d seen him and Erika at the mall, he was still trying to get together. Granted, if he’d known I’d caught him, it might be a different story. But what, really, had I caught him doing? It’s not like he’d lied; he’d been straightforward about Erika all along. It just meant something different now that I’d seen it. But that wasn’t his fault.

  “I should talk to him,” I kept telling Amelia.

  Finally, that Friday, she relented and said, “Go ahead. Talk to him.”

  “You think it’ll be a disaster?” I said.

  “No more than if you keep going like this. Just do it. Because not doing it is going to drive both of us crazy.”

  Amelia tried hard to sound mad at me, but it was pretty hard for her to do. Annie had messengered the contract over to her house, and her lawyer was looking it over even as we spoke. The network didn’t want to leave anything to chance—an actor had to sign away the next five years of his or her career in order to audition for a part. The actors who didn’t get chosen to be on the soap were freed from the contract, of course. But the ones who were cast were contractually obligated to a good, long run on the soap … as long as the soap wanted them. For some actors, like Dallas, this was a pretty scary step. But others, like Amelia, were more than willing to make the leap. None of them—not even Amelia—thought they’d stay on a soap opera forever. But most saw the soap as a good first step to something bigger.

  “Is your mom back yet?” Amelia asked me now.

  “No. Not ’til tomorrow.”

  “So invite him over. Tonight.”

  “Wait—one minute you’re telling me not to see him, and now you’re telling me to have a sleepover?”

  “I said no such thing!” Amelia pretended to be shocked. “All I’m saying is: Give yourself the home-court advantage. For whatever happens.”

  This, I felt, made sense. Anywhere else we went—the movies, the mall, downtown—could be somewhere Keith had been with Erika. My house was the only place I could be sure was entirely mine. Her ghost wouldn’t be able to get its bearings.

  Before I could chicken out, I texted him to ask if he was free tonight.

  Fifteen seconds later, I had his reply:

  4 U? OF COURSE.

  I hated myself for how happy that made me.

  The happiness, however, was temporary. As I waited for him to come over, it was bumped down the charts by anxiety. I knew I had to talk to Keith—really talk to him—but I had no idea which words to use.

  It didn’t help that he looked about as cutesexy as can be when I opened the door—with the cutesexiest part being how happy he was to see me.

  “Hey, Ophelia,” he said.

  “What’s up, Hamlet?” I replied.

  I was trying to keep it casual, but the result of that was we casually fell back into our usual patterns. Meaning: It wasn’t two seconds after the door closed that we were mashing up against each other, kissing our hellos.

  “Where’ve you been, Athena?”

  “Just busy, Adonis.”

  Moving over to the couch.

  “I’ve missed you, Rhett,” he said.

  “Yeah, Scarlett.”

  How long had I waited for some guy to call me his Rhett Butler?

  There we were, maneuvering into position for The Long Cuddle. Part of me pleading to myself, Don’t think about the mall. The other part reminding me, The mall, the mall.

  He wasn’t mentioning her. He wasn’t with her. He was with me. I should have been happy. I should have been able to ignore it.

  But instead I sat up and ruined The Long Cuddle.

  “Holmes …,” I began.

  Keith looked at me quizzically.

  “What is it, Watson?” he asked.

  All of a sudden, it was like I was filled again by the sad emptiness. All my joy was hollowed out.

  And I couldn’t. Say. A thing.

  Keith looked at me more seriously now.

  “What?” he asked again. “Tell me.”

  I wanted to make a joke of it, since it was making such a joke out of me.

  “Guess who I saw the other day,” I said.

  “Elvis?”

  “No, Keith. I saw you and Erika. Together at the Beverly Center.”

  “Oh.”

  He didn’t say, Why didn’t you come over and say hi? or I was only there because her therapist said I had to be or Are you sure it was me? He knew better than to try any of those. Which made it harder to be mad at him and therefore easier to be sad.

  “I know it’s not fair,” I went on. “It’s not like you’ve ever lied to me. You haven’t. But to actually see the two of you together …”

  “It hurt?”

  “Yeah, it hurt. A lot.”

  Keith leaned into me and stroked my hair.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I would’ve rather been there with you, Romeo.”

  It would have been so easy to leave it there. It would have been so easy to let him stroke my hair and kiss me again and make out a little and forget about Erika and keep doing what we’d been doing, in the hope that one day she’d be out of the picture and I would be in it—in the foreground, in the center. But it was like this was the one thing too many, the one brick that made the relationship too heavy to carry. I couldn’t do it.

  “No,” I said, turning away, staring at the dead television on our wall. “I can’t do this, Keith. I’m sorry. We can’t keep doing this.”

  “Mallory,” he said, putting his arms around me and nuzzling into my neck. “Mallory….”

  That’s when I surprised both of us—by pushing him away, by standing up, by ending everything.

  “You don’t get it, do you?” I asked, somewhere between a plea and a yell. “I am always, always thinking of you being with her. That whenever you leave me, you just go back to her. And it kills me, Keith. It kills me. I know you’re trying to do the right thing. I know that you’re at heart a great guy. I would love to be with you. But I can’t do it like this. It’s not fair to me, and it’s not fair to her. Although, honestly, I don’t really care about her. Mostly, I care that it’s not fair to me.”

  Keith finally understood what was happening here, and it hit him hard. Suddenly he woke up from his dreaminess and became a complete mess.

  “Can’t we figure it out?” he asked. “I mean, are we just over?”

  No-yes, I thought. Yes-no.

  “I’ll break up with Erika,” he said. “She’s really fragile right now, but—”

  “No,” I said. “You’ve said that before. And the perverse thing is that I can understand that she needs you. But that means I can’t need you, too.”

  “But I need you, “Keith insisted. “I do.”

  How rare is it to hear these words? How often would I have someone ask me so desperately to stay? I couldn’t ignore the fact that even while I was letting go, it meant someth
ing to me that he was fighting to hold on.

  “You need to go now,” I said. “We could talk about this for days, but we’ll only be saying the same things over and over. And I don’t think either of us could stand that.”

  But he just sat there on the couch, looking helpless.

  “Come on …,” he said.

  I shook my head. I knew he could wear me down. I knew he could make me doubt it. So if he wasn’t going to leave, I had to.

  “I’m going to go upstairs,” I told him. “Let yourself out, okay?”

  I disappeared into my own house. I hid in my own bedroom. I stayed perfectly quiet, waiting until I heard the sound of the door closing behind him.

  Then I let myself be a total mess, regretting everything.

  Amelia assured me I had done the right thing by breaking up with Keith. But it was a measure of how badly I was taking it that she still had to assure me a week later, as Jake drove both of us to the studio. It was the day of Amelia’s big last-round audition, and while I liked to think that I was just distracting her from her nerves by talking all about me, the truth was that I needed the talking more. Poor Amelia—now that I didn’t have Keith, she was the only person besides Gina that I could confide in.

  All the talking stopped when we got to the studio. Amelia wanted to get into actress mode before her audition scenes. And I—well, I bumped into Dallas.

  Richard and Annie had flown him in to read with all the possible Sarahs and Jacquelines. I knew this. But still it was a shock to see him. So much had happened to me since we’d been at the Getty. But he didn’t know any of it. Because, at heart, we were still strangers.

  “Hey, Chekhov!” he called out when he saw me.

  Hey, Shakespeare! I almost called back. But then I realized: He wasn’t Keith. We weren’t playing the nickname game.

  So instead I just said, “Hey,” and we walked over to each other. An awkward moment followed—were we supposed to hug? Shake hands? Curtsy? In the end, we just smiled and asked each other how things were going. A few weeks ago, even this basic exchange would have made my heart flutter. But now my heart was saying, I’m just too exhausted right now to flutter. I would if I could. Sorry.

  “You ready for all of the Sarahs and Jacquelines?” I asked.

  “One of them’s your best friend, right?”

  I hadn’t told him this. Who’d told him this?

  I figured it would be silly to deny it.

  “Yeah—Amelia. Be nice to her.”

  “Amelia. Cool.”

  Annie’s assistant Phil came over and explained to us what would happen: Each actress would do two scenes with Dallas, one as Sarah and one as Jacqueline. There would be three cameras taping, and Tillman Lane, one of the Good As Gold directors, would be directing. Once the taping was done, the footage would be edited into a scene (just like it would have been for a real show), and then all of the scenes would be put on a tape for everyone to take a look at before the big-decision conversation occurred.

  We were actually taping on one of the Good As Gold sets that wasn’t being used that week—Brick and Loni Madison’s bedroom. Because my mother’s character, Geneva, hadn’t been involved with Brick or friends with Loni for quite a while, I didn’t really have many associations with the room itself. Still, it was strange to be bringing my characters into my mother’s world. I expected us to be kicked out at any moment.

  “I grew up here,” I told Dallas.

  “In this very room?” he joked.

  “Yeah. I didn’t know rooms were supposed to have four walls until I was old enough to leave.”

  Dallas chuckled, and I was starting to feel better about life in general when suddenly there was a voice behind him.

  “Dallas?” it asked—and Dallas immediately responded. He half turned, then opened his arm out so a stellarly beautiful girl could be held by it.

  “Mallory, have you met Francesca?”

  “No,” I said, wedging up a smile on my face. “It’s so great to meet you.”

  “You too,” Francesca said, offering a hand. It was so dainty and porcelain that I almost feared to shake it.

  “Francesca’s auditioning today,” Dallas explained. “But I guess you already know that.”

  Yes, I knew all about Francesca Moore. And it was even worse face to face.

  “They’re calling for you both on the set,” Francesca said. “It’s almost time to start shooting. Tillman looks like he’s ready to start taping.”

  “You know Tillman?” I asked.

  “No,” Francesca replied. “We just met. But he’s really great.”

  So she was already buddies with the director.

  This was bad news.

  And the way that Dallas kept his arm around her was bad news, too.

  ————

  Richard, Annie, and I were watching the auditions from the control room, with Phil as our messenger and Tracy keeping the other actresses company. (They would not be seeing one another audition.) Since the boom mics were open, we could hear everything that was said on the set.

  Francesca was the first up. She and Dallas talked quietly as Tillman set up all the shots. I tried not to look.

  “Pay attention,” Richard told me, pointing at Francesca and Dallas. “This part is as important as the rest. You can tell whether they’ll have chemistry or not.”

  Well, there was no doubt that Francesca and Dallas had chemistry—the kind of chemistry that was producing a poison in my gut. It was clear to me that they’d practiced the scenes together when they were back in New York, just like Amelia and I had been practicing here in LA. The difference was that while I was worse than amateur when it came to acting, Francesca and Dallas had perfected the rhythm of their scenes.

  But perhaps they had perfected it too perfectly….

  Francesca and Dallas were great together, but I thought it was clear: Francesca was no Sarah. She was too glamorous, too beautiful. There was nothing vulnerable about her. You’d never imagine Dallas—I mean, Ryan—leaving her for anyone else.

  She was better at being Jacqueline, who was a little bit colder and much more scheming than Sarah.

  “She’d be a good Jacqueline,” I said when the audition was through. “Not a Sarah, though.”

  “Shush,” Richard told me. “No comments until we see the edited tape. Right now, you’re watching a stage production, seeing it live. But we’re not casting them for a play—we’re casting them for a TV show. So we need to see how it plays on TV before we come to any conclusions.”

  He said this like it was the most obvious thing in the world. I’m new at this, I wanted to say. But at the same time I knew it wasn’t in my best interest to point it out.

  I couldn’t, however, help but laugh a few times when it was Genna’s turn to audition. For one, Dallas didn’t know what to do with her and the WAY she spoke her LINES. Also, her reading comprehension sometimes seemed to dip to The Cat in the Hat levels. She was doing a more than adequate job of acting with her cleavage, but (at least for me) her cleavage didn’t have very much interesting to say.

  Next, it was Alexis’s turn. Once again her mother was demanding to be on the set during the audition, and once again Annie had her barred. Part of me wanted to slip out and meet this famous screaming mother, but since my attention was needed for the taping, I instead just pictured my own mother out there, making just as much fuss.

  Dallas and Alexis chatted a little bit before the taping, and I could tell right away that there wouldn’t be too much off-set chemistry here—Alexis was just too shy. As Dallas put on his charms, Alexis kept her eyes on her shoes, nodding every now and then, smiling carefully when she did manage to look him in the eyes. Finally, the stage manager called her on set and showed her how the scene was going to play out. She nodded once, said she didn’t have any questions, and the taping began.

  The transformation wasn’t instantaneous. She didn’t suddenly become a brazen knockout or a great comedian. But it became remarkably clear that
Alexis not only understood Sarah but knew exactly how she’d sound and move. The chemistry that wasn’t there before suddenly materialized—not in a sexy way but instead in a real way. Watching Alexis and Dallas act it, I could believe that Sarah and Ryan had been in love with each other for a while … and were now falling apart.

  SARAH

  When something happens to me,

  you’re the one I want to

  tell. How do I erase that?

  It’s an impulse, Ryan. How do

  you erase an impulse? How do

  you make something that seems

  so natural go away?

  RYAN

  I don’t know, Sarah. I don’t

  know. All I can do is beg you

  to forget me.

  SARAH

  But now I’m going to remember

  you telling me to forget. You

  keep trying to erase, but you

  only write more.

  RYAN

  How many times do I have to

  tell you it’s over?

  SARAH

  Before I believe it?

  RYAN

  Yes. Before you believe it.

  SARAH

  I’d have to want to believe

  it. In which case, we’re both

  in trouble.

  I had written these lines. I had revised them at least a dozen times. I had read them over and over again with Amelia as we’d rehearsed. And still—it was like I was hearing them for the first time. Seeing them for the first time. And I got it, where these words were coming from. You think you’re writing fiction, but it ends up that it’s just pieces of your life that are coming out.

  Alexis was also good as Jacqueline, but she didn’t seem to understand the part and the motivations as well as she understood Sarah’s.