Pretending to Be Us

by Taylor Holloway

  Being alone with my thoughts was probably not ideal. So, when Mark invited me to come work out, I scraped together my self-worth and sweatpants and went over. Although I could have spent the time grousing alone in my condo, a small piece of rational thought encouraged me not to be a shut-in. So, instead, I went to go get physically beat up.

  Unsurprisingly, the first thing I did when I got into the ring with Mark was get punched in the face.

  “Earth to Peter,” Mark said, dancing around me and taking shots at my middle. “You aren’t supposed to just stand there and let me hit you.”

  I was taller and heavier than Mark, but he was faster and far more skilled. Sometimes it felt like I was Godzilla, trying in vain to swat the planes away. Today I was barely even trying. I was too distracted.

  “I’ve had a bad couple of days,” I told him, managing to land one solid right hook. “Give me a minute to warm up and I’ll kick your ass.”

  “You’ve had twenty minutes to warm up on the bags,” he reminded me. He paused. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  I used his moment of hesitation to swing and miss. “It’s all too weird to talk about.”

  Mark laughed at my weak attempts to throw him off balance. He floated around me effortlessly, taking shots at me whenever he saw an opening. “Try me. I got lit on fire yesterday. Twice. And I got paid for it. Weird is my game. Weird is my middle name.”

  Weird was his seemingly platonic relationship with his roommate, Lara. He was so in love with her it could be seen from space. I didn’t mention it. He’d figure it out eventually.

  “Your middle name is Thomas,” I said instead, blocking a blow to my head and feeling a bit better now that I had someone to argue with. “It’s on your sign out front.”

  “That’s old Welsh for weird,” he replied, laughing.

  “Oh yeah? And is Mark old Welsh for ‘full of crap’?”

  He rolled his eyes at me and landed another left to my ribcage. Ow.

  “Talk or I’m just going to hit you until you talk,” Mark ordered. “Let me guess, this is all about that princess, isn’t it? Don’t deny it, because it’s all over your famous face.”

  I grimaced. He was right.

  “You like her.”

  “Yeah. Well. I did, anyway. I really liked her,” I told him, putting it firmly in the past tense where it wouldn’t hurt so much. “We even had a little bit of a thing going,” I admitted. I wasn’t going to tell him about taking her virginity in Avignon. I was sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that she hadn’t been lying about that much, at least. Biology can’t be faked. The blood on the sheets was genuine.

  “So, then what happened?” he asked. “You married the princess and lived happily ever after?”

  “Not quite.” Not even close.

  “Yeah, you don’t look that happy.” That was probably an understatement. I felt horrible. I probably looked horrible, too.

  “I’m not,” I admitted.

  “Well, don’t keep me in suspense,” Mark said.

  I sighed. “She was lying about being a princess. Apparently, our evil, pathological liar of a producer, Darcy, had her audition knowing that if we didn’t like her then she could seize control of the production. When that didn’t work and we did like Lucy, then she was screwed. She had to go along with it until she found a way to stop work for a few days. There was some obscure clause in the contract about a work stoppage basically giving her carte blanche to do whatever. So, now she’s thrown Lucy under the bus and is preparing to make us reshoot the entire thing. With Darcy, our producer, playing the lead role.”

  Mark stared at me. “Wow. That’s some story.” He dropped his guard at last. I could have sucker punched him at that point, but I wasn’t going to. I’d leave that kind of behavior for Lucy.

  “It is, isn’t it?” I laughed, but it was bitter. It was like something out of a movie. A bad one. If I read a script like this, I’d toss it straight in the trashcan for being too unbelievable. And I was the guy who spent most of his movies punching robots and wrestling monsters.

  “So, what happened to the princess?” Mark asked.

  I shrugged my shoulder like I didn’t care. Like I didn’t wonder what she was doing at every moment. “She wasn’t a princess.”

  “You know what I’m asking.” He cocked his head to the side. “You’re mad at her. But what happened to her after everybody found out the truth?"

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. She lied to me. She lied to everybody. She helped Darcy screw us all over.”

  Mark frowned at me. His blue eyes were thoughtful. “It sounds like she got screwed worse than everybody else.”

  “How do you figure?” I asked him. I was pretty sure I got screwed worse than everybody; the girl I liked had lied to me and tricked me.

  Mark leaned back against the ropes and crossed his arms over his chest. “Well, she wasn’t supposed to get the role, right?”

  “Right. I guess Darcy was planning on her bombing the audition. But Lucy was actually pretty good. She’s a good actress, I’ll give her that.” It was really a shame. I hated to think that all of her footage would be locked away forever. She had talent. She was a liar, but still...

  “Then she wasn’t really on Darcy’s side. She was just trying to keep her job,” Mark said.

  “Sure, by lying to everybody.” Especially me. Was she pretending to like me the whole time just to keep me under her spell? It worked. Hook, line, and sinker. If she showed up right now, if she just waltzed into the boxing gym and smiled at me, I’m not sure I’d be able to resist her. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I wasn’t sure of much at the moment.

  “So, you think she wanted to keep the job because she wanted to be an actress?”

  “Well yeah.”

  I thought about all the times when, in hindsight, she was clearly right on the verge of telling me the truth. I should have seen it for what it was. Everything made so much more sense to me now. And it only made it worse.

  “I can’t say that I blame her,” Mark said.

  I frowned at him. “For lying to everybody?”

  Mark shrugged his shoulders. “Do you know how hard it is for us normies to break into Hollywood?”

  I paused. No. I didn’t. And he knew I didn’t.

  Mark was a great guy. A good actor, an amazing stuntman, a former solider, a wonderful human being. He was smart and talented. But he wasn’t famous. He might never be. The farther he got into his late twenties, the less likely his leading man days would ever arrive.

  I stifled my guilt. I did nothing to earn my golden ticket. I was born into it. Success hadn’t necessarily been easy for me, but it had always been accessible. That wasn’t normal. I knew it. Mark knew it. Lucy knew it. And she’d been trying to tell me, but I hadn’t been listening.

  Still...

  “That justifies her lying to me?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” Mark frowned back at me. His expression said he honestly wasn’t sure. “That’s between you two. But I do think it justifies her lying to everybody else. If it were me and I had that opportunity, I’d take it. In a hot second. And if it ever happened again? Shit. I’d do it twice.”

  I paused. “She lied to me,” I repeated. But the doubt that had been in me since Lucy burst into tears at dinner two days ago was still there.

  I wasn’t sure if there was any future for us, but I needed to find Lucy. I at least needed to know why she did it.

  29

  Lucy

  “The flight’s boarding,” Daniel told me. He looked as tired as I felt. “Let’s go home.”

  I looked up groggily at him. We’d been stranded in the Paris airport for two days with an increasingly irritable Bill. My back hurt from trying to sleep upright and I doubted my neck would ever be the same. It turns out that when you take a private plane to France, they don’t stamp your passport the right way. Then, when you try to fly home commercial, it’s a fucking disaster. And bringing a large dog without the proper paperwork?
They don’t like that much either. The embassy had to get involved and there were fines and delays and lectures. But now, finally, we were going home.

  At great personal and financial cost.

  The way home from Avignon drained the rest of my bank account. And that paycheck? Somehow Darcy managed to find another loophole in the contract. I hadn’t worked enough hours on the production to actually “qualify” for the parts of the deal that happened after filming wrapped. It was like some kind of horrible practical joke.

  I was right back to where I started. Only worse, because now I was in France.

  “My mom’s power got cut off this morning,” I said as we shuffled our exhausted way down the aisle. “I’m not there to fix it. And even if I was, I don’t have the money to do anything.”

  The money from selling my car was just enough to pay for my ticket home. The rest was already being paid to the hospital for my grandmother’s wrist surgery. That left me just enough to maybe make it through the month. Daniel was now just as broke as me. But he’d be okay. He could get his law license back. Or get a job as a paralegal for a while. He was educated. He’d recover a lot faster than me. At least financially.

  “I heard from Santiago,” he replied, reminding me that he was going to be rehabbing his heart, too. “He says he’s sorry.”

  I winced. “Oh?” Sorry hardly seemed sufficient.

  “Darcy wants to sue us. He keeps texting me but I...” he trailed off. “I just don’t know.”

  “Are you angry at him?” I asked. Daniel seemed weirdly conflicted about what to me seemed like a very straightforward betrayal.

  “Of course, "he answered defensively. “You were right all along. He must have known what Darcy was up to. He just let me believe everything was going to be alright.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told him, wishing I hadn’t been right. “I know you liked him.”

  “Do you think she’ll really sue us?”

  I shrugged. “Probably. She knows we’re broke. But I don’t think she cares. It’s not about the money.”

  “I can’t believe he would let her do that,” Daniel said. “I thought he was better than that.”

  “She probably has something on him, you know?” The more I thought about it, the more I considered that it might be true.

  Daniel looked over at me. “You think so?”

  I nodded. “She’s got a real talent for dragging people down to her level.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  I knew Santiago was going to betray Daniel, but I could tell he was still stung by it. The thing was, I believed Santiago was sorry. I don’t know why, but the way he was with Daniel... I guess it reminded me of the way I was with Peter. I wanted to be with him, I wanted to be happy, but it wasn’t possible. Sometimes the world makes you do bad things. Sometimes you have to lie. I no longer viewed Santiago as our enemy. In his way, he was probably just as manipulated as we were.

  “Have you heard from Peter?” Daniel asked me.

  I winced. “No.”

  “Have you tried to contact him?” Daniel asked. We’d been sitting side by side for two days in the airport, so the answer should have been clear, but he was still curious.

  “No. I haven’t.”

  “Why not?”

  I made an exasperated noise. “What would I even say? Oops. It turns out I’m actually not the girl you thought I was. Do you still want to make out?”

  What would possibly make up for weeks of lies? There was nothing.

  “You would probably want to lead with ‘I’m sorry’,” Daniel said seriously.

  I sighed. “There’s no point. He hates liars.”

  I didn’t deserve his forgiveness. I had my reasons for doing what I did, but I doubted he would ever understand. From his perspective I was nothing but a liar. I hoped for his sake that Darcy did a good job as Eva. It would be hellish to watch this movie come out in theaters with them on the poster. I’d never be able to watch it without crying, and it wasn’t exactly a sad movie.

  Daniel raised an eyebrow at my sad-sack reply. “At least now you can be honest with him. You can tell him everything. That’s a good start.”

  “I don’t think he’ll want to talk to me.”

  “Is it that? Or are you just scared.”

  It was copious amounts of both. That was probably obvious.

  I stared out the window, unable to meet Daniel’s eyes.

  “Are you in love with him?” Daniel asked. His voice was mild, like he was just making conversation. But I knew Daniel. He’d been working up to this all along. He was worried about me, and I knew it came from a place of caring, but I wasn’t in the mood to talk about my feelings.

  I nodded though. There was no point in pretending. “Yeah. But it hardly matters. He’s probably already found somebody new.”

  There was no shortage of women out there who would do anything for a chance with the famously handsome Peter Prince. I was one of them. But I had my shot and I blew it. He was probably busy forgetting me already with someone prettier and more talented. It just better not be Darcy. Anyone but her. My heart couldn’t take it.

  It was going to be a long flight home. Thirteen long hours. And then? I had no idea what I would do. Maybe I could find a waitressing gig. I could tell the hiring manager I’d almost played one in a movie.

  30

  Peter

  The address on Lucy Bergen’s contact card at the studio led me to a small, rented condo downtown that, according to the doorman, was registered to Daniel. Luckily, the doorman was a fan of mine. It took a lot of selfies and two autographs, but I managed to get Lucy’s real address out of him. Apparently, Lucy Bergen was Daniel’s house sitter and she’d signed some paperwork in case of emergencies. She wasn’t supposed to even live there with him, per the HOA. The building had been looking the other way for a while, but they were getting wise that she was sleeping there.

  The actual address for Lucy Bergman was deep in Southeast Austin, nestled in an area of town that could at best be described as ‘modest.’ I was glad to be visiting during the day, because somehow this corner of town had missed the prosperity that seemed to be bursting in every other neighborhood in town. By the looks of it, this place just got forgotten.

  Eventually (and after two wrong turns because the street signs were so badly vandalized, I couldn’t read them), I found her address. I checked and rechecked the address, but this was it.

  I must have transposed a number at Daniel’s condo, because there was no way Lucy could live here, but I figured I should at least try the door. It looked abandoned.

  The single-story house sat on an overgrown lawn surrounded by a lopsided chain link fence. The house itself had probably once been blue, but successive layers of paint had all been applied and then weathered off until it was more of a multihued blue-beige with hints of red and yellow. I climbed the rotting wood steps up to the front door carefully. I worried a misstep would send my leg straight through to whatever nest of animals had clearly taken up residence under the porch. My money was on raccoons, because I could hear something squeaking urgently as I walked.

  There was an eviction notice pasted to the door. I had to have the wrong address. I knocked on the front door, but no one answered. There was no doorbell that I could find. I was on the verge of giving up when the door creaked open and a very old woman stared out at me.

  “Hello, I’m looking for Lucy?” I asked.

  She frowned at me. The woman said something in what I’d now learned to identify as Swedish and made a few elaborate, unintelligible hand gestures.

  Great. She didn’t speak English. This was not off to an encouraging start. I couldn’t understand Swedish at all. I couldn’t even tell where one word ended and the next began or if something was a sentence or a word.

  “Do you speak English?” I asked her.

  She shook her head.

  “Does Lucy Bergen live here?” I asked, pointing to the building. “I’m looking for her.”

&nb
sp; She paused. “Lucia Antonia?”

  “Yes!” I said, nodding. Did she understand me? She clearly understood me better than I understood her. “Is Lucy here right now?”

  The woman shook her head again. “Hon är inte här.”

  I might as well be talking to the Swedish Chef. She seemed very friendly though. I smiled at her and she smiled back. We couldn’t communicate, but at least she wasn’t yelling at me.

  I knew this woman knew Lucy. That meant that she was probably related to Lucy. If I squinted, I could sort of see the resemblance. We stared at one another for a moment.

  “Peter,” she said after a moment, pointing at my chest. “Peter.”

  My lips parted. I pointed at myself. “Yes. I’m Peter.”

  She nodded and then pointed at the dubiously sound bench next to the door. “Vänta där,” she told me. “Sitt ner.”

  I was no linguist, but I understood she wanted me to sit down. I did and she smiled. She mumbled something else and then shut the door.

  I waited. The woman had gone inside the house, but I had no better leads on Lucy than this place. I figured I could wait for a few hours and see if Lucy showed up. I had nothing better to do.

  A moment later, however, the woman reemerged. She had a plate of cookies in her hand and a book under her arm.

  “Snacks,” she said clearly. She pushed the plate at me, and I took it uncertainly. “Äta,” she said, pointing to her mouth. I nibbled on the edge of an unfamiliar looking cookie. It wasn’t bad. I smiled at her and she smiled back. Then she sat down next to me and opened up the book. It was a photo album.

  From the pages, tiny Lucy grinned back at me from every photograph. The old woman, who I was rapidly beginning to piece together was Lucy’s grandmother, narrated each photograph in Swedish. I didn’t understand any of what she was saying, of course, but I didn’t really need to.

  The pictures told the story of Lucy growing very much like any average American in a number of different cities I recognized. I saw Dallas, Austin, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, and Chicago. She must have moved a lot. The woman I surmised to be Lucy’s mother looked exhausted in most of the pictures, and she used a cane in more and more of them as we moved through the pages.