Likely Story!

by David Levithan

  SNAP

  Take the plea deal, Geneva.

  GENEVA

  And let them brand me an eco-

  terrorist? Not on your life.

  SNAP

  If they get a conviction,

  you’ll hang.

  GENEVA

  What if it was you, Snap?

  What if you were the one

  wrongfully accused of

  murdering all those

  chinchillas?

  SNAP

  We’re talking about your

  life, Geneva. And more than

  that, we’re talking about

  your future.

  GENEVA

  No, we’re talking about my

  good name. And that’s worth

  something—not just to me but

  to the readers of Hoopla. I

  won’t have them believing the

  worst of me. I won’t give in.

  I can’t. Please, Snap. Fight

  for me. (SHE DISSOLVES IN

  TEARS AND

  “Cut!” Shoulders sagged across the room, and the cameramen muttered curses. Mom flagged down the stage manager, pissed.

  “That was the sixth take already. What’s wrong now?” she wanted to know.

  The director emerged from the control room, waving a script. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong. The script calls for Geneva to DISSOLVE IN TEARS, but I’m not seeing any waterworks.”

  “We’ve been over this, Bob. Geneva would not cry in this situation. She’s made of steel. Raw iron steel.”

  “She’s been charged with a capital crime, honey. I don’t care if she’s the Eiffel Tower, she’s going to have a moment of vulnerability.”

  Mom rolled her eyes. “Geneva doesn’t ‘do’ vulnerable.”

  “Or do you just not know how to do vulnerable?” Bob shot back.

  Jim gasped. All eyes targeted my mother. Had anyone ever had the nerve to accuse my mother of being less than a consummate thespian?

  No one spoke. No one moved.

  My mother blinked.

  My mother, who never blinked.

  Bob held her stare a moment longer, wondering if he’d caught a tiger by the tail. He opened his mouth to backtrack, but my mother silenced him with a sweep of her hand and instructed the stage manager to roll tape. The crew resumed positions, Bob scurried back to the control room, and the stage manager gave my mother the go-ahead.

  GENEVA

  No, we’re talking about my

  good name. And that’s worth

  something—not just to me but

  to the readers of Hoopla. I

  won’t have them believing

  that I am the worst that

  there is. I am not a killer

  of chinchillas! I love

  chinchillas. As a little

  girl, I—(SHE BEGINS TO CHOKE

  UP) I had a chinchilla named

  (A SINGLE TEAR FALLS DOWN HER

  CHEEK) Checkers! So if not

  for me, or my readers, then

  for Checkers. I won’t give

  in. I can’t. Please, Snap.

  Fight for me. Fight for—

  Checkers. (SHE DISSOLVES IN

  TEARS AND CRUMBLES TO HER

  KNEES. SNAP TAKES HER IN HIS

  ARMS AND COMFORTS HER. FADE)

  The scene ended, and the crew was ordered to take five, but not before Jim proclaimed, “Now that was acting.” My mother’s performance was over as abruptly as it had begun. Her face betrayed no sign of the tears that had dangled there moments ago. She was, once again, the tough-as-nails Mom/ Geneva I’d known her to be. She stormed off to the control room to put Bob in his place, unaware I’d witnessed the whole thing. Unaware that, just then, I’d seen her die again. Or at least disappear.

  It wouldn’t be the last time.

  My friend Scooter has a pretty typical after-school job stocking shelves at Store-Mart. His boss meets him at the door every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday at four, usually with a mop and good news along the lines of “cleanup in aisle three.” On his way to the pukepile, a co-worker begs Scooter to please-pleaseplease take her Friday night shift so she can go out with her boyfriend ’cuz it’s their forty-six-hour anniversary! And then he’s run down by a gang of irate customers waving their nubby fingers in his face, demanding to know why their favorite press-on nails were discontinued.

  I’ve got a job, too. Like Scooter’s, mine comes complete with angry mobs and needy colleagues. My boss also delights in meeting me at the door with talk of disaster. Only he never carries a mop.

  “Break out the red pen, Mal. You have to change Harry and Carmen’s scene so it no longer includes the banana splits,” he said to me now, plucking a piece of lint from my shoulder.

  Eight a.m. and I was sighing already. “Today is not the day, Richard. You’re the executive producer, so make an executive decision for once. Replace the ice cream with frozen yogurt. I’m not rewriting three pages of dialogue because a couple of actors are deathly afraid of cardio.”

  “The problem,” Richard informed me, “is not that Wardrobe is out of elastic waistbands. If you bothered to read the memos from our friends at Standards and Practices, like any responsible head writer, you’d know that banana has been added to their list of objectionable words and phrases. Apparently you can no longer say banana in daytime.”

  “Are you kidding? What do the network censors have against fruit?”

  But Richard was off and running mid-sentence before I’d even finished my question: “… story meeting tomorrow, at which I hope you will finally reveal the identity of the killer of the student council president.”

  “Hey, it wasn’t my idea to jump-start the show with the murder of a character no one knew and no one cared about,” I reminded him.

  He rolled right over me. “Plus I need three ideas for integrating soap products into a front-burner story. A poisoned loofah or an incendiary bath bomb, something like that. Don’t think too hard about it.”

  “Why don’t you save us both a migraine and do the thinking for me, Richard?”

  “Believe me, I’m considering it.”

  He smiled when he said it, as if to prove to passersby that all was well. Nothing to see here, just a couple of friendly creative-types having a warm chat. But the grin was a thin veneer for solid ice underneath.

  “What’s the matter, boss? Wake up on the wrong side of the bed?”

  He didn’t bother to contradict me. I’d scored, but he’d sooner give up his Amex Black than admit it.

  Richard slung an arm over my shoulders, walking me through security. “I know things have been tense between us lately, Mallory.”

  This might’ve been because he was sleeping with one of the stars of our show …

  “And here I thought I was imagining it.”

  … who happened to be my mother.

  “You’re stressed. I’m not surprised, with all the buzz.”

  Buzz. Swarm. Bees. Kill.

  “You’ve always got a finger on the pulse, Richard.”

  And on my mother.

  “You’re not the only one with anxiety, Mallory. The cast made off with half my stash of Xanax by seven. But as much as I care about their well-being during this trying time, I know yours is the hand that most needs holding.”

  If you try to hold my hand, I thought, I will break all your fingers.

  “Richard, so far I have heard nothing that you couldn’t have put into an e-mail.”

  I’d actually trusted him. Even when he was giving me a hard time. Little did I know he’d been auditioning to become my mother’s new husband.

  “But then we wouldn’t have had this valuable face time.”

  Her fourth husband.

  He thrust the offending scene into my hand and gave me his Lawgiver look. “Quit it with the amateur attempts to sabotage me with the network. They may give me a talking-to for letting these double entendres nearly get through to tape, but believe me, they know exactly who
wrote them.”

  Scowling on the inside, sweetness on the out, I asked, “Anything else?”

  “Be nice to your mother.”

  I thought he was kidding. “Why don’t I just ride my unicorn over to Shangri-la and pick you a bouquet of four-leaf clovers while I’m at it?”

  He wasn’t kidding. “She could use your support right now.”

  “She could also use a chemical peel, but you didn’t hear it from me.”

  Still not kidding.

  I sighed. “What do you want from me, Richard?” I asked. “We’ve always lived by the Golden Rule at our house. I do unto Mom as I would have her do unto me. Which is to say: Nothing is done or un-done to anyone at all. That’s how it’s always worked.”

  “Has it worked, Mallory?”

  Richard had clearly been to his shrink that morning.

  “The two of you are a True Hollywood Story waiting to happen,” he cautioned.

  “And I have no doubt you’ll be ready and waiting to produce the hell out of it. Please steer clear of my relationship with my mother. If I find out that you’ve booked us on Oprah to kick-start the healing, there won’t be a toupee maker alive able to re-sod your scalp.”

  Apparently Richard didn’t mind playing fast and loose with his coif. “I’m going to do whatever it takes to get you two right again.”

  “Whatever it takes? I admire your research methods. And that, Richard, was a double entendre.”

  “I do care about you, Mallory. I want you to be happy.”

  As evidence, he flagged down a passing intern and instructed him to “fetch” me a latte. This was what I dealt with on a daily basis: a boss whose vocabulary suggested feudal Europe, not feuding Hollywood. “You’ll feel better with a little steamed soy milk in you. I can’t have my wunderkind off her game on such a big occasion.”

  I protested, but not because I didn’t crave the coffee and not even because the intern was actually six years older than me. Soon after Likely Story got the green light, I confessed to my mother my unease at having a hundred seasoned professionals reporting to me, a high school student. Mom didn’t bother to look up from her Marie Claire. “You were born in LA,” she droned. “Being catered to is in your genes.” I got over giving orders pretty quickly.

  But there was that other, much more important reason I had to nip Richard’s patronizing in its ever-growing bud. “A five-dollar coffee isn’t going to buy the peace, Mr. Boss Man.”

  He overrode my veto and sauntered off toward the control room. “Be sure to be home for dinner tonight. We’re ordering Indian.”

  I had to break off their engagement. Right away.

  I retreated to the writers’ room, which for me was kind of like going to the area in the high school cafeteria where you know that no one will make fun of what you’re wearing or anything you say.

  My faithful friend (and staff writer) Tamika was waiting for me.

  “I hear bananas are verboten,” she said.

  “Yup. No doubt cherries will be next.”

  “And cantaloupes.”

  “And pears.”

  Tamika nodded with mock seriousness. “Clearly, all fruit is out.”

  “At least Richard had to get yelled at by Standards and Practices. He had the look of someone who’d just had his wrist slapped raw. But he also had the look of someone who liked it.”

  “Maybe that’s enough. Maybe that will finally teach him to back off your mom and not to mess with you,” Tamika said.

  Oh, how I wished. “Or it’ll teach him to read the scripts more carefully before releasing them to the wide world. I think if we’re going to get Richard to break off the engagement, we need to do more than cram a scene full of sight gags requiring lots of melons and a cucumber.”

  Tamika mulled this over. “So we move on to Plan B.”

  “Oh, good.”

  Silence.

  “Uh … tell me, Tamika. What’s Plan B?”

  “This is your show, girl. I’m just along for the ride.”

  We came up with the following list:

  Discover Richard is embezzling from the show. Blackmail ensues.

  Discover Richard has been smuggling blood diamonds. Blackmail ensues.

  Discover Richard has been imprisoning his good twin in an (a) attic, (b) meat locker, (c) wishing well, (d) coffin, (e) bank vault, (f) ship’s hold, (g) cargo container, (h) car trunk, (i) abandoned mine shaft, (j) abandoned sauna, (k) deserted island, (l) ghost town, (m) haunted house, (n) haunted hayride, (o) corn maze, (p) catacomb, (q) Underground Railroad tunnel, (r) underwater grotto, or (s) lobster trap. Blackmail ensues.

  Discover Richard is a woman. Blackmail ensues.

  Discover Richard is a man. Blackmail ensues.

  “The trouble with blackmail,” I said, yawning, “is that it’s illegal. And the last time we tried to trap Richard, I was arrested.”

  “But he dropped the charges,” argued Tamika.

  “And then threatened to leak the whole thing to TMZ! So I’d prefer to avoid any more legal entanglements, thank you. I’ve seen enough bars to last me ’til my twenty-first birthday.”

  Tamika bit her lip. Which was Tamika for You’re not gonna like this, but …

  “What?” I asked.

  Her attempt to shrug off my question was just for show.

  “There is one way to put the brakes on your mom’s marriage plans, and you can do it without the fuss and muss of plotting and scheming. It’s kind of out-there, though.”

  “Don’t make me get out the pliers, Tamika.”

  “You could tell her how you feel about it.”

  “Going back to the blackmail idea …,” I said.

  “Would it be that big a deal to have a heart-to-heart with your mother?”

  “That scenario requires two hearts, I believe.”

  Tamika waved me off. “You’re too harsh.”

  “I told you how I reacted when they broke the engagement news to me, right?”

  “You fainted.”

  “My head hit the floor. Have you been in our study? I missed the Oriental rug by three inches and smacked the marble floor instead. I still have the wound.” I swiped back my hair, exposing the scar. “If four stitches didn’t get my mother’s attention, no meeting of the minds will, either.”

  Not even Tamika could argue with that. Or maybe she just knew not to push it. I wished I did.

  “Why should I be the one to take the first step?” I blurted. “Why should I put myself out there and tell her I want to fix things? Why can’t she want to fix things with me? All my life I was just a speed bump to my mother, something to slow down for, something that ruined her ride. Then Likely Story comes along, and suddenly I’m no longer an obstacle—now I’m her chauffeured ride to success! And not only is she driving all over me, she’s giving Richard a ride, too. She nearly stole the show. He nearly ruined it. Put them together and I shudder to think what’ll become of it.”

  Still, Tamika needed confirmation. “So no good would come of telling her this?”

  I was ninety-five percent sure such a conversation would only aggravate my ulcer. Ninety-five percent sure it would only lower my expectations of my mother … right through the floor. Ninety-five percent sure I’d get emotional, ninety-five percent sure she’d turn it around on me.

  But that left five percent. Five percent that remembered my mother could, indeed, cry. Five percent that knew she was capable of emotion.

  Five percent that wasn’t sure of anything.

  Luckily, the rest of the writers soon arrived, and we resumed wrestling over how to fold the element of Ryan’s worsening drug problem deeper into Jacqueline’s family crisis without leaving Sarah, our presumptive heroine, out of a storyline. We hadn’t even begun to climb out of the murder mystery hole into which we’d dug ourselves. It was a tricky situation, and I didn’t want to leave them to figure it out on their own.

  About fifteen minutes later, Richard slipped in. We’d long since given up on Ryan and were compa
ring our stripper names instead (first pet’s name + street on which one grows up = Rufus Castle, Fergie Red Post, Matches Peppercorn, Max Wellington, to name a few). Richard could see we were getting a lot of valuable work done.

  Before I knew what was going on, Richard was saying it was time for me to go, and was hustling me toward an idling Suburban.

  “Don’t forget to smile,” he said. “And if she doesn’t get a nod, you’ll need to do damage control right away.”

  I almost laughed. I knew the drill better than he did.

  Richard may have spent the night with my mom, but he’d never been with her on the day the Daytime Emmy nominations were announced.

  That job was mine.

  And we were about to do it on live TV.

  “I want him naked,” said the director. “As naked as possible.”

  Mom always said the liveliest conversation in Hollywood was found not at The Ivy and certainly not in a room full of writers. There is a place where Nobel Prize–winning plastic surgeons, shark-attack victims, and Disney Channel stars sit down to compare notes … and that place is the makeup room of an afternoon talk show, where all brows—high, middle, and low—converge into one big, unsightly uni. Blabbermouth’s makeup room was no exception.

  The show’s director jabbed a finger at his frightened costume designer. “Give me flesh. The more the better.” By and large the rule in show business is to clothe actors; the exception to that rule appeared to be Likely Story’s male star, Dallas Grant.

  The costumer dogged her boss the length of the room.

  “Look, Cynthia, I’m not asking for an obscenity charge. I just want some skin. This kid Dallas drives Likely Story’s ratings, so we might as well have his pecs drive our nomination ceremony. Bargain with him. Offer him a sock and work from there, okay? But hold the line at shirtless. And tell him it’s a ‘brave’ choice. Actors always fall for that.”

  Ha, I thought. There was no way Dallas was going to fall for that.

  Not my Dallas.

  Who wasn’t mine, really.

  I mean, at all.

  “It’s not going to happen,” I told Cynthia once her boss was gone.