Likely Story!

by David Levithan

  “Hey?” I asked. “Do you forgive me? I had no choice.”

  It was sad, the way Keith tried to smile but couldn’t do it all the way. “I forgive you,” he said. “But at some point I want my girlfriend back.”

  ————

  Cha Cha Cha is an East Side restaurant that’s Latin in concept and Brazilian in detail. Located in Silverlake, east of the Highland Curtain, the place is a magnet for alterna-chicks and slim-suited architects. Francesca had picked this place presumably because she lived in nearby Echo Park. But I’m sure its coolness factored in.

  I scanned the crowd on the outdoor patio and saw Francesca and Dallas at a table in the back. She waved to get my attention and stood up as we approached, with Dallas following a few beats behind.

  He did not look happy.

  “Hope you weren’t waiting long,” I said as I air-kissed Francesca across the table. She extended her hand to Keith.

  “Hi, I’m Francesca and this is Dallas. You must be Keith.”

  “Good guesser, this one,” said Keith.

  “I knew Mallory had good taste, since she hired me and Dallas. But now it’s definitely confirmed.” Francesca didn’t sound like Francesca at all; instead she sounded like she was auditioning for a sitcom. “Sit. Sit. I ordered a pitcher of sangria and a bottle of Pellegrino. I didn’t know if you guys drank or not.”

  Dallas, I noticed, was sipping a margarita on the rocks. The salt stuck to the top of his lip, and I tried not to have any visible feelings about doing something about it. None of us was twenty-one, but Francesca’s aura of celebrity was sure to get us served. I, personally, wasn’t about to start drinking with my cast. Because my mother was such a boozehound, I usually saved the sips for special occasions. I remembered the time I had felt compelled to sample her “grown-up lemonade” when I was about nine. I spent the rest of that afternoon worshipping the porcelain goddess. Keith, I noticed, had quickly poured himself a glass of the sangria.

  “Don’t forget you’re driving,” I whispered.

  “Just one glass,” he said through the side of his mouth.

  “I’m really excited we could get together and do this,” said Francesca, taking control of the table.

  Keith raised his glass. “Let’s have a toast—to my beautiful girlfriend, and to her talented cast. Live long and prosper.”

  “Hear! Hear!” chirped Francesca as we clinked glasses. Dallas barely lifted his.

  The conversation turned to traffic and other polite, uninteresting things. Three of us chatted. One of us didn’t.

  “You’re awful quiet, Dallas,” I said.

  I kept catching him looking at Keith. He wouldn’t look at me.

  “Long day,” he said sullenly.

  “Well,” I said, “I’ve been working hard on making those rewritten scenes work. It’s not like the whole murder mystery is going to be alchemized into gold or anything, but I think we at least pressed it into a semi-precious gemstone. I’m thinking of making my mom the killer.”

  “But I wanted to be the killer!” Francesca exclaimed.

  I was shocked. “Really?”

  “Kidding, honey. Kidding. I know I’m playing the bad girl, but if you start me at murder, I’ll have nowhere to go. I don’t want to be poisoning the Deception Pass water supply by week six.”

  Francesca said something to Keith and he laughed. Was he enjoying himself? Strange.

  ————

  Dinner did not progress easily.

  At one point, Keith excused himself to go to the “little boys’ room.” Then Francesca’s phone rang.

  “It’s Alexis,” she said, then headed to a quieter spot to take the call.

  Leaving me and Dallas. Alone. Together.

  “He’s very nice,” Dallas said.

  “I know,” I said, irritated.

  “A shame,” he mumbled.

  “What?”

  He looked down at the table, then back up at me. He started to lean in and say something, but was interrupted by the waiter delivering his next drink. “Mallory …”

  He stopped.

  “What is it, Dallas?”

  He shook his head. I leaned in, but he leaned away.

  “It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.” He looked over my shoulder. “Francesca thinks this will cheer me up. But it only makes me miss home more, you know?”

  It was now clear what Dallas was looking at—Francesca, coming back from her call. She was like a circuit breaker to whatever had just connected the two of us.

  He took another gulp of his drink. The salt sat on his lip in that way again. I had to fight the urge to lick it off myself.

  Fortunately, she sat back down before I could give in.

  “She’s on her way over,” she said. “There was no avoiding it. She heard me and Dallas talking about it earlier, and someone”—she glared at Dallas—“invited her along.”

  “What?” Dallas asked. “Is she not allowed to be seen with us?”

  I had to agree with him. But clearly there was some Francesca/Alexis issue I didn’t know about.

  “I thought you two were friends,” I said.

  “My publicist would say that we are great friends,” Francesca replied. “But that doesn’t mean I trust her.”

  Which was funny to hear her say, since it was pretty much how I felt about Francesca, at least before seeing her in action tonight.

  The tension between Alexis and Francesca became clearer once Alexis arrived. Keith was back from the bathroom by then, and Alexis pulled a chair up to our table, placing herself smack-dab in the middle of the two boys.

  “Ooh, what’s this?” she asked Dallas. Then she took a swig before he could respond. “Yummers.”

  “Come here often, Alexis?” Francesca asked coolly.

  “Oh, sure. I totally love Mexican food.”

  “Then you should go to El Cid. This place serves Brazilian.”

  Alexis giggled. “Whatev.” She signaled to the waiter and pointed to the margarita. “I’ll have one of these.”

  Uh-oh, I thought. Who let the teen actress away from her domineering stage mother?

  “How’d you get here?” I asked. She was fifteen. There was no way she had a license.

  “I cabbed it. Mom has a meeting of CAMERA—you know, Child Actors’ Mothers Earning the Right Amount. They get together to bitch and moan about how evil everyone in Hollywood is. I’m supposed to be at home, learning my lines. One of you can give me a ride back, right?”

  “Sure,” Keith said, ever the good sport.

  “You’re so great,” Alexis said, putting her hand on his arm. “Who are you?”

  “Mallory’s boyfriend.”

  “Oh.” Alexis took her hand away … and moved her other hand onto Dallas’s arm. “How are you doing, Dallas?” she asked earnestly.

  I don’t want to see you this way, I thought.

  Francesca had a side conversation with the waiter, and Alexis was never served her own drink. She didn’t seem to notice. She seemed drunk on the company instead. The male company, that is.

  Talk turned to all the failed pilots Francesca, Alexis, and Dallas had been in—mostly Alexis, who was a California girl through and through. Though I’d been raised around cameras, she was raised on camera. Her first TV appearance was as a diapered baby in a Gerber commercial. Then came the pilots: Sweet Nothings (kids! running a candy shop!), Desperate Schoolgirls (girls! getting caught by the mean headmistress!), and Tweenville (for the Sci Fi channel! about tweens who take over a town after adults mysteriously disappear!). I sensed Alexis had told the story of each failure a million times before, but I had to admit it was still entertaining. Despite her lack of a breakout hit, she had worked constantly and had the cloying air of seen-it-all naiveté that is prevalent among child actors. The amazing thing was that it didn’t come across at all when she was playing Sarah.

  While Alexis was telling us all about how she’d blown her audition for the Law & Order: Child Services spin-off, Keith leane
d over to me and said, “You having fun, Holmes?”

  “My publicist would say, ‘Yeah,’ Watson. You?”

  “Not bad myself. So these are your new friends, huh?”

  I looked at Francesca, Dallas, and Alexis. It hadn’t even occurred to me to think of them that way. But I guess they were all I had, now that my high school friendships had flamed out.

  “I guess so,” I said. But even as I said it, it didn’t feel entirely true. It was more complicated than just friendship.

  I reached for Keith’s hand under the table, and he took it.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” I said.

  And I really was. Until I saw Dallas looking at our arms going under the table.

  I tried to catch his glance. But he’d already turned away.

  Dallas continued to phone his performance in for the rest of the week. Even the crew, who usually ignored anything not related to their union-sanctioned duties, were beginning to notice his lack of enthusiasm. One simple shot of him answering his phone took thirty-seven takes—an eternity when most shots get two or three takes, max.

  The only saving grace was that we were shutting down production early on Friday so that the cast could attend my mother’s Good As Gold Farewell Party. Naturally, I was expected to attend as well. But my thoughts were more focused on the Valentine’s Dance that night, and my quick departure after. In the interest of spending as much time with Keith as possible before I dashed, I’d invited him to the party, too, but he said he couldn’t miss a chemistry test. Scooter, however, had taken the day off school to attend. I was upstairs taking a catnap in my bedroom when my mother burst through the door with a crazed look in her eye.

  “Mallory! Wake up! It’s a disaster.”

  “What?” I asked groggily.

  “The chocolate fountain exploded and ruined my dress.”

  Indeed it had. My mother’s white organza gown looked like a black-and-white cookie.

  “What do you want me to do about it? I’m not a dry cleaner.”

  “That’s not what I meant, Little Miss Snotface. I need you to go downstairs and oversee the caterers while I find something, anything else to wear.”

  I wasn’t too worried about my mother’s problem. Her closet was stocked with more designer ready-to-wear than all the tents in Bryant Park combined. I was confident she would find a new ensemble in no time, equally as gaudy as the one she recently ruined.

  “Don’t you have a party coordinator?”

  “Of course I do, but I don’t trust her. Carly seems a little flighty.”

  If my own airborne mother considered this woman flighty, she had to be a born-again Amelia Earhart.

  I pushed myself off the bed with a burst of that helpful can-do attitude that usually results in a serious backfire. I was going to head downstairs, but my mother stopped me with a “You think you’re wearing that?”

  That was jeans and a flowy top—the kind that the children of the children of the sixties liked to wear. I was pretty sure my mother had bought it for my last birthday. Or one of her assistants had. It undoubtedly came from Fred Segal (upstairs, not downstairs).

  “It’s a garden party, Mom. This is supposed to be casual.”

  “Does this Vera Wang look casual?”

  “No, it looks like crapture now.”

  She almost slapped me. I backed away out of instinct and decided not to press it.

  “I’ll put on a sundress,” I conceded.

  “And heels,” she commanded.

  “I repeat, it’s a garden party—I’m not trudging around our muddy grass in heels. You get a dress, but I get flats.”

  “Fine. But do it fast because I’m afraid that chocolate fountain is going to flood the dance tent.”

  That sounded like biblical retribution to me. But I kept my mouth shut. My mother was ready to pounce on any insubordination and I was not about to give her more ammunition.

  Downstairs, in the yard where the tent had been erected, Scooter had already made himself at home. He was wearing a dandy suit and a Good As Gold souvenir tie that you can buy on the network’s Web site.

  “Scooter! I’m so glad to see you.” It was nice to have a friendly face in my home for once. “Stay by my side at all times. I don’t want to be left alone with any of these people.”

  “These people,” he said in all seriousness, “are not people. They are stars of Daytime. I’d love to be left alone with any of them.”

  “Sure, Scoot, but it’s not your show that cost them their jobs.” I’d managed to save a lot of the people from Good As Gold—like Gina—and add them to the staff of Likely Story, but not everyone had been able to switch ships.

  “Point taken. I’ll be your wingman at all times.”

  “You’re positively a dream,” I said. Because I knew he’d like to hear it that way.

  ————

  The party itself was so over the top that I wouldn’t be surprised if it could have been seen from space. The chocolate fountain was the least of the expensive horrors my mother had concocted. The Handwriting Analyst. The Juggler. The Caribbean Steel Drum Band playing Paul Simon songs.

  At first I felt fortunate to have Scooter glued to my side as the guests began arriving in their Beemers (those who had worked on Good As Gold for five years or more) and their Hondas (those whose characters had suffered mysterious and abrupt deaths off boats or planes when a younger, more attractive female character had been introduced to seduce, marry, and betray one of the male leads). After sixteen years of watching these day players come and go, I’d forgotten who many of them were. Desperate to approximate intimacy with me (a new possible employer), they all gushed like oil wells during a boom time. I would have had no idea who some were had Scooter not been there to identify each and every one. He even provided the perfect comments, saying things like “Laura Brock, you were absolutely devastating in that scene when they told you that you’d been exposed to bird flu,” or “It’s so neat to meet you, Mr. Strich—your marriage to Muffi Mattison was second only to Luke and Laura’s.”

  The guests beamed at the comments. It made them feel like real stars again. Were they ever real stars? In Hollywood it goes from Movies to TV to Music in terms of Celebrity Importance. There are exceptions that prove the rule, of course, but soap stars are somewhere around that guy who was once on that arc of Law & Order and Oprah’s latest celebrity dietician.

  After about half an hour of conversations I wouldn’t remember under penalty of death, my mother reappeared. Like any lesser goddess, she made her presence known with everything short of medieval trumpet players. She sashayed down our backyard patio staircase (my mom LOVES a good staircase—I think it dates to her days watching Gone with the Wind as a girl) into the party, showing off her new gown. A Balenciaga, I think.

  Everyone fawned over her like she was the Queen of England. Or, rather, the Queen of Daytime … recently deposed. Yes, she was on my show, but she wasn’t the STAR. And that’s what counted to these people: stardom. They woke up in the morning wondering how to get it. They went to sleep dreaming of it. Very few got to wake up living it.

  Scooter continued to stay glued to my arm when my own cast started showing up. In all of the madness of party preparation, I hadn’t really thought obsessively about the fact that was striking me now: Dallas was about to see my house. It’s not like there was anything embarrassing around—my mother was not the type to hang up third-grade studio portraits or blue ribbons from pony camp. But, when it came down to it, I was a little embarrassed by the lack of embarrassing things. Until you got to my bedroom, you wouldn’t even know I lived in the house.

  Dallas and Francesca were in nearly matching garden party outfits—him looking suave in a vest and skinny tie, with flat-front Costume National pants, his white sleeves immaculately rolled up to look like he hadn’t bothered; her looking like a low-key flapper, complete with beaded purse. I noticed she had braved heels. Behind them, Alexis looked fresh as a breeze in a floral print, and Javier look
ed ready to party in South Beach in a Rag & Bone T-shirt designed to emphasize every contour of his chest. Even Richard looked like he’d worked hard on what to wear, sporting a fancy navy blazer with hairline pinstripes of silver. He’d brought my mother roses, which she accepted with delight.

  I sensed Scooter teetering next to me.

  “Mallory,” he said nervously. “Do you think I could—I mean, would it be okay if I—I mean, I should probably go say hi to your mom, right? Because, you know, she invited me.”

  “It’s okay, wingman. I cut you loose.”

  I watched as he joined the cluster around my mother, like a member of the Royal Court. I suppose for him it was like being at the Daytime TV version of Buckingham Palace. I envied that a little. Growing up amidst it, more aware of the skeletons in the closet than the gilded wood doors that covered said closets, I was rarely overwhelmed by a Hollywood party. I knew these things got written up a lot in magazines as glamorous “don’t-you-wish-you-were-there” affairs. Three photos of anything can make it look good. But with all the tragic facelifts and early nineties gowns dusted off by ladies who once had money but now only had memories of it, Us Weekly would be lucky to get one usable shot of the Good As Gold last hurrah. Hopefully, it would have Dallas in it. Maybe a little celebrity would give him back the spark we so desperately needed.

  Or would it send him fleeing to New York?

  Dallas and Francesca were standing in front of the slightly ominous pink bougainvillea bush, which had started out in a small corner of the yard and now nearly encompassed the pool house. The flowers made it look something like a fairy-tale cottage or one of those weird Thomas Kinkade paintings with old mills and candlelit windows you see in malls. Except that inside this sprightly cottage were not kindhearted homespun peasants and their enchanted friends but rather the accumulation of lots of unused pool equipment. Neither my mother nor I swam. Nobody swims in LA. It’s like walking.

  I realized I had been standing there, in the middle of my backyard, with the blank look of a girl who’s seen too much, done too much, and been ignored too much in her short lifetime. It’s a stare you’ll see at a lot of barbecues in Bel Air during June: the empty eye that comes with being treated by your famous or rich parents like an accessory. That relationship is something that makes you feel like you’re competing against a Birkin bag or a canary diamond or the power shuffle at Paramount. The kids almost always lose that competition.