Likely Story!

by David Levithan

  As I headed over to Dallas and Francesca, Dallas raised his can of Pepsi One in my direction in a mock toast. I had only gotten the “hi” out of my mouth when, like all experienced monarchs, my mother took her stage—in this case, our gazebo. The day was just starting to edge into twilight, and she looked glorious. Somehow, my mother could even control natural lighting. Did she have a contract with God?

  “Thank you, everyone, for coming,” she said grandly. “It has been truly amazing to work with all of you for at least part of the twenty-three years I spent on Good As Gold. We had our ups and downs, of course. Fortunately, of the six of us sent to death row, only one of us was actually gassed. Speaking of which, we’re thrilled to see you here, Asa.”

  Tepid applause echoed off stucco and stone walls around the garden. Asa waved his hand in the air. My mother was probably upset that the applause had not been for her and that she’d never had the opportunity to be gassed (and, of course, revived … although that hadn’t been Asa’s fate). Her character had been found guilty of a capital crime twice … but both verdicts had been overturned. One was because the judge was her secret lover (inside the prison! Is that allowed anywhere?). The second time she discovered that Ramona, her arch-nemesis and cell mate, had actually been the murderess. (Small world.) But Ramona didn’t get “gassed,” as my mother so delicately put it, either. I’m not sure what circumstances led to that. It likely involved blackmail or marriage or sex. Probably the combination of all three.

  Framed by the lattice of the gazebo, my mother continued:

  “I don’t want to take up the spotlight, but I think we all know that Good As Gold’s untimely end was foolish. And I have a feeling they’ll be regretting their decision any week now. No show will ever be as great as ours. Remember that. Remember. “She paused with that classic soap pause—the kind where you feel like the actor is marking time until the next commercial break.

  “So get back to eating and drinking—we’ve got gobs and gobs of hors d’oeuvres and champagne. I love you. I truly, truly do.”

  I had spent over a decade and a half being annoyed, flustered, or angry at my mother. Now I was furious. Not because she hadn’t even mentioned Likely Story. I understood that—who wants to bring up the show that’s replacing a canceled one at the cancelee’s party? But the part about no show ever being as great … and the fact that the mistake of canceling Good As Gold would be evident “any week now”—how could that not be taken as the biggest maternal bitch slap since Medea killed her kids?

  That’s when I realized: I didn’t have to stand here and take this. I could leave.

  I went to my room and fumed for a while. That’s where Javier and Tamika found me.

  “Girl, you get out of that bed,” Tamika ordered.

  “No,” I said.

  “Stuff is going on downstairs.”

  “And I don’t want any part of it,” I said, burying my face in my ergonomic pillow.

  “Let me take it from here,” Javier interjected. He sat down on my bed, stroked my hair in that pleasing but completely nonsexual way that only a gay friend can. He took a deep breath. “Okay, there is no proof to confirm this, but I overheard Alexis conspiring with Richard and your mom.”

  “Conspiring? What is this? The Bush administration? Alexis is fifteen. She’s not capable.”

  “Now, I admit I had some of the Good As Gold punch—which is strong, I’ll admit—but I heard her say to your mom that Likely Story would be a much bigger hit if … well … her character was revealed to be Vienna’s long-lost daughter!”

  “What?” I bolted up. “You must have misheard.”

  “I hope I did, babe,” said Javier. “But you had best be checking that out.”

  “What did Richard say?”

  “He didn’t say yes … and he didn’t say no. Then he started to tell your mom about how he’d obsessed over Good As Gold when he was in college. It was a little freaky.”

  So now Alexis was working her own angle while Dallas agonized, Richard went gaga over my mom’s old role, and the opening credits needed to be reshot and re-edited in a nanosecond.

  This, I was discovering, was the difference between writing and television:

  In writing, it’s just you and your words.

  In television, there are so many other people who can mess them up.

  They say to keep your friends close and your enemies closer. But who could tell the difference at this point?

  The party wound down after my mom showed the gag reel. Gag reels are usually made up of flubs on the set and are traditionally shown at cast parties for fun. But instead of bloopers my mother had assembled a fifteen-minute montage of her greatest hits. My mother’s greatest acting talent has always been in reacting. Reacting to bad news. Reacting to scandals exposed. Reacting to the séance in which her great-grandmother came back to life and told her about the family curse that started when her great-great-grandfather had stolen some magic beans.

  Most of the other actors were pissed they hadn’t been included in the reel. But while all that drama was being screened, I tried to dig around the ambrosia salads and deviled quail eggs to see if there was any more gossip about the new Alexis-Mom-Richard axis. Though my Nancy Drew routine was hardly producing any results beyond what I already knew, and Javier was worth about half a Bobbsey Twin, it was all interrupted by Scooter, who had the most shocking news of all: The Valentine’s Dance was less than half an hour away.

  The time had indeed slipped away like sands through the hourglass. The sun was setting on Sunset Boulevard and Keith would be here any moment. Since Scooter was already dressed to the nines, he was heading straight over to Bryce McKibbon’s house on Doheny to meet up with their friends. He had brought Bryce’s boutonniere with him and had left it resting peacefully in the Sub-Zero fridge while everything else continued to wither around me.

  I hoped Keith would be the fashionably late type so I might have a little time. I jumped into crisis mode—the zero to sixty in four seconds flat that made me feel like a sixteen-year-old Lambo (as in-rghini).

  Tamika was heading toward the valets, tossing her scarf behind her like she always did. I raced down the lawn and grabbed her by the arm.

  “You can’t leave yet,” I yelped.

  “I’ve been roasting like a Peruvian potato in this sun for hours, Mal. And I’m meeting some of my USC film friends at the ArcLight in, like, twenty minutes.”

  “This is an emergency. I have to get dressed for the Valentine’s Dance. I totally let the time get away from me and I’m not ready.” I took a deep breath and pleaded, “Please. I need girl support.”

  “You got it, honey. I had a homecoming debacle my sophomore year that took two years of therapy and four prescriptions to get over. I vowed never to let that happen to anyone again. I almost started a foundation.”

  We started back up the hill to the house.

  “How much time do we have?” she asked.

  “None.” I grabbed a white rose from a nearby table and bit the stem off with my teeth. This would have to do for a boutonniere.

  “Do you have a dress?”

  “I meant to borrow one from wardrobe today, but I totally forgot.”

  That’s when God gave me just a little gift. There was Gina, handing out flower arrangements to departing guests. I quickly explained the situation.

  Scant seconds later, we had ascended the stairs and were in my room working like a well-oiled machine. Gina was combing out my hair while I was applying the first coat of base to cover my red skin. Tamika was ransacking my closet looking for a dress.

  “This closet is a wasteland,” she said. “I’ve seen monks with better color sense than you.”

  “I have some dresses in there, don’t I? What about that black cocktail one?”

  “You mean this?” she said, holding up a knee-length charcoal Miss Sixty with ruffled taffeta princess sleeves.

  “Yeah.” I frowned.

  “Maybe if you gave it a dye job and ruffle-
ectomy before transporting yourself back in time five years.”

  “You might have to go back more than five years,” mumbled Gina.

  “You’re not helping,” I told them both.

  Just as I was thinking I couldn’t get any more despondent, my mother waltzed in with a snifter of brandy and a haughty air of self-congratulation wafting from her like Chanel No. 5.

  “What’s going on in here?”

  “Don’t worry about it, Mom.”

  “Don’t you think it was a wonderful party? Everyone had such a splendid time.”

  “Yes, it was,” said Gina. “Everyone was complimenting the canapés. And your dress! Everyone loved your dress.”

  My mother, it seemed, was a little confused to find Gina out of the dressing room and in my bedroom.

  “Why is Gina doing your hair? And who is this black girl rooting through your closet?”

  “That’s Tamika, Mom. You’ve met her a bunch of times. She’s a writer on the show.”

  “Oh, Tamika!” she said, as if she actually remembered. “I didn’t recognize you with your new hairstyle.”

  Tamika had not changed her hairstyle in five years, but whatever. I just wanted my mother out of my room.

  “I’m running late for my high school dance,” I told her. “I know that surely means nothing to you. Keith will be here any minute and I don’t have anything to wear.”

  “Why didn’t you say so? I just asked what was going on. There’s no reason to be as nasty as a divorce lawyer about it.”

  I suppose this was true if you didn’t count the fact that she’d announced to everyone at the party that I would essentially never be as great as her, and that she was probably plotting against me with my producer and female star.

  But desperate times called for desperate measures, and I thought my mother, in her drunken stupor of geniality, might offer a way out. So I sucked it up and said, “I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m really frazzled.”

  My mother lolled about on my bed, kicking off her heels to reveal the panty hose beneath. She flexed her toes and mentioned, in an offhanded way, as if she was telling me that soy milk was in the fridge, that she had something that might work.

  “Why didn’t we think of that?!” Tamika exclaimed with the gusto of a Scrabble enthusiast who’d just found a way to use her ten-point Q for a triple-word score. “Your mom’s closet must be chock-full of couture just waiting to be served à flambée at your high school gym.”

  Tamika, knowing my mother blissfully less well than I, bounded out of the room behind her with glee—hopeful for the classic Tom Ford–era Gucci jersey dress my mother surely had (but I knew would never let me wear).

  Then there was a rare moment of silence. Gina was fussing and spritzing, but I felt all the pressures of the day collide in a perfect storm of excitement, dread, anger, exhaustion, and, somewhere, buried deep beneath the rest, hope.

  It was overwhelming.

  Gina saw this and asked me what was going on. I told her about the attempted coup.

  “This isn’t Communist Russia,” she said consolingly. “No one is planning any coup. Your mother has never seen a pie that she hasn’t stuck her finger into. I haven’t heard anything, which is unusual if there is in fact something to be heard. But I’ll put my ear to the ground and report back.”

  I pulled myself together just in time for Tamika and my mother to burst back into the room.

  “Here it is!” Tamika squealed while my mother polished off the last of her brandy.

  And, indeed, there it was. A timeless, midnight-blue silk floor-length dress. Low-cut in the back. Demure but seductive in the front—like a whispered, secret promise.

  But would it fit? The Million-Dollar Question. And the answer was a resounding Yes.

  As Gina dabbed on the last bits of eyeliner and lipstick, my mother stood back and gushed, “You look like a zillion euros. Or ten zillion yen.”

  Don’t let her fool you, I reminded myself. She’s out to get you.

  The doorbell rang. Prince Charming had arrived, and Cinderella was heading for her ball.

  There are four major dances every year at my high school. Prom and homecoming are the most important, with the various coronations and traditions surrounding them. The Snow Ball is probably the least important. The Valentine’s Dance is the lone fiery ruby in the midst of a drab desert of February. Its timing on the calendar gets it more attention than it deserves. Kind of like the Golden Globes.

  Keith looked amazing in his thrift-store Duckie Brown suit. The French cuffs of his shirt peeked out from the blazer while the cuff links—one of the few things his father had left him—glinted with the reflected glow of the dashboard. Tom Waits crooned softly in the background about the heart of Saturday night.

  Gina had snapped the obligatory digital pre-dance pics that will never be downloaded or printed. We made a handsome couple—I was pretty sure of that. I wanted people to tell us what beautiful babies we’d have. (Not that I was looking to test this hypothesis anytime soon.)

  When we pulled into the school parking lot, it was already jammed with limos and kids driving their daddies’ cars. A Hummer limo was blocking three of the lanes while its passengers disembarked. Behind it was gridlock. Unwilling to wait for the traffic to move or the ice caps to melt, whichever came first, Keith made a fourteen-point turn and took us back out of the parking lot. We found street parking about a block away.

  I started to climb out of the car, but Keith stopped me.

  “I have something for you,” he said.

  Oh, no. A Valentine’s gift. I knew I’d forgotten yet another thing this week. He was about to give me something wonderful, no doubt, and I had nothing but a flight to the Pacific Northwest to offer in return.

  Keith clicked open the glove compartment and revealed a perfect little powder-blue box that I did not need to inspect in order to know that it had Tiffany & Co. printed in black letters on the top.

  “Oh, Keith, you shouldn’t have….” Whatever it was, it must have cost him years of his California Pizza Kitchen salary.

  “Wait ’til you open it. You might hate it.”

  “That’s doubtful when it comes in a box from Tiffany’s.”

  “It’s not an omelet.”

  “I was hoping for pancakes.”

  However, instead of breakfast, the box held the most perfect and lovely silver charm bracelet. It had one charm, a little heart. Keith was good—really good. And what I couldn’t tell him was that the effort he must have made to get it for me meant just as much to me as the bracelet itself.

  “I love it,” I gushed as he undid the clasp and fit it around my wrist.

  “I figure we can get some more charms for upcoming big events. Like our anniversary or your big premiere.”

  I kissed him long and hard, meaning every second of it. Then I stopped and looked away, embarrassed.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “I feel like a total jerk.”

  “Why?”

  I looked out the window, trying but failing not to stare at the gorgeous bracelet.

  “I forgot to get you a present.”

  “Oh. Well, I wasn’t expecting one. Valentine’s Day is sort of for girls anyway,” he said sympathetically.

  “It’s just another example of how well you treat me and how distant and detached I’ve become. I want you to know that I’m trying, I really am, to get my life in order. You belong at the top.”

  “Hey, hey …,” he said, using his thumb to stop the forming tear in my eye before it could ruin Gina’s work. “Mallory, I know you’re overwhelmed right now. I mean, we’re teenagers—we’re always overwhelmed unless we’re stoned or medicated into oblivion or just plain stupid. So it’s only natural that you’re having to learn how to balance things. I’m not going anywhere. I’m gonna be here to help you figure it out. You waited for me—now it’s my turn.”

  I smiled weakly. “I love you.”

  Keith smiled and pecked me on the
lips. Then he put his mouth to my ear and softly said, “I love you, too.” He pulled away. “Now let’s go dance to some bad white-boy rap.”

  The dance was being held in the school’s new Culture and Science Building. How and why these two disciplines came to be married is still a mystery to me. A wonder of poor design, the building has a huge center room that is never used for anything other than the occasional physics club meeting or impromptu drama rehearsal. Tonight it had been draped lazily with crepe paper and balloons that showed a surprising lack of imagination. With so many home design shows popping up all over cable, I assumed the decoration committee would have set a higher standard for itself.

  In a surprising bit of eighties variation from the DJ, we entered the room just as he dropped “Somebody to Love” by Queen.

  “I love this song,” Keith exclaimed, seized by the blaring guitar. He grabbed my hand and pulled me behind him toward the dance floor. No one was on it, but that didn’t stop him from gettin’ jiggy with his vintage glam rock. I grinned and joined him. I loved that I had a boyfriend who loved Freddie Mercury. Even if everyone was staring at us, judging us silently.

  I was trying hard not to feel out of place. Even though I’d escaped, I still wanted to think, if only for tonight, that I belonged at this school.

  After the song was over, we ran into Scooter.

  He was escorting Bryce through the photo gauntlet.

  “Hey, guys,” Scooter said gamely. Keith always made him nervous, but he was playing it cool tonight. Clearly he was trying to impress his date.

  “Hi, sweetie,” I said, leaning in for a cheek kiss and half hug. “You look even more handsome than you did this afternoon. And, Bryce, can I say, you look quite dashing as well.”

  “Thanks, Mallory. I didn’t even know you knew my name.”