by Robin Palmer
“Are there any newcomers who would like to introduce themselves at this time?” asked Laticia, who was running the meeting. The reason I knew her name was because when she began she said “I’m Laticia” and the group—well, everyone in the group but me—responded, “Hi, Laticia” in unison in this singsongy way.
I slunk down in my seat and started examining my cuticles, but even with my head down I could feel everyone staring at me.
“Introduce yourself,” whispered the Munchkin kid, who had somehow ended up sitting on the other side of me.
I gave him a look before I mumbled, “I’m, uh, Annabelle.”
“What’d she say her name was?” a Hispanic boy wearing a TUPAC 4EVA T-shirt across the table loudly asked the girl next to him, who was busy texting. “Angela?”
“She said Annette,” the girl replied.
“Annabelle,” I said louder.
“Hi, Annabelle,” they sang. I tried not to flinch. Even if I got something out of this thing, I didn’t think I could ever come back if only because I could not deal with the “Hi” thing. It just felt so . . . cult-y.
Luckily, no one began grilling me after that. (Annabelle what? Who’s your qualifier? Why are you picking at your fingers?) Instead, Laticia went back to reading a bunch of handouts that I didn’t listen to because I was too busy thinking. Where exactly did things go so wrong that I’m spending a beautiful Saturday afternoon not with my friends, or a boyfriend, but in a smelly church basement at some self-help group meeting? A few words stuck out—understanding, hope, acceptance. Like, say, the way I hoped that Mom and Ben would be understanding when I told them they needed to accept I wasn’t coming back here.
“Okay,” Laticia said when she was finally done reading through the Twilight-size notebook of announcements. “Well, Eddie was supposed to speak, but he texted me last night that his dad was getting out of jail today and he was going with his mom to pick him up, so—”
Okay, I’m sorry. But jail? Then I remembered: it was only a few weeks ago that my mother had been in jail as well. So much for thinking I was all that different than these guys.
She turned to Munchkin Guy. “Walter—would you do it?”
“Sure,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. As he stood up and walked to the head of the table, I saw that he had a bit of plumber’s butt going on. Once he settled himself in his seat, he cracked his knuckles. “Hi, I’m Walter—”
“Hi, Walter,” boomed the group.
I was just about to get up, slip out, and go hide in the bathroom when something clicked and the Charlie-Brown’s-teacher wompwompwomp noise coming out of Walter’s mouth morphed into regular English, and what I heard shocked me. Even though there was a lot that was different about us—he was a fourteen-year-old boy and mentioned Call of Duty, like, three times—I completely related to much of what he was saying. The way that he couldn’t stop himself from snooping in his dad’s briefcase and throwing out pills when he found them. The way that he hated to have friends over because he never knew if his dad was going to embarrass him by being drunk. The pressure to remember what lies he had told to other people in order to cover up the truth about what was going on inside their house.
When he talked about that stuff, I knew exactly how he felt. And because I knew how he felt, I felt understood—like Amanda did, when she nodded—and not so alone. And because I felt understood and not so alone, I felt. . . . better.
When Walter was done, and we went around the room and people started to share, I related to them, too. I even found myself nodding a few times. That being said, I had gone this long without help from anyone but Dr. Warner in dealing with Mom—I didn’t need to bring my problems to complete strangers. Finally, after the Korean girl shared about feeling if she could just try harder to be perfect, then maybe her mother would stop drinking (hi, been there, done that), it was my turn.
I cleared my throat. “Well, uh, this is really—”
“Who are you?” Walter demanded.
“Huh?”
“Your name.”
“I already said it,” I replied, feeling my cheeks getting red. “It’s Annabelle.”
“Yeah, but you have to say it each time you speak,” said the Hispanic boy.
I sighed. “Fine. I’m Annabelle, and—”
“Hi, Annabelle,” the room sang back.
I flinched. “Hi. And, uh, I think this is a really great thing you guys have here. So thanks for letting me sit in and listen today. . . .” I trailed off. They all looked at me, as if waiting for me to go on. “And . . . that’s it.”
Luckily, it was 12:59. When Amanda said it was time to close the meeting, I shot out of my seat.
“Where are you going?” asked Walter.
“She just said it’s over.”
“No, it’s not. We still have to close.”
As everyone got in a circle and grabbed hands, I half wondered if we were going to start skipping around and singing “Ring Around the Rosie.”
“Annabelle, would you like to take us out with the Serenity Prayer?” Amanda asked.
“What?” I asked, confused.
“She doesn’t know what that is. She’s new, remember?” Walter reminded her.
“I know what it is,” I insisted. Mom had put a copy of it up on the fridge.
He shrugged. “Fine. Go for it.”
Everyone looked at me, waiting for me to start. “Ah . . .”
“God . . .”—Walter began, before everyone joined in—”grant me the serenity . . . to accept the things I cannot change . . . the courage to change the things I can . . . and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Other than the God part, it wasn’t very religious, which was a relief.
At the end of the prayer, while still holding hands, everyone moved them up and down.
“Keep coming back,” they said in unison.
Even though I may have related to what they were saying. . . . that was not going to happen.
Awards shows are the L.A. version of religious holidays. The Golden Globes are Rosh Hashanah; the Grammys are Easter; and the Academy Awards are Christmas, Yom Kippur, and Kwanza all rolled into one. Each one is an opportunity for a party, including the MTV Movie Awards, which Mom decided would be a great opportunity to make into a house—or to be more accurate, apartment—warming party.
It was a good thing we had been poor before Mom became famous because it meant that we knew how to clean. And because our apartment was about one-sixteenth the size of the Santa Monica house, we had it party-ready pretty quickly. One of the worst things about going broke was having to let Esme go. She ended up taking a full-time job in Malibu working for a director and his wife because her mom was coming from Guatemala for good and she needed a steady gig, but she promised that she’d be back. (“Wait until I get on The Price Is Right and win,” she said. “After that, I’ll come back and take care of you for nothing.”) Her last day with us was so sad that I ended up eating the entire dulce de leche cake she had made me as a good-bye present while Mom was at back-to-back AA meetings.
“That Wendell boy seems very nice,” Mom yelled from her bedroom as she tried on half her closet looking for just the right outfit for the party, even though there would be only six of us. “I’m glad you invited him to the party.”
“It’s Walter,” I called out while I set out the food. Nothing fancy—just guacamole, hummus, chips, spinach dip. A little different from the time Mom had convinced the chef from Nobu to cater our Oscar party. “And I didn’t invite him—you did.”
The day before, while Mom was over in the bath-and-body-cream aisle of Whole Foods, even though I told her that buying fifteen-dollar vanilla body cream was not how people without money shopped, and I was in the middle of checking the ripeness of some avocados and wondering whether we could get away with not having guacamole and ser
ving just salsa, seeing how much the avocados cost, I felt a jab in the back.
“Is that you?”
I turned around to see Walter—the Munchkin-eating kid from the Alateen meeting—chomping away on one of the jumbo chocolate chip cookies from the bakery shelf.
“Yup. I thought it was,” he said with his mouth full. “Annabelle, right? I’m Walter. In case you forgot.”
“Hi, Walter,” I said in the singsongy way the kids had used in the meeting. I was trying to be funny, but from the look on his face I had missed. Like by a mile. I glanced over to see that Mom was now demonstrating her signature pratfall from the show to a small group of shoppers. “Mom,” I called out. As she glanced over at me I shook my head in an attempt to get her to stop.
“That’s your mom?” Walter asked, surprised.
I nodded.
“The woman who got busted going the wrong way down the PCH?”
Apparently, even fourteen-year old gamers read the gossip blogs. “Yup.”
“That was epic. My dad only hits mailboxes. But he’s gotten pretty good at it.” He held out his cookie. “Want some?”
“Thanks,” I said as I broke off a piece. Maybe he wasn’t that bad.
“I said a piece—not half of it.”
Then again.
Mom made her way over. “Did you see that older couple? They’re from Des Moines, and it turns out they have every single episode of Plus Zero on their DVR. It’s like they’re . . . what do you call that . . . superfans!” She flashed her signature Janie Jackson smile at Walter. “Hello, I’m Janie Jackson.”
“I’m Walter.”
“So do you two know each other from school?” Mom asked.
“Mom, I go to an all-girls school, remember?”
“Oh, right.” She laughed. “Early sobriety space-out, I guess.”
I shook my head. So much for anonymity.
“I know Annabelle from . . . around,” Walter said. He made it sound like we were part of the CIA, rather than two people who ended up in a smelly basement because our parents drank too much.
She turned to me. “Did you invite Walter to the party?”
“Um—”
“What party?” he asked suspiciously.
“We’re having a little soiree for the MTV Movie Awards tomorrow night,” Mom replied. “A combination awards/housewarming thing. We recently had to move because—”
“Mom, Walter probably already has plans—”
“No, I don’t,” he said. “That sounds like fun.”
“You don’t have to come,” I said quietly as Mom turned away to pose for a picture with the couple from Des Moines.
“Why would I have said I wanted to if I didn’t mean it?” he asked. “If I had done that, that would’ve been people-pleasing, and that’s one of the things that attending meetings helps us to stop doing.”
I sighed. “Fine. Give me your number. I’ll text you the address.”
When I had recently given the praying thing a try, like those kids had been talking about at the meeting, and had asked if maybe God could bring me some friends now that mine were gone, this wasn’t what I had in mind.
“Bug, come quick!” Mom yelled. “Look who’s on!”
Camera in hand, I walked to the door of her filled-to-the-gills-with-slipcovered-furniture bedroom, where a shirtless Billy Barrett was running away from a burning building in an ad for Rad and Righteous.
“Isn’t that weird?” she asked. At least she was wearing a towel instead of walking around naked, like usual.
“What?” I asked as I snapped away at her nightstand, which was littered with self-help books and little Twelve-Step meditation books.
“That at the exact second I turned on the TV, there he is!” She turned to me. “What do you think it means?”
I aimed the camera at the heap of dresses on her bed. If she had sold them—which she refused to do (“Annabelle, this is your legacy,” she kept saying, even though they were all size twos, and I was a six)—I bet we could have paid our rent for a year. I shrugged. “I think it means his movie’s number one at the box office, and they want to keep it that way.”
“No, I mean the deeper meaning,” she said. “You know what they say . . . ‘Coincidence is God’s—’”
“‘Way of remaining anonymous,’” I finished. “I know. You’ve mentioned that.” That was the latest slogan Mom had picked up at meetings. I just prayed there wasn’t a bumper sticker for it. Her car was already covered with ones that said things like ONE DAY AT A TIME, EASY DOES IT, and LIVE AND LET LIVE. (“Are you sure you don’t want me to get you one for your car at the Twelve n’ Twelve?” she had asked the other day. “Not only is it such a great reminder for you, but you’re actually being of service to other people when they’re driving behind you!”)
“I’ve actually been thinking of calling him,” she said. “Except I can’t find that piece of paper with his number on it. . . .”
Because it was still in my sock drawer.
“So I was thinking of e-mailing Carrie’s assistant to see if she could find out who his publicist is and—”
“Please don’t,” I pleaded.
She glanced up from the pile of dresses. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t—” The look on her face made me stop. Like she was this innocent kid, and I was about to tell her that Santa Claus was just something made up by Walmart and Target to justify people getting pepper-sprayed on Black Friday. “Nothing.”
She shook her head. “Nope. Can’t get away with that, Bug. That’s not clear and open communication.” She pushed the dresses aside so she could stretch out on the bed and put out her hand, motioning for me to join her.
Thank you, Oasis, for that. “It’s just . . . he’s sixteen years younger than you!” I said as I walked over and lay next to her.
She cringed. “Do you really need to keep bringing that up?” She shrugged. “So there’s a bit of an age difference. It worked for Demi and Ashton.”
“No, it didn’t! They broke up!” I reached for the camera and aimed it at her. I loved the little lines that were starting to come in on her face now that she couldn’t afford Botox as often.
“Well, it worked until they broke up.” She put her hand up. “Not so close, Bug.”
Instead of pulling back, I actually zoomed in closer. “Yeah, and then she had a total meltdown and became anorexic and started doing Whip-Its and got carted off to rehab.”
“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with rehab,” she said. “It’s the beginning of healing.”
I put the camera down and curled up beside her. “I thought the AA people told you you can’t get into a relationship for a year.”
“It’s not that you can’t,” she replied as she tickled my arm, “it’s just something that’s suggested.”
I closed my eyes. For years I had been the one to tickle her arm. It felt good to be on the other end of it. “How come?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably because if it doesn’t work out you’ll want to drink or something.”
My eyes snapped open. “Well, there you go. That’s a good enough reason right there,” I said. I hated how much I still worried that at any moment things could go back to how they had been. “Don’t you think you have enough going on at the moment without getting involved with some ginormous star who’s closer in age to me than you?”
“What are you talking about? I have nothing going on,” she replied. “That’s the problem.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “You just got a voice-over.”
She sighed. “For dog food, Bug. Dog. Food.”
I was glad we weren’t facing each other so she couldn’t see me cringe. That sounded a lot worse when said out loud. “Well, it’ll pay the rent for next month at least.”
“Nope. Half the rent.”
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If Ben weren’t helping us out, we would have been even more screwed. Because he didn’t want to make Mom feel worse than she already did, he tried to do it in ways that weren’t so humiliating. Like how he said the reason he was paying my tuition was because he wanted an excuse to go to the East Coast and visit me when I went to college. And how he took over the car payments because he cared about our safety and didn’t want us to have to deal with some used car that might have bad brakes.
Mom got up from the bed. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. It’s too depressing.”
She was right. It was.
“Getting back to Billy—”
Okay, that was as depressing as the fact that we were broke.
“It’s just . . . I really felt a connection with him,” she said. “Like at a very, very deep level.”
“Um, did you see SimonSez’s Not-So-Blind item on his blog this morning?” I asked.
“No. Willow suggested I try and detox off the gossip stuff for thirty days.” Willow was Mom’s sponsor. She was only twenty-five but had been sober for five years. An ex-heroin addict, she now worked at Neiman Marcus in the Chanel department. “What’d it say?”
I picked up her iPhone and surfed for it. “It says . . . What Hollywood hottie, recently crowned Hollywood’s most eligible bachelor, is also a major commitmentphobe as evidenced by the canoodling with cuties that was going on last night at Soho House?”
She shrugged. “It doesn’t say it’s him.”
I looked at her.
“At any rate, I’m telling you, Bug. The way I feel is very strong. It might even be a past-life thing.”
I sighed. “Mom, people are going to be here in, like, an hour, and you haven’t even put your makeup on yet.” I picked up a purple-and-tan-striped wrap dress. “Here—how about this?”
She took it from me. “Bug, I’m serious. Why are you so against my getting in touch with Billy?”
I might have answered her if I had known the answer, but I didn’t. It was partly the age difference. Partly that I worried that if they hooked up and then he dumped her, on top of everything that had gone down this past month, she’d start drinking again. Partly the fact that I knew the bloggers would have a field day with their snarky comments. But it was more than that. I just wasn’t sure what the more was.