Skinny Bitch in Love

by Kim Barnouin

  “Zaaach?” Jolie called again at the top of her lungs.

  “Don’t send her over before ten,” I said. “We won’t be able to deal.”

  He gave me one last kiss before Jolie came flip-flopping downstairs.

  I slipped out the back door and missed him immediately.

  Chapter 12

  “We’re what?” Sara asked the next morning when I poured her coffee and made her breakfast to get on her good side. “Did you say we’re babysitting Zach’s spoiled-rotten teenaged sister?”

  Sara was already in a bad mood because guess who hadn’t called her yesterday. She’d been expecting flowers, too. A surprise visit just because he had to see her face. But all day: nothing. I went the “it’s just one day, and he’s probably just letting it all settle in his head, being with someone new, etc., etc.” route, but all it got from Sara was a “Yeah, right” face and a shrug.

  “Well, his sister’s eighteen, so it’s not babysitting. We’re showing her real life. Can you take her on the open call today for the Hospital Orderly? She’ll show up in four-inch Zanottis and deal with the line for twelve seconds before she calls the boyfriend to come get her and leaves. Then she’ll go back to Daddy’s. And I can actually have sex with Zach.”

  Sara laughed. “Gotcha. But what if she sticks around and actually does get my part? Is she gorgeous?”

  “Yeah, she is, actually. But so is every other chick waiting to hand over her head shot.”

  “Yeah, I guess. Okay, I’ll take her. But you’re coming, too.”

  Shit.

  Because I idiotically told Zach that Sara and I would take Jolie along to the open casting call for Hospital Orderlies (and Cafeteria Workers) for Babe, MD, the stupidest show on television, the girl showed up in scrubs, a hideous pair of maroon clogs with backs, her hair in a low ponytail, and practicing her deeply caring expressions.

  “How’s this?” Jolie asked as she walked in my apartment. “Yes, ma’am, I’m wheeling you up to surgery. But we’re all pulling for you here at St. Michael’s Hospital.” She made an earnest face and I laughed, and she bit her lip. “Bad?”

  “No, actually,” I said, totally honestly. “That was pretty good.”

  Sara would not be happy.

  “Wow, this is your apartment?” she asked, looking all around.

  “Yeah, this is it.”

  “What’s that funny sound?” she asked.

  “The drilling or the water?”

  “The water.”

  “That’s my roommate in the shower. Our shower sucks and comes out in bursts.” The second the door buzzer rang, Sara had dashed into the bathroom to avoid dealing with Jolie for as long as possible. Little did she know she was actually doing her share.

  “I love it,” Jolie said, smiling. “Love it all.” She peered her head into the kitchen. She went in the living room and slowly sat down on the red velvet couch that Ty found for me in a B actress’s estate sale. “I love it. I love this couch. I love the rug. I love how small and cozy it is. It’s your own place, paid for with your own money.”

  “Yeah, wow,” I said.

  “No, I’m totally serious. You earn the money to pay the rent. Pay for that lamp to turn on. Pay for cable and whatever else. For food. For that really great shirt you’re wearing. That’s what I want to do—pay my way.”

  “If my rich father wanted to pay my way through UCLA when I was eighteen, I’d have gone in a second.” Which was actually not true. I was going to cooking school only, and I paid for it myself. I couldn’t even imagine my father writing a big check to anyone. First of all, he didn’t have the money. And second, my brother and sister and I were given jobs on the farm by age 3. That was how we rolled. And still did.

  “Yeah, well, that’s not what I want,” she said. “I just graduated from high school. I’m eighteen. I’m doing it my way.”

  This was not going Zach’s way, but he’d just have to deal. This was her life, anyway. Getting married at eighteen might be beyond dumb, but then again, maybe not. This girl wasn’t completely the spoiled airhead princess I’d taken her for yesterday.

  “And did you go to a four-year college or cooking school?” she asked, eyeing me.

  She had me there. “I went to one of the best vegan culinary schools in the country.”

  “So why can’t I go to a great acting school here in L.A.? Why do I have to take English Lit and Chemistry and four more years of French when I know what I want to do—act?”

  Ping. A text from Zach saved me from having to directly answer. I didn’t want to get into contradicting Zach when I didn’t know anything about this chick. Maybe she’d wanted to quit high school and try out for American Idol, too. Who knew the crap she’d pulled before this? Or maybe the girl was smart and knew what she wanted, had a plan, and was going for it. Until I got a better sense of her, I’d keep my mouth shut.

  I read Zach’s text. Did she run out screaming when she saw your tiny bathroom?

  Not yet, I typed back.

  Work on it, he wrote back.

  “Can I see your bedroom?” Jolie asked.

  Zach would appreciate this part of the grand tour. There was no way she’d like the lack of door, lack of privacy, lack of real room. “It’s right there, behind that glass brick partition.”

  She got up and peered around the almost-to-the-ceiling L-shaped “wall” Ty had built me. “So cool. This makes me realize that Rufus and I can look for a studio apartment and do something like this to make a sleeping nook. Or build a loft.”

  Sorry, Zach, but it was true. They could.

  I was running out of things to show her, so I offered her coffee and one of my homemade scones.

  She paused at the table, her attention on the refrigerator door. The photo booth strips of Sara and me making funny faces. A picture of one of my parents’ dogs nose to nose with their giant mutant rabbit who was scared of nothing. A new hand-scrawled recipe for dairy-free, nut-free, gluten-free apple-cinnamon muffins. A photo of Sara’s niece, age four, on a scooter. Two open-call notices. The ridiculously expensive cable bill because Sara insisted on HBO and DVR. And a Skinny Bitch Bakes label plastered right on the door.

  “This is what I want,” Jolie said as she sat down at the table and dumped two of Sara’s fake sugars and soy milk into her mug of coffee. “My own fridge. With my own crap on it. My own place.”

  “And your own bills,” I said. For Zach, and because it was true. Jolie Jeffries probably had no idea how much an apple cost. “See that cable bill? Add it to rent, electricity, phone, cell phone, car payment, gas, groceries. There’s not much left over for great clothes and shoes or going out to eat and for drinks.”

  “That does sound like a downside,” she said, sipping her coffee. “But I’d figure something out. Work part-time in a great boutique or something for the discount.” She bit into the scone. “Holy shit, this is incredible.” She took another bite. “Jesus.”

  I laughed. “I just made those last night. I have to bring two dozen to two of my clients later this morning.”

  “I’d go wherever these are sold—miles out of my way. That’s how amazing they are. Zach said you started your own business baking for coffee shops and cafés in Santa Monica but that you’re probably not making enough to even cover your rent.”

  Oh, yeah? He said that? Because he believed it, or because he was trying to get Jolie to forget the real world for four years and go to college?

  “Well, Zach is—” Wrong, I was about to say. But I had a mission here. Still, I had a breaking point, and Zach was coming close. “Zach doesn’t know the ins and outs of my business. I’m a personal chef and run a cooking class, too. I work around the clock.”

  “That is so cool,” she said. “Working like crazy twenty-four/seven doing what you love. That’s how life is supposed to be.”

  Yes, it is.

  “I’ve got two very intricate cakes to make this morning, so I’d better hit the oven,” I told her, putting on my Get Out of My Kitchen
apron and making a low bun of my hair by stabbing one of Sara’s chopsticks through it.

  “Can I help? I love baking. I suck at it, but I love making brownies and cookies and whatever.”

  I handed her an apron so she wouldn’t mess up her scrubs.

  “Oh good, I don’t have be Clem’s assistant for once,” Sara said, coming into the kitchen twisting her long damp curls into ringlet perfection. “I’m the roommate, Sara.”

  “The actress!” Jolie said, beaming and grabbing Sara’s hand to shake. “I’m so glad to meet you. I can’t wait to go to the open call. Just to see what it’s all about. And you never know, right?” she added, pointing at her scrubs and hideous clogs.

  “You never know” was the phrase of the month, apparently.

  And so annoyingly true.

  An hour later, baking in a small kitchen with a crap oven was “absolutely amazing” and I “made it look so easy and fun that it hardly seemed like work at all, just pure joy.” She even called Rufus and told him every detail and how she would love to find a place like mine for the two of them. She added an “I love you too, baby.”

  Sorry, Zach, but it looked like you were losing this fight.

  “There’s always hope for the casting call,” Sara whispered. “There’ll be hundreds there. There’s no way she’ll hang out for two hours in a cramped room with obnoxious twits waving their head shots around.

  I had a feeling she would, though.

  The casting call was in Burbank in some decrepit-looking studio without windows. Not a peep of complaint out of Jolie. Everything was “so cool!”

  Three quarters of the people there—men, women, all different ages and races and nationalities—were in scrubs. Some even wore hairnets, clearly hoping to show how gorgeous they still were as potential cafeteria workers.

  Jolie barely blinked at all her competition. She was just as pretty, if not prettier, than the best-looking women there. There were also lots of “regular”-looking people who, according to Sara, were in high demand for these kinds of walk-on roles. How gorgeous were orderlies and cafeteria workers, after all?

  And Jolie had head shots of her own, even if they weren’t taken by a professional photographer. Turned out Rufus was decent with a digital camera. And since Jolie was gorgeous, she had good pictures.

  Sara and Jolie had numbers forty-four and forty-five. Their group of fifty was the first to be called in—so much for waiting around for hours. I put in my headphones and blasted ’70s Bee Gees songs to drown out the annoying conversations going on around me. The most annoying was a stage mother type droning on to her daughter—they looked exactly alike, but twenty-fiveish years apart—to arch her back and show her stuff, even if she had to step slightly off her line, if there was one. “You want to call just a little bit of attention to yourself,” the woman said, and number forty-seven nodded, then practiced thrusting out her huge chest.

  As “Night Fever” blasted in my ears, I almost burst out laughing as one woman—in a hairnet and purple print scrubs—practiced her smile in her Cover Girl compact mirror. She looked so ridiculous sitting there grinning at herself. Another two women got into an argument, which I could hear over Barry Gibb’s falsetto, and actually started pushing each other until one of them stomped over to a chair across the room. A middle-aged woman across from me was staring at me, which was annoying, so I shut my eyes and leaned my head back against the wall.

  I felt a tap on my shoulder and opened my eyes.

  It was the staring woman. I yanked out my earphones.

  “If you fall asleep,” she said, “you’ll miss your number being called.”

  “I’m just the moral support.”

  “That’s nice of you,” she said. “This is my tenth audition this week. No one ever comes with me. And I never get picked, so I don’t even know why I keep trying.”

  I should stick Jolie next to this woman for five minutes. Maybe she’d depress Jolie right out of the business.

  Sara and Jolie’s group had been gone about ten minutes when the door opened and they started filing back into the room, most sulking.

  Like Sara.

  But not Jolie.

  “She gets chosen to audition and I don’t,” Sara said, mock glaring at Jolie as we left the building. “It’s because you’re eighteen and blond.”

  “You’re what, twenty-five? And you have amazing hair,” Jolie said.

  “True, but you still stole my audition.”

  “I read this really interesting book about the acting profession and how you have to have a really thick skin,” Jolie said. “But it must always suck not to get a callback.”

  “It does,” Sara said. “It sucks like you would not believe.”

  Zach would be pleased to hear her say it. Not that it had anything to do with Jolie. Her first time out and wham. A shot.

  “Sometimes I think I should just give up,” Sara said. “Become a paralegal like my mom thinks I should.”

  “You can’t give up,” Jolie said. “Ever. You never know when you’ll make it. And then you’ll be living your dream.”

  “Well, I’m not living my dream now,” Sara said. “Though I did get a second callback for a commercial I really wanted.”

  “See?” Jolie said. “Awesome.” She glanced at her watch. “I’m supposed to meet Rufus at four, but now I have two hours to kill.”

  “Let’s go to the pier,” I told her. “We can get lunch from the trucks and hang out.”

  “And you can tell us all about Zach,” Sara said to Jolie. “We want info.”

  “No, we don’t,” I said, elbowing Sara in the ribs.

  Sara gave me a shove. “Yeah, we do. And you’re giving it for stealing my audition.”

  “I’ll tell you everything,” Jolie said. “And there’s a lot to tell.”

  We parked our butts on a bench as far away as we could from the guy strumming his guitar and singing depressing seventies-era songs. It was one of those perfect southern California afternoons—seventy-two degrees and sunny and breezy—and the pier was mobbed. Jolie and I had had to wait fifteen minutes on line at the best Thai truck.

  Sara took a huge bite of her veggie burrito. I knew she was dying to ask Jolie for the lowdown on Zach, but while she’d been pumping salsa on her burrito at the truck, I’d sidled up behind her and ordered her not to.

  “So give us the lowdown on your brother,” Sara said to Jolie, ignoring the glare I shot her.

  “Zach is great. He can be annoying, but not as annoying as my father.”

  “Did you two grow up together?” Sara asked.

  “When I was born, Zach was fourteen,” she said. “He and his brother and sister totally doted on me, even though they can’t stand my mother. I can’t either half the time, so I get it.”

  “So you’re all close?” I asked. “That’s great.”

  “I’m the closest to Zach and always have been. Avery’s great, too, but she’s way too serious for me. If I’d gone to her last night about my dad cutting me off she would have said he was right and told me to grow up. At least Zach tries to understand, you know? And Gareth—my other brother—is cool and all, but he’s the opposite of Avery—not a serious bone in his body. Zach is the only one I can really talk to.”

  “Okay, so be totally honest,” Sara said. “Does he have a girlfriend in every major city or what?”

  “Don’t answer that,” I said.

  “He should be a total player, but he’s really not,” Jolie said, forkful of pad thai en route to her mouth. “Gareth isn’t, either. You watch your mother get totally betrayed and it has an effect, you know?”

  “Gotcha,” Sara said. “My father cheated on my mother with a friend of ours. My brother got married pretty young, like at twenty-two, and he’s totally devoted to his wife. I can’t imagine him ever cheating.”

  “I’d think some guys might avoid commitment, though,” I said, not really meaning to say it aloud.

  “Maybe” Jolie said. “But Zach’s always been k
ind of intense about his girlfriends. He’s had years-long relationships. Then again, he’s never been engaged, so who knows? Probably because of Vivienne, some French women’s magazine editor who managed to break his heart.”

  Vivienne. I hated her gorgeous French name. “Broke his heart, huh?”

  “Devastated him. I’d never seen Zach like that before. I think he was planning to propose, too. I don’t know what happened, though.”

  Well, shit.

  Jolie eyed me like she realized she’d said too much. She started to say something, but her phone rang. “Hey, Rufus. Omigod, I’m coming right now.” She jumped up. “Rufus found us an amazing legal sublet on 9th Street, not too far from Montana. I’m going to see it now.” She threw out her containers, then held out her arms. “Thank you guys so much for today. Thanks to you, I have my start in acting—and I didn’t even expect it. You guys are the best.”

  Zach wasn’t going to be happy that a) we got his sister an audition and b) that she was probably going to sign a lease on an apartment today. I knew he’d been expecting her to go back home in a couple of weeks, completely battered by the real world. Instead, in one day, she’d accomplished a hell of a lot. Including impressing me. And depressing the fuck out of me.

  “I hate that I like her so much,” Sara said as we watched her race away to meet Rufus. “She’s gorgeous and stole my audition. And maybe talks too much, after all.” She peered at me. “You okay?”

  “Eh. He got his heart smashed same as I did, same as everyone does.” But something told me Zach was even more guarded than I was.

  Sara’s phone rang, and she dug around in her bag for it. “Please be a callback for one of four casting calls I went on this week.” She finally found it and glanced at the number on the screen. “Ooh, it’s Duncan—finally. Hi, Duncan. Yeah, that sounds great. Me, too. Okay, bye.” She was beaming. “We’re having dinner tomorrow night. At Vinettos.”

  “I love that place,” I said.

  “I mentioned it was my favorite restaurant the other night. Which meant he was actually listening to me and not just thinking of sex.” She pulled me up. “Let’s go shopping—I need something amazing for hitting the seventeen-pound mark.”