Likely Story!

by David Levithan

  There was a flicker of a second when he moved in to kiss me. But then he understood. And he pulled back.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t be. Please.”

  He shook his head. “I still can’t believe you and Keith went to jail!”

  Once the name was out in the open, there was no way we could do anything. We both knew that.

  “It was pretty crazy,” I said, conversational now. “And look at you—about to return to New York and brave the morning talk show hosts. That’s scarier than jail.”

  “My friends from Juilliard are planning to picket outside the Good Morning America windows,” he said with a smile. “I say, let ’em have their Shakespeare. I’m happy here.”

  Now it was my turn to say, “Thank you.”

  He wrapped me in a hug, this one closer than the one before.

  I could feel the cab waiting for him in the distance. I could feel Keith waiting for me to call. I could feel Richard needing me in the editing room for one last look.

  So I let Dallas go, pretending I had no choice.

  Because most of the cast was off in New York, we didn’t tape on Monday. Instead, I stayed at home and stressed out about the premiere.

  At around noon, the phone rang. Since my mother was at a spa treatment, I picked up.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “To whom am I speaking?” a crinkly voice asked.

  “Mallory. Who is this?”

  “Aren’t you on the set of your television show?”

  I couldn’t place the voice, but it sounded vaguely familiar. “No,” I said. “We have the day off. Who is this?”

  “Are you with your tutor?”

  Miss Julie? It hadn’t even crossed my mind.

  “Who is this?” I repeated. And then I realized who it was:

  My school secretary.

  “Young lady, may I speak to your mother?”

  “She’s not home.”

  “Well, have her call me immediately. If you’re not at work, you should be in school!”

  I had a feeling this spelled trouble. But I put it out of my mind as three o’clock rolled around.

  Greg was the first to arrive, with an armful of flowers. “From Trip,” he said. “But I wrote the card.” I opened it and found:

  To my amazing, risk-taking friend.

  Here’s to a long, long Story.

  love, Greg

  “Take off your tie and stay awhile,” I told him. And he did.

  My mother made the next entrance.

  “I’m watching in my room,” she announced. Then she glided off, without even wishing me luck.

  Keith and Scooter came as soon as school ended, with Gina and Tamika arriving a minute later.

  “It’s a party!” Scooter proclaimed. And I thought, yes, it was a party. For my mother, a party might mean a lavishly catered affair with musicians and speeches and champagne. But this was the kind of party I loved—a group of friends in the living room, with bags of cookies and chips and Hawaiian Punch, ready to watch a show we’d all had a part in, whether big or small.

  Perversely, I wished for a second that Amelia could have joined us, or even that I could have invited her. But that seemed like ancient history now.

  “I’m really excited,” Keith said with encouragement as he settled in on the couch. “You haven’t shown me jack from this show, so I’m dying to see it.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” I said. Then, sitting next to him, I added, “I just want you to know that no matter what you think of this show, I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” he said as he fiddled with the buttons to achieve optimal surround sound on the plasma TV.

  I grabbed his arm. “No, I’m serious. I really love you and no one in this world except for you would have put himself on the line for me like you did. I am forever in your debt.”

  Keith rolled his eyes and gave me a popcorn-flavored kiss. “Shut up—I know the difference between TV and real life. I can only hope I see myself in there.”

  That’s when the opening credits began to roll on Likely Story.

  I held my breath. Scooter, Tamika, and Greg cheered.

  The theme music played. It sounded like a torch song you’d sing late at night and downstairs in a New York City jazz club. First, there was the shot of the fog-shrouded two-pronged bridge. There were the pine trees glowing like candles in the setting sun. That was followed by most of the shots I’d gotten on our shoot in Deception Pass. Alexis glowed. Javier sulked. Francesca exuded mystery. And Dallas looked hot. Mission: Impossible accomplished.

  The first scene was Friday afternoon’s scene with Dallas and Alexis.

  RYAN walks into SARAH’S

  BEDROOM and closes the door

  like a spy seeking plutonium.

  RYAN

  I’m leaving.

  SARAH

  But you just got here.

  RYAN

  I’m leaving you.

  SARAH

  But, Ryan! You can’t! You

  just can’t!

  RYAN

  I’m sorry. I’m in love with

  someone else. And her name is

  Jacqueline.

  “Take that, Alexis,” I said.

  “Shhh. I’m watching,” Keith said, staring intently at the box.

  Keith held my hand through the first ten minutes. It cut to commercial and everyone told me it was great. I felt good, because I felt like I was telling the story I wanted to tell.

  My mother’s scenes in the counseling office were just as ridiculous as they’d seemed on the set. But somehow, the sheer act of their being transmitted over the airwaves made them camp. Instead of being stupid, they were entertaining. Keith was laughing all the way through them.

  “Hysterical!” he said.

  I wondered if my mother knew this. I hadn’t known. But I bet she had. My mother knew a lot of things I didn’t give her credit for.

  As the hour was wrapping up, we came to the climactic scene, when Jacqueline is confronted by her boyfriend, Marco, and her new love, Ryan.

  MARCO bangs at the door of

  RYAN’S CONDO. JACQUELINE

  turns to RYAN.

  JACQUELINE

  I knew he’d find us here.

  RYAN

  There’s only one way out—

  through my

  bedroom.

  JACQUELINE looks RYAN in the

  eye. She knows it might not

  be a proposal, but it’s the

  best she can expect. She

  kisses him just as MARCO

  storms in.

  RYAN

  Too late.

  And BLACKOUT.

  Keith howled with approval. “Yowza! That’s some hot tamales you just served up. I’m so proud of you!”

  I couldn’t believe he liked it. I couldn’t believe it had aired just like I had imagined. I couldn’t believe he’d either missed or ignored the parallels to our own lives. I couldn’t believe the world hadn’t stopped turning. I had a show on the air and everything kept moving.

  I looked at my silenced phone. Immediately the messages began to rack up. Congratulations from Trip, from Richard. And from Dallas, a single “bravo.”

  “You did it,” Greg said.

  And I thought, yes, I had done it.

  With a little help from my friends.

  My mother waited until everyone had left before emerging from her bedroom. It was almost six o’clock, and she was dressed for a night out.

  “Well?” I asked from my perch on the couch. I was re-watching the episode, this time with my laptop at the ready for any notes I wanted to take.

  “They did a wonderful job with the lighting,” she replied.

  I couldn’t believe it.

  “They air the first episode of my show and all I can get out of you is a ‘They did a wonderful job with the lighting’?”

  “Surely I didn’t teach you to be so touchy,” she said. “The show was good. Very g
ood, even. But don’t rest on your laurels. You must always try to make it better. If I coddled you with my praise, you’d never grow up. Of course, I feel pride toward you. But you can’t expect me to constantly express it, in the same way that I don’t expect you to constantly express your pleasure with my performance.”

  “You were great, Mom,” I said, knowing it meant nothing now that she’d fished for it.

  “Thank you. I was pleased with it myself.” She looked at her watch. “Oh, I’m late for my date. Get some sleep tonight. You’ll need it.”

  “Why?”

  She looked at me like I’d just asked her how to turn on the television.

  “Why? Because the biggest test of all comes in the morning.”

  “And that would be?”

  “The ratings, darling,” she said. “Tomorrow morning, we shall all live or die by the ratings.”

  There were about twenty seconds after I woke up when I forgot about the verdict that was about to come. Instead, I woke up looking forward to the day. I was looking forward to Dallas and Francesca and Javier being back in town. I was looking forward to seeing Keith after work and planning our trip to Big Bear. I was looking forward to going to the writers’ office with Tamika and the rest of them so we could write more and more and more of Likely Story. I was looking forward to dragging Greg away from Trip’s phone for an hour so he could eat lunch.

  And then I remembered the ratings.

  I leaped for my laptop, hoping someone had e-mailed them to me. But my laptop wasn’t there—I’d left it in the living room. My hair in knots, my pajamas looking as unflattering as pajamas can, I headed downstairs. As I made my way through the foyer and past the solarium, I heard something buzzing in the library. Of course—my mother’s antique fax machine. Though she seemed to enjoy the Internet, she never quite took to e-mail. She still insisted that everything be sent to her via fax. “I like paper; it feels good between my fingers,” she’d once said.

  Unspooling from the mahogany desk were the Overnights, a.k.a. the Nielsen ratings for yesterday’s episode. Were they good? Were they abysmal? I was afraid to look. But I had to. I had to know. I grabbed the paper from the tray. But all I saw was a parade of numbers that made no sense to me. It might as well have been an AP Calculus test. I had no hope of deciphering them.

  “Well, well, well,” my mother said from the hallway. She was wearing her fancy nightgown, the one with gemstones and pearls embroidered into the silky gauze. “Are those the ratings?” she asked.

  “Looks like it.”

  “How are they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She grabbed the paper from me like a rabid coyote devouring a toy poodle. She scanned them quickly. I tried to read her face. Good? Bad? Middling?

  “Oh my God!” she cried. “They’re SPECTACULAR!!!” She took another look and screamed, “Darling, the ratings are through the roof!”

  I was about to tell her that she didn’t need to scream when it occurred to me that she wasn’t screaming to me. There was someone else in the house.

  Richard appeared in the doorway. He was wearing an oversized burgundy terry-cloth robe with my mother’s initials monogrammed on the lapel. I grabbed for the desk to steady myself.

  “They’re good, are they?” he asked my mother while he sipped a mimosa. Then he saw me. “Ah, Mallory. I didn’t expect to see you so soon. It sounds like our show’s a hit.” He air-toasted me.

  “What are you d-doing here?” I stammered.

  “We’re celebrating, can’t you tell?” my mother interjected cheerily, lifting her own mimosa.

  “Mallory,” Richard said, his smile uncontrollable, “it’s about time you knew. Your mother and I are very much in love. And we’re going to get married.”

  What else could I do?

  I sputtered out a congratulations.

  Then I fell to the floor, and the world went black.

  BOOK THREE

  I was just four years old when I saw my mother die her first death.

  She’d gone undercover at a chocolate convention to sniff out the lunatic who’d snuffed out her Hoopla magazine colleague, food critic Lionel Lumley. The paramedics said it was the result of an accidental overdose of artificial sweetener, but my mother didn’t buy it. She had little use for medical professionals of any kind, having twice woken up mid-operation, the victim of botched anesthesia—once to find her neurosurgeon cavorting with a nubile nurse and once as a surgical team was prepping to harvest her organs for sale to an ailing dictator from the South American nation of “Perugentina.”

  She hadn’t meant to go undercover on her own. She’d gone shoulder to shoulder pad with Bret Beauregard, Shadow Canyon’s police commissioner and punching bag, insisting that Lionel Lumley would have tasted the difference between pure and processed sugar at twenty paces—upwind. “No way would he be undone by a spoonful of Sweet’n Low!” she insisted. “This was foul play!”

  Bret appreciated Mom’s loyalty to her friend, but explained that the law didn’t recognize women’s intuition as grounds for opening an investigation. His hands were tied, but he knew Mom’s weren’t. He warned her not to do anything nutty….

  “Like look into it myself?” she asked. Hitting him with her trademark dramatic lean-in/arched-eyebrow combo, she added, “I didn’t spend two weeks in night school to get my PI license for nothing, Commish.”

  The trail of tasty evidence finally led her to the back rooms of the Shadow Canyon Candy Convention. There she discovered a cabal of evil pastry chefs plotting to make all of Shadow Canyon addicted to their designer sugar substitute (called Devil Dust).

  Caught in the act eavesdropping on a conversation in which the cabal revealed the full extent of its plans, Mom was bound and gagged and suspended over a vat of molten fudge, into which she was slowly lowered. As she was swallowed up in goo, the head goon, a pear-shaped Frenchman by the name of Henri, offered this solace: “Worry not, ma petite sucrerie. Your Death By Chocolate will be zee toast of zee town.”

  I saw the whole thing happen … and did nothing.

  Not that I was in a position to do anything. I wasn’t hiding inside a walk-in freezer, waiting for the right moment to fish her out. I was home. On the couch. Watching my mother drown in ice cream topping on network TV.

  Still, I tried. I desperately hit the buttons of the universal remote, looking for that universally remote chance of saving her. But the power of Panasonic couldn’t change her fate. She was lost to a chocolatey grave …

  Until she walked through the front door two hours later.

  Back then, my day-to-day rearing was mostly the responsibility of a bunch of nannies for whom I had little patience. They preferred popping bonbons to reading stories and were content to farm me off to the tender loving care of the TV. This was fine by me: The only attention I craved was my mother’s, and the only exposure to her I could always count on was Good As Gold’s three o’clock time slot. I was young enough and alone enough to take what I could get … even if it messed with my head. I was a preschooler, as impressionable as a piece of unchewed gum, getting my strongest dose of family from a soap opera. Naturally I began to think of Mom as her character, Geneva, and Geneva as Mom. It didn’t help matters that she had a habit of bringing her work home with her. One afternoon I watched Geneva/Mom tryst with Shadow Canyon’s perpetually shirtless dogcatcher. That night Mom/Geneva brought him home to “run lines” … in the hot tub.

  So her arrival in the living room on the day of her demise threw me for a loop-de-loop. I flung my arms around her legs and cried, vowing never to eat a Hershey bar again.

  “Mallory, darling, you do know that what you see on TV isn’t real, don’t you?”

  Still to this day, I don’t know whether she was disturbed by my fear or annoyed by my stupidity—she regularly told me to stop being childish, even when I was four.

  I gave her the nod she obviously expected, but she could tell I remained unconvinced. She took it more as a compliment to her
acting ability than as a comment on her mothering. “I did give a good performance, didn’t I?” she said, wriggling from my embrace. She had no time to suffer my confusion—the People’s Choice Awards were mere hours away. She’d brought home half her GAG wardrobe (all gowns) and had contracted her trusted makeup artist, Gina, to do her up for the occasion. Never mind that the People hadn’t actually chosen her for anything. If a red carpet was unrolled within a hundred-mile radius of Los Angeles, my mother was on it. She whisked upstairs to begin preparations, but Gina, always better tuned to my emotions, hung back and sat me down.

  “You want to know something?” she said, her voice as friendly as a rainbow. “I was pretty bothered by your mom’s chocolate soak, too.”

  “You were?” I sniffled.

  “Uh-huh. Think about it. They filled that tub with a ton of good chocolate! Chocolate that belonged on sundaes and in cookies and cakes. But mostly,” she confided, “in my belly.”

  “No one could eat that much chocolate,” I declared.

  “I bet the two of us could.” And just like that, Gina had coaxed a smile out of me. This was her easy talent, and I loved her for it.

  Gina must have said something to Mom, because the next day I was allowed on the set for the first time since I was a baby. They figured if I saw the show being made, I’d know it wasn’t real.

  I learned very quickly that Geneva’s adventures came courtesy of a pack of jaundiced, chain-smoking writers; that the sets were as tough as wet cardboard; and that she who controlled the snack table controlled the world. The most important lesson I learned, though, was that my mother and Geneva were not the same person.

  A few hours in, Gina sent me over to the studio floor with a delivery of fresh blotting powder for the actors on set. Taping was in progress, so I tiptoed to an out-of-the-way spot behind the boom operators and waited for the stage manager to call “Cut.” The scene was Geneva’s office. My mother stood opposite Jim Owens, the actor who played her worrywart lawyer, Snap.