Spoiled (31 page)

In fact, as Molly and Brooke crossed the street toward the Banana Republic, there was a whole cluster of paparazzi shooting
someone coming out of Barnes & Noble.

“Is that Rosario Dawson?” Molly wondered, pointing at the melee.

The clump of photographers surged toward them as Rosario fought her way to the parking garage. Brooke and Molly barely had
time to leap out of the way before the shouting mob trampled them.

“It’s just Rosario Dawson, people,” Brooke grumbled at them. “Name one good movie she’s even made.”

A paparazzo stopped to laugh at this and promptly got bowled over by one of his colleagues. His camera went flying. Brooke
deftly reached out and caught it by the strap, rescuing it from smashing on the sidewalk.

“Hey, thanks,” he said, retrieving it from Brooke’s outstretched arm. Then he peered at them both. “Wait a
second, I know you two. You’re Brick Berlin’s kids. You
hate
each other.”

He whipped up his camera and snapped a picture. Brooke stared at him, dumbfounded.

“Come on, give me a smile,” he shouted. A few of his buddies at the tail end of the Rosario scrum stopped trotting along and
looked over at them.

“What happened?” the first guy called out. “Didja kiss and make up?”

“How does it feel to have a sister?” another guy shouted as he jogged over to them. “What are you up to? Talk to us!”

Brooke froze on the spot. This had never happened to her before—at least, not without being elbowed out of the way for Molly.
She’d imagined this exact situation a million times, but now it was here and all she could do was gape.

Molly pinched her arm.

“We just came from yoga,” Molly announced. “And now we’re shopping.”

Several more photographers abandoned Rosario’s trek to the parking garage and came over, cameras held aloft. Brooke turned
her head toward Molly, then felt a surge of wild joy.

Thank God I did my hair for yoga this morning.

“Are you two getting along now?” someone in the back of the pack yelled.

Brooke pulled Molly closer to her, then angled herself
slightly to the side, flipped her hair over her shoulder, and flashed a blinding smile.

“Having a sister is the best.” Brooke beamed. “I’ve wanted one my whole life.”

“Over here! To the right, Brooke! Molly, smile!”

“Brooke, over here! Give us one alone!”

She squeezed Molly and shook her hair out one more time, then stepped away. As Brooke ran through all the poses she’d seen
other people do in magazines, she could see Molly grinning in her peripheral vision.

“Back together now! You girls look great!” the photographers yelled.

“Everything
is
great!” Brooke shouted at the crowd.

And, actually, it really was.

DRIVING HOME FROM THE GROVE
, it took superhuman willpower for Molly not to laugh at Brooke, who was reacting to getting papped the way someone else might
react to getting a MacArthur genius grant.

“It was just so thrilling!” Brooke bubbled. “I’m so honored to be representing our family like that! Daddy will be proud,
right? Because we’re all bonded now? Besides, what were we supposed to do? Run? We really didn’t have a choice. We
had
to pose for them. I just hope I didn’t look too bedraggled after all that yoga. And four doughnuts. Oh, my God, do I look
bloated?”

She turned to Molly with such a stricken expression, Molly couldn’t hold in her giggles any longer.

“You look beautiful,” she said, through her laughter. “I promise.”

Brooke started giggling, too. “Stop laughing at me!” she protested. “It was just so
exciting.
And so unexpected! I felt so powerful. And then Nordstorm was having that shoe sale? My horoscope was right. Today
was
a lucky day.”

Brooke chattered about her shoe purchases all the way home and up into their room, where she busied herself snapping Polaroids
of them, then taping the pictures to the shoe boxes and filing them in the appropriate place in the closet.

Molly flung herself down on her bed. If shopping were an Olympic sport, Brooke would have been headed for the front of a Wheaties
box. It was great fun to watch—Brooke could size up any store in ten seconds and blaze through it for the best stuff in under
twenty minutes—and had made for a really entertaining Saturday. Even yoga class had been amusing. And, weirdest of all, being
snapped by the paparazzi hadn’t been nearly as awkward as Molly’s first time—or second, or even third or fourth. Seeing Brooke
so excited somehow made Molly feel less exposed. It was almost enjoyable.

This was a good day
, Molly thought, folding her pillow underneath her neck. She couldn’t wait to tell Charmaine that Matthew McConaughey was
just as freakishly bendy in person as when the paparazzi “accidentally” caught him doing shirtless yoga on the beach.

Brooke popped out of the closet and snapped a Polaroid of Molly.

“That picture is going to make some stellar blackmail material,” Molly laughed. “I think my eyes were crossed.”

“Constant vigilance,” Brooke chirped. “Now that we’re being papped, you’ll need it. I wonder when those pictures will show
up on the Internet.”

Molly yawned and rolled over to look out the window. It was another gorgeous, cloudless day. “Do you want to go in the hot
tub?” she asked. “I bet we can talk Stan into making us his famous virgin margaritas.”

“I can’t right now. I have to proofread the programs for the play,” Brooke said, all the pep seeming to drain right out of
her. “I still have so much work to do on that thing. I think it’s finally coming together, though. Julie Newman’s accent sounds
Welsh, but at least that’s better than having to explain why her character is from Moscow.”

Brooke braided and unbraided the same piece of hair three times. It didn’t take tarot cards and a BeDazzled turban for Molly
to divine why she was suddenly so fidgety.

“It’s going to be great. Brick will be so proud of you,” Molly assured her. “You pulled this together in, like, no time at
all.”

“Yeah, well, I just hope the studio doesn’t make him go scout the
Titanic
wreckage to see if they can use it in
Avalanche!
or something,” Brooke grumbled. “It’s the first lead role I’ve ever had, and it’d be nice to have a parent there.”

Molly chewed on the inside of her cheek for a second and then decided to go ahead and pick the scab.

“What about your mother?” she asked gingerly.

Brooke glared at her. “Are you
new
?” she asked. “I don’t even know where she is.”

“So send her an e-mail,” Molly said. “Send her
all
the e-mails. Let her have it and then tell her to be there for you. For once.”

“I can’t do that,” Brooke said.

“Why not?”

“Because…” Brooke’s voice trailed off. Molly could tell she was racking her brain. “Because there are limited tickets and
I don’t have any extras.”

“Weak sauce,” Molly said, shaking her head. “I was sure you’d come up with something better than that—shopping-induced amnesia,
at
least
.”

“Don’t push me,” Brooke said, sounding both defensive and a little worn out, a combination Molly was unfamiliar with hearing
from her. “I’ll e-mail her when I’m ready.”

“And when will that be?” Molly asked. “When you’re thirty-five?”

“Please. By then I’ll have faked my own death to escape my enormous fame.
She
will be desperate to find
me
.”

“Joke all you want, but I’m serious,” Molly said. “There are a hundred things I wish I could say to my mother, but I can’t.
You still can.”

“I can’t believe you’re playing the dead mother card,”
Brooke said, sitting down on her bed with a thump. “This is so unfair. I am telling you right now that it will eventually
stop working.”

“Fine. Instead of me going on and on about how you need to get everything off your chest before every opportunity is lost
to the winds of time—”

“Boring.”

“—then how about we make a deal,” Molly finished. “You pull the trigger with your mother, and I’ll face this thing with Danny.”

Brooke sat up on her bed, intrigued. “I knew it! You want to dump Danny for Teddy. I’m so good. I called Tom Cruise and Katie
Holmes way before the couch jumping.”

“Teddy has nothing to do with it,” Molly insisted, pretty sure that was true. “And it might not even be a dumping. But you
were right, it’s not fair to Danny to pretend everything’s fine if I’m feeling ambivalent about whether this can work.”

“Wait, this is a terrible deal,” Brooke said, starting to sound vaguely panicky. “You’re doing something you have to do anyway,
and I’ll get nothing but puffy eyes. I hate this plan.”

“You don’t know that,” Molly said gently. “Maybe you’ll get a mom. Whereas there’s no way I’m going to come out of my end
of the bargain without things getting awkward.”

Brooke stared over at her laptop as if it had teeth and wanted to use them to drain her blood.

“I can’t,” she whispered.

Molly made a mental note to give Kelly Berlin a piece of her mind when the time came for them to meet—which at this rate seemed
like it’d be the tenth of Never, so it was a pretty easy promise to make. Brick wasn’t perfect, but at least he hadn’t left
and never looked back. Kelly’s selfishness was totally antithetical to the way Laurel had been, and it upset Molly on Brooke’s
behalf. In this arena, at least, her sister needed a wingman.

“Do it, Brooke,” pressed Molly. “Send them. Tell her everything you’ve ever wanted to tell her. No regrets.”

“What if she never writes back?”

“Then you’ll have done everything you can do, and we’ll steal a bottle of Brick’s Champagne and plan a serious jihad.”

Silence. Molly decided to give Brooke some breathing room and went into the bathroom under the pretense of tweezing her eyebrows.
Another lesson from being raised by two opinionated women like Laurel and her grandmother Ginger was that sometimes you just
needed to stop yammering and let the other person process things. (She’d learned that because neither of them had
ever
stopped yammering.)

Molly killed time examining a pimple on her chin, which appeared to be running up the white flag of surrender, until she realized
her hands were shaking a little. So she gave up and just stared at herself in the mirror. She still
looked
the same. But in just a month, everything about her had changed: bedroom, friends, school, Danny.

She felt like such a stereotype—the girl who gets a bit of distance from her boyfriend and suddenly decides she needs even
more space. Especially because, if she was being honest, she liked the idea of being able to hang out with Teddy without feeling
guilty when their skin accidentally grazed and it sent tingles down her spine. But Teddy really wasn’t the issue. Danny sending
her a Slurpee and a note only made him her boyfriend on a technicality; the two of them avoiding conversations the way they
had been lately, like they were afraid of what they might say, was getting unbearable. Molly wondered if, that night on her
front stoop, they’d both subconsciously known they’d look back someday on her last night in Indiana and realize that was supposed
to be their ending. It was dumb to move away for a fresh start if you didn’t actually give yourself one.

Of course, unless Brooke worked up the guts to send those e-mails—which didn’t seem terribly likely—Molly might be able to
mull it over a little while longer. She could hear Laurel telling her to suck it up and stop it with the dithering, but Molly
was more in a mood to give sensible advice than receive it.

She emerged from the bathroom and stopped short when she saw Brooke, ghostly pale, sitting at her computer. She looked like
a scared little girl.

“I did it,” she said, her voice hollow. “I did it.”

Brooke stared at her Drafts folder. It hadn’t been empty in almost four years, and now there it was, terrifyingly blank. She
hadn’t reread any of her e-mails, hadn’t changed a thing. She’d just hit Select All and then Send All.

It had been easy. That was the kicker. For years, she’d convinced herself that sending them was an impossible act that would
push her mother away for good. But suddenly, after one deep breath and a brisk figurative shove from Molly, Kelly Berlin was
about to get more than two hundred e-mails—a digital time capsule of Brooke’s life without her.

Molly looked just as stunned as Brooke felt.

“I called your bluff, didn’t I?” Brooke asked.

“Yep.” Molly grinned. “I’m so screwed. How do you feel?”

Brooke rested her elbow on the desk and cradled her chin in her palm. How
did
she feel? Jittery. Relieved. One of the toes in her right foot was numb from being crammed into four-inch heels most of last
week.

“Free,” she finally said. “All these years I thought writing those lightened my load, but now I realize how heavy they really
were.”

“That’s
so
Brick Berlin,” Molly said. “Quick, get out your BlackBerry and write it down.”