Likely Story!

by David Levithan

  malcontent: truly, I’d only drown. can we go under the sea another night soon?

  rocketboy: just as long as you’re still a part of my world.

  As soon as we signed off, I was going to log off altogether. But then, even though it had been months since we’d really spoken, I instinctively looked at my buddy list to see if Amelia was on. It used to be that I couldn’t end a night until I’d told her about it.

  Her screen name, of course, was nowhere to be found. She’d blocked me as soon as we’d rifted. It’s amazing how easily a friend can disappear from your life, if she wants to.

  I admit: Early on, right after it happened, I would go on under a new screen name, just so I could see if she was on. I never tried to make contact with her or mislead her. I just wanted to see if she was on.

  Not tonight, though. Tonight, I would just feel blocked. Shut out.

  Our friendship was far beyond my reach.

  I was jolted awake by the shrill crow of my cell phone at five-thirty the next morning.

  “Mallory?” a voice asked when I answered. It took me a moment to realize: Greg. It was Greg’s voice.

  “Greg?”

  “I’m so sorry. I won’t even ask, ‘Did I wake you?’ because then you’d just say no to be polite and I would still feel awful.”

  “I think I’d say yes, Greg. What is it?”

  “I have Trip on the line for you. New York time, you know.”

  I groaned. “Put him through.”

  Poor Greg—when Trip was on New York time, he probably had to be in the office at five in the morning. Because God forbid a network executive should ever have to dial direct….

  “Mallory!” Trip sounded as artificially bright as a sunlamp. “Just wanted to check in with you—I talked to Webster and Richard, and they filled me in on the murder and the new direction. I just wanted to tell you I think it’s a fantastic decision, and I’m sure it will get the show to where we need it to be. If you have any problems whatsoever, just give me a holler—through Greg, of course.”

  “Well, I …,” I started to say.

  “Oh, Mallory? I’m afraid my car is here, and I have some calls I have to make in the car. Give my love to your mother. Wait—scratch that. Keep it all for yourself, okay? And good luck today.”

  I didn’t even get the b in bye out before I had the dial tone. I wanted Greg to come back on the line, but he no doubt had to dial all of Trip’s other morning calls.

  Once I’m awake, there’s no getting back to sleep, so I went over to my computer and tried to write. It was strange, though—now that we had a staff of writers, it wasn’t like I could just sit down and make the scripts up on my own. I had to wait my turn, and it had to all fit into the master plan.

  “Forget that,” I told myself. I would just sit down and write a Likely Story scene, whether we ended up using it or not. I decided to write a scene for Ryan and his new girlfriend, Jacqueline. Which meant, of course, I was really writing a scene for Dallas and Francesca.

  JACQUELINE

  Do you still think about her?

  RYAN

  Who?

  JACQUELINE (laughing)

  I’ll take that as a yes.

  RYAN (sheepish)

  Not much. Every now and then.

  JACQUELINE

  Why, Romeo? Why?

  RYAN

  You can’t just let go of

  someone instantly. They

  linger with you. It takes a

  long time to get them out of

  your thoughts, even if you no

  longer see them.

  JACQUELINE

  Do you think Sarah still

  loves you?

  RYAN

  She’s with someone else now.

  She has Keith.

  JACQUELINE

  Keith?

  RYAN

  I meant Marco.

  JACQUELINE

  But you said Keith.

  RYAN

  You’re trying to trap me into

  saying it.

  ACQUELINE

  Saying what?

  RYAN

  That I love …

  Okay, stop. I had to stop.

  I climbed into bed and tried to fall back asleep.

  Forty very awake minutes later, I got back out of bed.

  “You look horrible!” my mother said as soon as I got to the kitchen.

  “Did you even sleep?” I asked her. “Or did you just stay here all night, waiting to deliver that line?”

  “You can’t look that horrible today of all days! You look like death warmed in a toaster oven!”

  I wanted to grab the nearest spatula and do mean things with it. Death warmed in a toaster oven was one of the off-kilter phrases the writers had often given Mom’s character, Geneva, on Good As Gold. She was so lost in her soap opera world that she believed people talked like this in real life, too.

  “I haven’t even showered yet,” I pointed out.

  “Well, shower!”

  “Can I eat something first?”

  “No!”

  When I returned to the kitchen, showered and brushed, Mom still looked on edge. We headed to the set together, but before I left for the writers’ office, she told me to be ready to go to Gina for a “fix-up” at eleven-thirty.

  “Why?” I asked, mystified.

  She came up to me and spoke in the low sotto voce she reserved for important news like Daytime Emmy nominations and Q scores.

  “We’ll be having lunch today at The Ivy.”

  I knew what this meant: The only reason people ate there was to show other people that they can eat there. Evidence: I’d already been there once with Richard.

  “I have too much work to do, Mom,” I pleaded. “And I’ve already been to that chow palace of the damned.”

  “It is work,” she intoned with a Cleopatra-like seriousness. “Perhaps bigger than we can even dream.”

  Mother picked up a strand of my tangled hair and said, “This still needs to be fixed. And the outfit—it’s nice but not ‘pow!’ I’ll have Gina make this a priority. Be there by eleven-thirty. The reservation is at one.”

  I knew my mother had to be proud of this. Reservations at one were the hardest to get.

  “Nice,” I said.

  “I know. Don’t be late.”

  The wackiness continued when I got to the writers’ office.

  “Go ask Richard about the sexy teachers,” Tamika told me as soon as I walked in. “He’s in his office.”

  So I went straight down the hall to Richard’s office. Unlike the writers’ office, which was a sprawl of paper and empty Vitaminwater bottles, Richard’s was immaculate.

  I didn’t knock. He didn’t seem surprised.

  “Good morning, Mallory,” he said, pleasantly enough.

  “Tell me about the sexy teachers, Richard,” I replied.

  He didn’t miss a beat. “As you’ve no doubt just heard, the network would like us to add a pair of sexy teachers to the show, and I said yes.”

  I tried to keep my calm. “How sexy are these teachers going to be, Richard? Will they wear bikinis to class?”

  Richard sighed. “First of all, one of them is male, and we’re not the kind of show that puts a grown man in a bikini. Second, the idea is for them to be sexy together, if you get my drift.”

  “Richard …”

  “Look—this is compromise, Mallory. You don’t want your characters to be having sex? Fine. But someone has to be having sex, and while I would advocate your mother being the one to have sex, I am guessing Trip Carver would have a thing or two to say about that. So that means new characters. New sexy characters who can have the sexless sex preferred on daytime soap operas.”

  “The sexy teachers will only be having sex with each other, not with the students?”

  “Correct.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “You don’t have to like it. You just have to do it. Annie’s already working on the casting.”


  “I’ll talk to the writers,” I said, and moved to leave.

  Before I could get out the door, Richard told me one more thing.

  “Part of getting what you want is knowing how to keep it,” he said. “Remember that.”

  I had little doubt I could forget it now.

  ————

  The writers seemed jazzed to have some sexy teachers to work with. Apparently, if you’re writing five episodes a week, it helps to have more than five significant characters.

  I was less jazzed when eleven-thirty came and it was time for me to be “fixed up.”

  Jim the Wardrobe Boy sat me down on a small folding stool. He started going through racks of clothes and picking out various blouses, mini-dresses, halters, and such.

  Finally he found a Betsey Johnson number that was mostly canary yellow but had a small cornflower print that gave it a soft blue under-hue. “Try this,” he dictated.

  Once the dress was on, I realized Jim knew what he was doing. I looked good—a little young, maybe, but it made my not-so-notable cleavage look like gangbusters. And suddenly I realized I had pretty nice legs. They looked even better when he shoved my feet into Jimmy Choos and I was suddenly four inches taller.

  Jim gave me the once-over and clucked with approval. “Fix the hair and you’ll kill ’em, Madame Producer.” He pronounced Madame with a French accent—two loooong, luxurious ahhhs.

  Kill ’em? Who was I trying to kill?

  When I got to the makeup trailer, I asked, “Gina—what the heck is going on with this Extreme Makeover, Mallory Edition? I mean, I know I wasn’t exactly Vogue Cover Girl of the Month this morning, but still … I could’ve just worn the Marc Jacobs from yesterday if everyone was so concerned.”

  “There are two reasons for that, Mallory,” said Gina as she worked on my hair like Edward Scissorhands with a meth problem. “One is that you are too young for this Marc Jacobs. I respect your mother’s attempt at buying you appropriate levels of fashion for your new position, but she’s got some things wrong. This Marc Jacobs is for thirtysomethings who want to look sixteen. Not sixteen-year-olds trying to look thirty.”

  “And this makes me look sixteen?” I asked incredulously.

  “We’re getting there….” I could hear in her voice that she was leaving normal reality and was becoming a follicle fascist where every hair was a potential revolutionary just waiting to cause havoc and bring down her carefully constructed empire.

  I tried to get her attention back. “Gina!” I hollered. “Why am I getting made over like I’m a drab housewife who got lucky on Oprah?”

  Gina didn’t say anything at first. Instead, she scuttled across the ever-shrinking trailer to the wig, fall, and emergency toupee closet, pretending to search for something. You might not think that a teen soap would need an emergency toupee supply, but like the Red Cross with its blood banks, you never know when disaster will strike. Better to be prepared than not for the inevitable day when your main star has decided to shave his head during a drunken night on the Sunset Strip. I learned a few weeks ago during one of the infinity-plus meetings I’d taken that fake hair was a major part of every soap opera’s budget. Who knew so many daytime stars suffered from female-pattern baldness?

  Since my hair was fine (for now?), it still didn’t explain why I was undergoing a drastic makeover, from young upstart exec to starlet lite.

  I voiced this again to Gina, and to her credit, she couldn’t evade my questions any longer.

  “You didn’t hear any of this from me—all right?” she said in a hushed tone.

  “Gina, of course. Nothing that passes between us would ever become public.”

  “It’s not the public I’m worried about. It’s your mother.” She came back to my chair and started fussing with my hair again. It was becoming shorter and shorter. “You are not supposed to know, but network publicity has tipped off all the paparazzi in town to the fact that you and your mother will be lunching at The Ivy today. And by ‘tipped off,’ I mean they’ve begged, bargained, and blackmailed to get you coverage. The publicists are planning on getting this in every celebrity rag and blog by week’s end.”

  “I have no business in front of the flashbulbs!” I protested. “That’s for people like—”

  “People like you.” Richard’s timing was almost eerily perfect. “Sorry to break it to you, sweet cheeks, but you are the story. You and your mom are the perfect story. A publicist couldn’t dream this up no matter how many Ambien he took and how many hours he slept on his two-thousand-thread-count sheets. Daytime is dying, but you are the Messiah. And to quote Shakespeare, ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’—you and your mom together at The Ivy. It couldn’t be better if she was passing you the Olympic Torch while you fed starving orphans.”

  “So now I’m just a pawn?”

  “You’re not a pawn—you’re a ploy,” Richard responded calmly. Clearly he had been expecting this. “We wanted you to go unawares so that you’d look natural and young and innocent in front of the cameras. It would be one thing if we wanted to manufacture a feud between you and your mom—we could’ve taken that angle. But we all decided the torch-passing was a better scenario. It makes you look important and it transitions your mother into the older-woman roles she’s now destined to play.”

  “This was her idea, wasn’t it?”

  Richard nodded.

  I stood up. “It’s always about her, isn’t it?” I said to Gina. “This is about getting her in the spotlight, not the show.”

  “Sit down,” Richard said.

  I didn’t.

  “Fine. You can take this standing up. I know your whole life you’ve seen your mother as one of the biggest stars in the universe. But it’s a very small universe, Mallory. Soap stars are never A-list, except at soap conventions. They’re not like movie stars. They’re like made-for-TV-movie stars. Your mother has had to fight for every single mention she’s gotten in People. She’s had to scheme and seduce and spend for every minute on Entertainment Tonight. She’s getting a burst of attention now because everyone’s nostalgic about Good As Gold ending. But that won’t last. It’s a vicious cycle—you can’t get power if you can’t command attention, and you can’t command attention if you don’t have power. Am I right, Gina?”

  Gina nodded sadly.

  “So, yes, Mallory, you’re being used here. I’m sorry if it offends you to wear heels, although clearly you love those shoes or else you wouldn’t be strutting like an aristocratic peacock right now. You are going to do this for the show, and you are going to do this for your mother. Because we never would’ve gotten the network publicists to do it for her alone. And she needs the attention. Not just because she’s a vain, insecure television actress. But because the attention is her life, Mallory. You of all people should know that. So sit back down so Gina can finish your hair.”

  Gina, white as a Donna Karan oxford, got back to plying my hair with gels and fudges to give it that certain something. I didn’t even care what that something was anymore.

  Richard continued, “It’s crucial for us to maintain Good As Gold’s audience for Likely Story. Part of your job is to make that happen. And yes, in a perfect world, the sheer brilliance of your scripts would be enough, but since I doubt they’ll be winning any Pulitzers anytime soon, what we really need is FREE PUBLICITY. There are no sweeter words to a network’s ear—except maybe high profit margin. The point is: You and your mother having lunch at The Ivy means that you are players, that you are buzz-worthy, and that the four corpses who still watch Good As Gold will watch your show, too, so help me God. Now put on that mascara and look like a good girl and go eat your sixty-dollar Cobb salad next to every other It girl in town. Smile for all those cameras. Every single one, Mallory. We need them.”

  I was stunned into silence. I’d always resented my mother’s publicity demands, but now I saw they were part of the deal. If you wanted people to care about your show, you had to make them care about you. Richard was right. This w
as my job.

  I started to sweat in my armpits. I am not a society girl, I thought. I can’t do this. Richard kept glaring at me. I wanted to call Keith right then and tell him to pick me up.

  At that moment, Dallas walked into the trailer, looked me up and down, and said, “Hey, great cut.” Then he grabbed a Chap Stick from the counter and was gone before I could respond.

  I stared at my new reflection in the mirror as a way of avoiding any eye contact with Richard. He sat down in the other chair. Out of habit, Gina began to go at his hair.

  “Just a little around the sides, please,” Richard told her, as if he was accustomed to having his hair cut at any particular time in any random chair. “Focus on getting the premature gray out if you can. And, Mallory, remember not to fraternize with the actors. It will only cause trouble.”

  Fraternize? I hadn’t even said a word to Dallas! Were my thoughts that obvious?

  “I know,” I sputtered. “But …” I couldn’t think of how to finish that sentence.

  As I moved to leave, Richard reached out to me like a lazy invalid from his barber’s chair.

  “You, me—post-lunch. We got some potatoes to hash-brown, if you know what I mean.”

  I had no idea what he meant. Though just to get out of there, I repeated, “You, me—post-lunch. I’ll be so post it’ll be post-modern.”

  “Funny you mention that, Mal,” Richard said, relaxed this time because Gina was rubbing his temples. “Post-modernism figures heavily in what we need to discuss. I hope you like it.”

  Just then, the siren horn of a luxury automobile bleated like a dying lamb and I knew it was too late for me to escape. I stepped outside into the piercing California noonday sun and began my forced march toward Hollywood destiny.