Spoiled (17 page)

“Our Eliza Doolittle is here!” crowed Jennifer, ushering Brooke front and center. “Take a bow, Brooke.”

Obligingly, Brooke curtsied as the cast applauded.

“Please, no, this is going to be a team effort. It’s not just me,” she said. “It’s me and
Jennifer
.”

“Oh, but it’s mostly Brooke; she has such vision,” Jennifer gushed. “I’m just a professional consultant. My acting coach wants
me to understand the other side of my art.”

“Right,” Brooke said dismissively. “Anyway, thank you all for coming here on a Friday afternoon. Postponing the start of your
weekend is a test of your commitment as actors, and I am happy to see that you’ve all passed. Now, do everything we say, and
this will be an enormous hit. Ignore us, and perish. Got it?”

Everyone blinked, then the applause resumed in a scattered, nervous way.

“Fabulous!” Brooke beamed. “I assume you all learned your lines over the summer. Let’s do an off-book run-through to see where
we are.”

“I have a question.” Jake put up his hand. “Why do you call it
My Fair Lady
if the book says
Pygmalion
?”

“Because
Pygmalion
sounds like a skin disease,” Brooke retorted. “We’re using the title from the musical. Now please, let’s get started so we’re
not here all night. Jennifer will read the stage directions. Go.”

Brooke wished Brick could see her now, running her cast with authority, jotting intelligent comments into her notebook—for
instance, the more Julie Newman talked, the more obvious it became she could
not
carry off a bonnet—and basically already kicking ass. She’d spent all summer sketching out the blocking and set ideas, dropping
hints to Jake that the lead actress always gets flowers….

Suddenly, she realized nobody was speaking.

“What happened?” Brooke asked. “Did we forget our lines already, people? Seriously? You had
three months
. I—”

Jennifer cleared her throat and nodded toward the spot just over Brooke’s left shoulder. She turned in her seat and saw Molly
standing there, a pained look on her face. Brooke clenched her jaw. Why was she always
everywhere
?

“Yes?” Brooke hissed. “Are you lost again?”

“No. I’m here…” Molly gulped. “I’m here to work on the play.”

Brooke’s laugh sounded tinny and hollow, like dropping an eyelash curler in the sink.

“Hilarious!” she said. “Now run along. I’m in the middle of something important here.”

“I know, but… Headmistress McCormack said she’d enforce this personally,” Molly told her. “I guess Brick told her I can do
costumes, like my mom, and… I don’t know, he said something about the trenches, I think from that Vietnam movie he did. And
then he said he can’t wait to see our production. So… we don’t really have a choice.”

Brooke felt her stomach churn. In her periphery, the cast exchanged apprehensive glances. Surely, Brick couldn’t expect her
to work with Molly on the play.
Her
play, that she had slaved over all summer while he skulked around the house and made plans for his secret, stupid love child
to move in with them and ruin her life. How would he like it if she stormed onto the set of
Avalanche!
and told him he had to let Quentin Tarantino direct all the action sequences? (Brick and Quentin had a falling out over Uma
Thurman and hadn’t spoken in years. Privately, Brooke was relieved. Quentin had a habit of coming over for dinner and crashing
in the pool house for three weeks.)

What’s she going to ruin next? Is she going to shave my head and start wearing my hair?

Brooke felt like she finally understood what Dr. Hedge Von Henson experienced that time the flesh-eating virus went on a rampage
through
Lust for Life
. Despite her best efforts at containment, Molly was contaminating every single aspect of Brooke’s life, and it was beginning
to seem
like a fight she couldn’t win. So she went with the first plan B that leapt to mind.

“Where were we?” Brooke asked the cast. “Jake, I think it’s your line.”

Everyone stared at her.

“Hello?” Brooke trilled. “The sooner we finish the read-through, the sooner we’ll all get to start our weekends!”

“Um,” Jennifer started, nervously twirling a lock of hair around her index finger. “Don’t you need to finish…?”

“Finish what?” Brooke chirped.

Jake scratched his head and shot Jen a concerned glance. “Is she…
okay
?” he asked.

“Peachy!” Brooke said. “Let’s get back to work!”

“I promise this wasn’t my idea,” Molly said. “Can’t we just—”

“Jake,” Brooke said, her voice getting uncontrollably higher than she’d prefer, “please continue.”

Jake looked blankly from Brooke to Molly and back again.

“Or I’ll give your part to Neil Westerberg!” Brooke snapped.

“But my part is better than—” Neil began.

“Are you
kidding me
?” Molly asked, from somewhere behind Brooke’s shoulder.

“Brooke, I’m sure it’ll only take a second to deal with her,” Jen said.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Brooke said.
She turned around and pretended to look for something, then let her gaze drift past Molly. “There’s
nobody
here.”

Their eyes met for a second. The hurt in Molly’s, and their likeness to Brick’s, was surprisingly hard for Brooke to withstand
without losing her composure and apologizing. She turned around quickly and clapped her hands to avoid betraying any reaction.

“Onward!” she said.

The cast stared at her with a mixture of disbelief, awe, and a little fear. Maybe more than a little. But then Jake nervously
picked up with his last line, and the read-through continued.

Brooke held her breath until she heard footsteps behind her getting fainter and fainter. The door slammed, and she knew Molly
was gone. She wanted to exhale, but her body was still tense and her stomach hurt. What was wrong with her? She ought to feel
victorious. This was war—an ugly, but necessary, war. And war always had casualties.

Molly let the theater door slam behind her. She’d never felt dumber. Her strenuous efforts to rise above all the rudeness,
to behave in a way that wouldn’t make her cringe when she looked back on her life in twenty years, were being spit back in
her face. Why couldn’t she have stood up for herself more? Why did she
always
have to be the
one acting like an adult? She didn’t look like the better person. She looked like a fool.

What am I supposed to do, Mom?

Usually, Molly could conjure her mother’s voice with ease, in part because Laurel had a lot to say about a lot of random topics,
and always yielded something Molly could put in her figurative pocket and apply to other situations. For instance, after an
odd encounter with a guy in Whole Foods, Laurel had made Molly promise never to date a man who owned a ferret; this helped
the summer she and Danny broke up and she met a fellow camp counselor who seemed awesome until he started talking about his
pet rat.

But her mother was strangely silent today.

“I can’t believe how rude that was.”

Molly lifted her head and met Shelby Kendall’s sympathetic gaze.

“You saw that?” she asked.

“The best reporters know where the story is before it even happens.”

“That’s… I’m sure that’s true,” Molly said, unsure what else to offer.

“You’re incredibly brave, you know, Molly,” Shelby said. “I’ve been watching you all week. Honestly, I’m concerned.” She paused
dramatically, biting her red lower lip. “I knew as soon as I heard you were moving here that her pathological tendencies would
rear up and bite.”

Molly stayed silent. She didn’t want to fuel the fire, but
Shelby wasn’t exactly wrong, either. Brooke did seem a little unhinged.

“I’m sure you’re aware that Brooke and I are not close,” Shelby said softly. “I don’t know if it’s because Brad Pitt once
told me I look just like Angelina, or because her mother skipped town and she’s resentful of my stable and loving family situation….
But I think perhaps no one understands what you’re going through quite like I do.”

“She did this to you, too?” Molly asked, feeling a small flood of relief.

“Let’s not dredge up ugly details from the past,” Shelby said. “We’re talking about you now. You need a shoulder. And I have
two.”

That this was a quote from one of the Dirk Venom movies—
Shoot Before Dying—
did not escape Molly’s notice.
What kind of sales pitch is this, anyway?

As if she heard the question, Shelby reached into her Michael Kors bag and pulled out a small sterling-silver case the size
of a deck of cards, from which she extracted a small rectangle with one reflective gold side. She handed it to Molly and said,
“Why don’t you give me a call sometime? Perhaps I could be of help.”

The card was embossed with the Colby-Randall crest, had the
Hey!
logo tucked down near the bottom, and read, “Shelby Kendall: Reporter, News Anchor, Student Leader.” Molly had never encountered
anyone her age with her own card, but then again, she’d also never encountered a teenager who treated socializing like a business
transaction.

“Fancy,” she said, for lack of a better reaction.

“They’re terribly handy,” Shelby noted. “I once ran into a
very
famous reclusive redhead in the parking lot of Gelson’s, and if I hadn’t had official documentation, I’d never have introduced
myself, and then I wouldn’t have seen that she was buying two boxes of laxatives.
Hey!
ran with that story for three weeks in a row.”

“Well, thank you, I, um, I really appreciate this,” Molly said.

“Don’t thank me. Call me,” Shelby said, reaching out to squeeze Molly’s shoulder. “You won’t be sorry.”

She turned away, then stopped and looked back at Molly.

“See?” she said, a tiny smile playing around the corners of her mouth. “I told you we’d meet again.”

The memory came rushing back: She’d bumped into Shelby, almost literally, the night of the party. While she was drunk. In
retrospect, Molly remembered Shelby had seemed to be enjoying that entire fiasco. And that she’d been wearing Molly’s Marchesa.

Molly glanced down at the card in her hand, then over her shoulder at the closed doors of the theater. Monday, she wouldn’t
have known what to do with this. But today she had a pretty good idea where to start figuring it out.

MOLLY WENT STRAIGHT TO DINNER
at the McCormacks’. She decided Brooke’s behavior denied her the right to a ride home. The laws of physics supported this:
If a person had to chauffeur you around town, then that person definitely existed. So if Brooke wanted to pretend Molly was
transparent, then she could find another driver. Besides, it wasn’t like she’d stranded Brooke at a truck stop. Someone, either
voluntarily or under terrified duress, would give her a lift.

It took Molly ten minutes to decipher Max’s chicken-scratch handwriting, but eventually she managed to punch an address into
the Lexus’s navigation system that it recognized. Molly didn’t even care. Wherever she ended up, be it Max’s house or a prison
replete with serial killers, it would be an improvement over her afternoon.

The directions took her to the end of a cul-de-sac off a pothole-plagued road near the Hollywood Bowl and deposited her in
front of a two-story shingled Craftsman bungalow. The house, which sat like a madcap anomaly between two neat little thatched
cottages with tidy porches and blooming window boxes, was nearly as patchy as the street. Someone had tried, and failed, to
improve it by adding a turret, and its compact, wild yard was dotted with gnarled vegetable patches and a knot of trees heavy
with fruit. The effect was more romantic than run-down, though that appeared to be a fluke of nature rather than a landscaping
plan.

As Molly parked behind a rusty 4Runner, a very compact bald man emerged from the garage dragging a dishwasher in a little
red wagon. He squinted at Molly, then offered an absentminded salute before tugging his cargo to a dilapidated shed. An avocado
fell from a tree with a thud, narrowly missing her head.

“Thank God you found it,” Max said, appearing on the porch. “MapQuest usually tries to make people turn into the side of the
mountain.”

As she walked up the steps, Molly noticed Max’s face was scrubbed clean, her hair held back by an old bandanna. She looked
about twelve years old, and rather striking, almost fragile. Without the aggressive eyeliner and her shaggy green mop, Molly
could see Max’s eyes, which Molly had thought were dark but which actually had flecks of amber glowing in them.

“Maxine, have you seen my soldering iron?” the bald man asked, coming out of the shed and holding a disintegrating weed whacker
almost as tall as he was.

“Dad, meet Molly. She just moved here. She’s Brick Berlin’s new kid.”

Mr. McCormack looked confused. “Is he the tan parent your mother is always complaining about?”

Max shot Molly an apologetic look. “Yeah, probably.”

“Right, right. Welcome!” he said, shifting the weed whacker to his other hand so he could shake Molly’s. “I hope Maxine and
Theodore have been helpful.”