by Paul Rudnick
“You know why I’m here. Who are you calling?” I asked, because I needed to monitor Heller’s social contacts.
“Hit men. There’s this guy I know and he says that for two grand, he can have you shot and buried in an unmarked grave.”
“Heller is just kidding,” Wyatt assured me. “She’s testing you.”
“Now I’m on Craigslist,” Heller said, still without looking up. “I’ve got the price down to three hundred plus french fries, and they can make it look like an accident.”
As we got under way, everyone in the van stayed on their phones and even April had an earpiece.
“Guys, you know what I think could be really fun?” I said. “What if we all just put down our devices and talk to each other?”
No one answered because they were still using their phones, and I heard Heller say, “No, don’t worry, no one will miss her. If you could see what she’s wearing you’d understand.”
As Heller kept pushing more buttons on her phone, she opened the clear plastic case that was on her lap. The case was divided into little compartments, each filled with a very few pieces of different treats, including M&M’s, candy corn, Life Savers and miniature candy bars. It was like the case where my grandmother keeps her carefully labeled medications. Heller picked out three pieces of candy corn and then put one piece back.
“Heller?” I said, because I was confused by this. Heller sighed dramatically and finally looked at me as if I was a small, not especially bright child.
“Do you know how many calories there are in one piece of candy corn?” Heller asked. “It’s weird because the package says that candy corn doesn’t have any fat but that’s not true because it’s all sugar, and I always wonder if the little yellow stripe is more fattening than the little white stripe. I’m taking two pieces because it’s a big night and I need energy.”
“Heller,” said Wyatt. “You can have three pieces of candy corn.”
“No,” said Heller firmly, and then, “Stop staring at me like that, K-Bop. Do you have any idea how many photographers are gonna be out there this weekend, just dying to get a picture of me with a muffin top or cellulite or my ass hanging out? Maybe you can snap one yourself. Those pictures sell for the most money because they can put them on the front page of the tabloids with a headline like ‘Heller’s Weight Is Off the Charts!’ or ‘Heller-Belly!’ or ‘She’s a Heller-potamus!’ ”
“But, Heller,” I said, “you still require proper nutrition, including each of the four basic food groups …”
“Which in Hollywood are cigarettes, vodka, bottled water and air. I have all of these dresses that all of these designers are giving to me for free and they’ve all been altered so they fit me within an inch of my life. So I don’t need a piece of candy corn poking out of my stomach.”
Heller paused and looked at me, as if she was daring me to question her logic. She’d changed into a tight, sleeveless black velvet top and a tiny sequined black skirt. I’d seen thousands of pictures of Heller looking perfect in fancy dresses but I’d never thought about the work involved and the dieting and the denial. I wondered if Heller had an eating disorder or, worse, if she wanted to have one.
“Heller,” I said, “what if you wore something less revealing?”
“Said the girl in the plus-size rubber blazer.”
“It is not plus-size!”
“It’s a shower curtain.”
“You should eat something!”
“Shut up. Fuck you. Welcome to my world,” she said, and then she was back on her phone.
* * *
The club was in a downtown warehouse with mobs of people waiting outside. We stayed in our van until everyone else had gotten out of their own vans and then the rest of the group surrounded us and we all moved into the club together, like we were smuggling Heller across state lines. The club was incredibly dark and packed with people and the music was really loud and thumping, and I was having trouble breathing.
I tried to keep my panic in check by keeping Heller and Wyatt in sight. I just have to say one thing: I don’t understand that kind of music. It never sounds like a song but more like a broken garbage disposal that won’t stop burping and chugging and spitting, and if there are ever any lyrics they’re just the same thing repeated over and over again saying something like “smack that thang” or “bump that thang” or “bounce that thang,” but I don’t know what the thang is.
Someone from the club led us across the dance floor and past some guards with really thick necks and into a roped-off area where Heller and I sat at a little table.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“We’re in the VIP section,” said Heller, rolling her eyes as if she couldn’t believe how dense I was. “It’s for celebrities and models and rich people and their crews. And their super-repulsive neo-Nazi FBI informants.”
“I am not an FBI informant!”
“You might as well be. Can you please stop eyeballing me like I’m about to overdose, just so you can kneel over my corpse and start singing some gospel song called ‘Jesus Is My Drug Mule’?”
“Excuse me, but from what your mom told me, you do have a history of extremely dangerous and self-destructive behavior …”
“And you probably have permanent ridges on your shins from the elastic in those kneesocks.”
“I do not! Not if I wear the correct size!”
Heller stood up for a second and waved, and hundreds of people screamed and held up their phones and took her picture.
“They need you,” Wyatt told Heller, and then he brought her a few feet away to a raised platform where she stood in between a huge blown-up poster for the Angel Wars movie and a prop can of Angel Power, the Angel Wars energy drink. The can was taller than Heller. The music stopped and Heller was in a spotlight.
“Hey, y’all!” said Heller. “How are ya?”
The crowd screamed again as Heller grinned and for a second I thought that if Heller told all of these people to follow her into the street and burn down the building, or to spray-paint her name across the front of the White House, or to rip off my arms and use them as golf clubs, they’d do it in a heartbeat.
“Welcome to the official opening event of Angel Wars Weekend International!” Heller said, and the crowd screamed even louder and I thought my eardrums were going to burst.
“I know that we all love the Angel Wars books and I hope you like the movie! Tonight everybody here is going to get a free can of Angel Power, the energy drink that’s so packed with power you’ll feel like you’re flying!”
A row of models wearing white spangled minidresses and little golden wings started tossing cans of Angel Power into the crowd as the music thumped back up and Heller waved and came back to our table. She looked at me triumphantly, as if she’d just demonstrated how famous she was, and she handed me a can of Angel Power. I took a sip and then spewed every bit of it all over the table.
“K-Bop!” said Heller, who couldn’t stop laughing. “Where are your manners?”
“That tasted horrible! What’s in that?”
“Who knows? Probably caffeine, cat vomit and motor oil. Or maybe it’s angel poop.”
“But … but … your picture is on the can!”
“I didn’t say it was my poop. Please, it’s just business. When I signed on to do the movie I agreed to do all of this promotion and all of these appearances; it’s just part of the deal.”
I was starting to understand why the studio was so worried about Heller. She wasn’t just starring in the Angel Wars movie—she was the Angel Wars ambassador. If she messed up, everything would fall apart. I wondered what it would feel like to have my face on posters and cans of soda and everything else—would it be exciting and a nonstop ego boost or would it feel weird, like I was trapped in some alternate universe on the planet Caitlin?
“Hey, Hel,” said a really tall, good-looking guy. “Who’s your friend?”
“She’s not my friend,” said Heller. “She’s a narc crossed wi
th an Amish surveillance drone. She’s here to make sure that I don’t get drunk or high or have sex with you on top of this table. K-Bop, this is Mills Stanwood.”
“Hey, K-Bop.”
I was about to tell him my real name but as he smiled at me and his narrow blue eyes crinkled I felt like the most wonderful tractor-trailer in the world had just run me over because, oh my God, OH MY GOD, it was MILLS STANWOOD!!!
He was on the Angel Wars poster standing next to Heller because he was playing Tallwen, the high school quarterback who falls in love with Lynnea! Tallwen is one of the Stelterfokken, a celestial tribe assigned to secretly protect the Chosen Winglet! MILLS STANWOOD WAS TALKING TO ME!!!!
Calico, who’s two years older than me, has the biggest crush of all time on Mills and in our room, underneath her mattress, she’s hidden a stack of magazines with his picture on the cover where sometimes he’s wearing a tank top and smiling and pointing his forefinger right at you and sometimes he’s looking off into the distance because he’s thinking about you.
As far as I could tell from the magazines and from everything Calico had shown me on the computer when our parents were out of the house, Mills was the star of a cable TV show called Blood Stud, where he played a really unhappy but totally cute vampire named Dane Belmont. Calico had told me that “Dane never wanted to become a vampire but his first girlfriend ever had turned him into one so that he would never leave her, but then they broke up. Dane hates having to kill people by drinking their blood so that he can stay alive, so he only kills criminals and dictators and bullies, and he travels the world seeking the enchanted moonstone, which has the power to make him human again. While he’s searching he helps people because his special vampire tears can heal broken bones.”
“But you know, don’t you, that vampires don’t really exist,” I’d told Calico. “They’re just made up and they’re silly and dumb. Why are you wasting your time over some TV actor who wears plastic fangs and who can’t keep his shirt buttoned?”
As Mills Stanwood kept smiling at me, I completely understood why Calico had written his name in secret vampire script with a magic marker on the bottom of her foot where my mom would never see it. While my dad is handsome and some of my brothers are perfectly nice-looking, although I would never tell them that, I’d never seen anyone who looked like Mills Stanwood. Maybe that was another reason why some people become famous: They actually look like their posters.
“Close your mouth,” Heller said to me. “And stop drooling. Or wear a bib.”
“I think that K-Bop has a beautiful mouth,” said Mills as he sat down next to me, and although I’m horribly ashamed to admit this, at that second I wanted him to bite me in the neck and turn me into a vampire so that we could go to a twenty-four-hour IHOP and have pancakes and talk or we could just pretend to talk while I watched him pour syrup and then smile at me some more.
“K-Bop likes you,” Heller told Mills. “Her gills are inflating.”
“Please do not call me K-Bop! It’s insulting and demeaning and juvenile!”
“K-Bop’s parents are named Calvin and Carol and they have eight hundred children who all have names starting with C, like Cucumber and Cockatoo and Colostomy …”
“I only have eight brothers and sisters and my parents like the letter C because it stands for Caring, Cooperation and our Creator.”
Heller mimed choking herself.
“Yo, Hel, welcome back,” said someone else, a guy wearing a little hat pushed back on his head, along with a worn leather motorcycle jacket and a limp T-shirt. “Here ya go. Your favorite. I remembered.”
As this guy started to hand Heller what looked like a bottle of imported beer I stood up and grabbed the bottle. “NO!” I said, as loudly and firmly as I could. “Heller has no interest in drinking any form of alcoholic beverage and will you please leave this restricted area immediately! Or I will … I will … I will call your parents!”
Everyone was staring at me and Heller covered her face with her hands.
“You’re kidding, right? Hel?” said the guy, so I said, “NO! I am not kidding! Take that bottle of beer and … and … recycle it! I’m warning you! Because I am … a fully authorized warning person!”
“Okay, chill … ,” said the guy as he backed off and blended in with the people on the dance floor.
“Nicely done,” Wyatt told me. “I can see why your family sent you here.”
Heller stood up and she was so furious she could barely speak. “I … CAN’T … BELIEVE … YOU … DID … THAT!” she sputtered.
“I’m not going to apologize,” I said. “That person was offering you a poisonous and life-denying substance—”
“Hey, Hel,” said a very skinny, unbelievably beautiful blonde girl who was wearing a dress the size of an oven mitt. “Look what I got.” The girl opened her hand and she had a little cellophane packet with some pills inside, resting in her palm.
“ARE THOSE NARCOTIC PILLS?” I demanded as I stood up again, speaking even louder because that seemed to be effective. “Heller has no need for those pills, thank you very much! She does not need to go on a drug trip or get high or … or … become the sort of person who would take those pills and go on a murderous rampage and end up in a maximum-security prison with other such criminal pill takers!”
“Okay … ,” said the beautiful girl, backing away into the crowd as Heller mimed banging her head on the table.
Wyatt grinned at me and said, “That was Ticey Shandles.”
“Who?” I asked.
“She’s on the cover of Italian Vogue this month,” he said, “and she’s the face of Multresse hair-care products.”
“I don’t care who she is,” I said, “although if she’s on the cover of an Italian magazine, why is she speaking English?”
“THIS IS A TRAIN WRECK!” said Heller, leaping up from the table and heading out onto the dance floor.
“You’re amazing,” Mills said to me as his knee touched mine under the table, and I wondered if just maybe our knees had somehow gotten instantly glued together, which would be crazy and medically impossible and maybe the best idea I’d ever heard in my entire life. But I had a job to do and Heller was getting swallowed by the crowd.
“Heller!” I called out. “I don’t think you should be dancing! Dancing can lead to … inappropriate touching! And shared bodily fluids!”
“I HOPE SO!” yelled Heller over her shoulder and now I almost couldn’t see her. I’d been starting my crusade by keeping Heller away from beer and drugs but now I was about to lose her.
Mills grabbed my hand and I’m not completely sure but I may have blacked out and left my body and floated over the crowd and looked down at myself holding hands with Mills Stanwood. I zoomed back into my body when I heard Mills say, “Come on! We can find her!”
As Mills took me onto the dance floor I noticed several things: first, that Mills had an earring, and second, that I’d just completely changed my mind from thinking that boys who have earrings are gross. I saw that the blond highlights in Mills’s hair were fake and I decided that the fake blond highlights in Mills’s hair were God’s finest achievement since creating Mills in the first place.
“There she is!” said Mills and then we were both smushed right up against Heller on the dance floor and we were all doing something that I couldn’t really call dancing because it was more like bobbing up and down and moving our shoulders a tiny bit, which was the only sort of dancing we could manage because we were packed in with so many other dancers. I looked around frantically to keep the exit signs in view but people were waving their arms and my shoulders were starting to tense up and I was beginning to worry about falling down and having drunken people step on my head and how if my obituary said that I’d died in a nightclub people would think I was a terrible, out-of-control, substance-addicted person. People would think I was Heller.
“Heller!” I yelled, trying to be heard over the music, which had grown even louder.
Heller mouthe
d something that looked like it involved my name and an f-bomb and she started moving through the crowd while I struggled to follow her, and as the crowd closed behind us we reached an exit. I couldn’t see Mills Stanwood anymore and while I was planning to use my phone the minute we left the club to check in with my mom, I wasn’t sure if I should tell her that I’d held hands with Mills or that while I was trying to turn Heller’s life around, she wasn’t cooperating. I was drowning in an ocean of degenerate clubgoers, secondhand smoke and Angel Power energy drinks!
Once I got outside Heller was standing by the van as Wyatt and April tried to calm her down. As I got closer I could see that Heller was vibrating with anger and had shut her eyes and put her fingertips to her forehead.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m trying to make your head explode with my mind. I’m trying to splatter your tiny little prayer-monkey pea brain all over the street.”
This was something Heller and I had tried to do when we were kids, only we’d always aimed it at other people. I shut my eyes and put my fingers onto my own forehead.
“I’m using my mind to thwart your evil plan,” I said. “I’m calling upon our Lord to deflect your violent thoughts and channel them into cleansing you of unholy impurities.”
“Ladies,” said Wyatt, “I have a thought. Why don’t we stop using our mind power and hop in the van and go someplace quiet, where we can have a bite and maybe work through our differences. April, do you know Hutterman’s Diner in Brooklyn?”
“Got it,” said April. “I’m going to use my mind power to levitate Heller and Catey into the van.”
Once we were traveling Heller got even more frustrated. “What is going on here?” she said, holding her phone out an open window. “I can’t get a signal!”
“We’re getting near the bridge,” said Wyatt. “It’s a dead spot.”