The Unnoticeables (6 page)

“I'm going to change really quick.” I moved toward the bedroom, but Jackie intercepted me. She started to say something, but three beeps from outside stopped her. She smiled.

“Can't. Cab's here.”

Shit.

*   *   *

The cab driver was Iranian. He tried to sell me a used pickup truck his cousin owned.

*   *   *

The party was at one of those generic Southern California hilltop mansions. You know the type: a bunch of neomodern boxes locked together by small glass hallways, big pool overlooking the city, track lighting everywhere. I swear to God, every industry party I've gone to was held in a house just like that one. In fact, it could have been the same house.

Does anybody even live here? Do they rent houses just for reality TV shows and schmoozing?

There was a little table for appetizers, but it was mostly shellfish and avocado.

Los Angeles.

I nabbed six bacon-wrapped somethings—it didn't matter what they were, beyond “not shellfish and avocado”—and made for the deck, where I last saw Jackie. She was talking to a paunchy guy with a soul patch. As usual, she had gathered a small crowd of newly converted fans around her. She was telling some kind of story, but I walked out right as she finished and only heard the paunchy guy's huge laugh. I caught her eye, and she wiggled her ears, making the crooked top hat dance. I smiled.

She was great at this stuff. But then, she needed to be: This, we'd both discovered upon moving down here after high school, was the only way anybody got jobs. This was
networking.

I was terrible at it. I didn't think it would matter for me.
Nobody's going to hire you to jump off a bridge because you give good conversation at parties,
I argued. But judging by my absolute work drought lately, that apparently wasn't the case. Four years ago, Jackie had convinced me to move to L.A. with her. She wanted to be an actress, and, she insisted, I absolutely had to come with her: How many hot chicks could jump a dirt bike over a train? They would throw work at my feet, she said.

Turns out, there indeed are
not
many girls who can power-slide a muscle car, but every single goddamned one of them is in Hollywood, competing for the same job. Jackie was pretty, funny, confident, charming; she was making slow headway, but she was making headway. I was treading water.

I admit it: I was jealous. Bitter, even.

But also kind of proud. Of her, I mean. Jackie really was meant for this life. In my better moments, I even tried to swallow my pride and learn from her example. I did the dance, no matter how bad I was at the steps. I …
networked.
God, just the word is filthy. So far I had shared small talk with a bitch agent (that's not a dig; he was an agent exclusively for female dogs) and bitterly complained about the 405 with a girl who painted food. Not pictures of food—she literally painted food to make it look good for commercials. That's all she did.

“What's the point of a brand-new Jag,” she asked me, “if I'm just going to park it on the freeway?”

Just by painting grill stripes on fake hamburgers! What the hell?

I was growing to hate L.A., even though that in itself is such an L.A. thing to do. Everybody hates it here, if you ask them. But they don't move, and I wasn't about to, either. It may not happen often, but I made three months' rent this year by speeding a '69 Charger into a dump truck. It was one of the most beautiful moments of my life. Show me anywhere else in the world where I can make a living doing that, and I'll move. Until then, L.A. is a necessity.

“K!” Jackie shouted, seizing a man from out of her crowd of fans and dragging him over to me. “This is Marco.”

She smiled giddily, waiting for something. I narrowed my eyes at the guy. Extremely good looking, but in that alien Hollywood kind of way. Vaguely Latino, but not so much that he couldn't “pass,” as they so horribly say in the business. I knew him from somewhere.

“Oh, holy shit,” I said, when it finally clicked. “Sable! You're J. C. Sable!”

“It's Marco, actually.” He laughed, shaking his head. “Marco Luis. But, yeah, that was me.”

“I lived for that show as a kid!” I practically squealed.

Oh, Jesus Christ, Kaitlyn, close your jaw, you jabbering yokel.

“Sorry,” I added hastily, “I don't get starstruck often. It's just that me and Jackie ran home after school every day to watch
Home Room.
Wow, I haven't thought about you in, like, ten years.”

Jackie slapped me on the arm, and I instinctually went to slap her back, when I realized what I'd said.

Marco saw my eyes bug out, but he just laughed again.

“It's okay!” he exclaimed cheerfully. “That was my household-name moment. It's a blessing and a curse. I'm just glad the show meant so much to you two.”

“She had a poster of Sable up above her bed”—Jackie smiled wickedly—“the shirtless one in the pool.”

Oh, son of a—

“Hey, me too!” Marco said, so earnestly that it took me a minute to realize he was joking. He stayed deadpan until I laughed, then joined in.

“Personally, I was a Mack girl, myself,” Jackie said, already backing out of the conversation. “I go for the well-meaning jerks. But Kaitlyn's always had a soft spot for the misunderstood jockish type.”

I reached out to slug her, but she spun away. She did a taunting little robot dance, then turned and went back to her followers.

“So we've already established that we're both fans of me,” Marco said, still chuckling. “What about you? What do you do?”

“I'm a waitress,” I said.

I was finding it hard to think of him as a real person. He was J. C. Sable; he was a fictional character; a poster in a fourteen-year-old girl's room. And he looked like he'd been carved from stone by an ancient Roman, for Christ's sake.

“Oh? That's nice,” he replied. “Usually everybody I talk to is in the business.”

“Well, I sort of am, I guess. I do some work as a stuntwoman, whenever I can get it. But I don't make my living from it yet, so I try not to tell people, ‘I'm a stuntwoman,' when I actually pay my rent by balancing plates of food.”

“Oh? That's nice,” Marco repeated, with the exact same intonation as before. I got the feeling all he knew about small talk he learned from press junkets. “That sounds like a lot of fun.”

Awkward. Silence.

“So…,” I finally said, seeing that he had no intention of pursuing the last line of conversation, “what are you working on these days?”

At the prompt, he sprung into enthusiastic life: “I've got a great new project lined up with E! It's a reality show all about my work with inner-city Latino kids, trying to show them there's another path besides drugs and gang violence. We just shot the first episode: I teach a gangbanger how to Rollerblade!”

“Oh, wow, that's so cool. So you work with troubled kids?”

“That's what the show is about, yes,” Marco confirmed.

Awkward. Silence.

Yeah, he was just being polite, talking to you. What the hell would he want with a girl like you anyway, Kaitlyn? He probably power-screws a bus full of supermodels between takes.

“So listen,” I said, mowing through the last of my bacon-wrapped somethings, “I've gotta talk to my friend real quick, but I'll see you later, okay?”

“Adios!” he said, just like Sable did in the show. Weird.

I made my way over to Jackie, who was deep into an anecdote that necessitated her pantomiming ramming her fist into some kind of hole over and over again. The paunchy soul-patch guy was turning purple, he was laughing so hard. The lean, plastic-faced blonde next to him was covering her mouth with one hand, equal parts amused and terrified. I stood just to one side until Jackie finished her story—something about a mayonnaise jar, I gathered—and then swooped in when everybody paused to breathe.

“I'm gonna head out,” I said, and she gave me a disappointed look. “I know you need to stay. You're killing here, but I have work in the morning. Again.”

“You called a cab yet?” Jackie asked me, annoyed but understanding—or at least accepting that arguing was pointless.

“No, I figured I'd call and wait out front.”

“F that noise,” Jackie said, waving Marco over.

“Jackie, no!” I whispered harshly. “He practically died of boredom just talking to me.”

Marco was standing exactly where I'd left him, strangely blank, like somebody had just switched him off. When he saw Jackie wave, he immediately broke into that trademark expectant half smile and began strolling over.

“I am not hooking up with Marco,” I informed her evenly. “You're just going to embarrass me. Stop. Please, seriously, stop.”

“How could you possibly not?” she whispered back. “I mean, sure, no way he's any good in bed, looking like that. But if you don't at least
try
to stick it to J. C. Motherfucking Sable, what would fourteen-year-old you think?”

“I…” I started to protest, but she was right, of course. Some things you just have to do because you never should have gotten the opportunity to do them, like eat caviar or slobber on former
Tiger Beat
hunks.

“Marco!” Jackie exclaimed, and hugged him like a long-lost brother. “You were saying you had to head out soon. My friend here needs a ride home. Do you think you could do her a solid?”

“Sure thing!” Marco threw on his eager smirk. “Anything for my number-one fan!”

My whole body flushed. I felt like somebody had thrown me into a microwave on defrost: Warm tingling spread outward in waves, pulsing from my core to my skin.

Oh, God. Was this really…? No way. No fucking way.

Flashbacks to cutting his picture out of magazines. Jackie and I making jokes about what we'd do to Sable and Mack if we were students at Lakeview High. Touching myself beneath the covers, looking up at that poster where he sat frozen, immobile, guarding over my bed at night …

Marco looped his arm through mine, which was totally hokey but also kind of adorable, and I decided right then that whatever else happened, no matter how much of an ass I would surely make of myself, I had to go for it. Arm in arm, we moved toward the brightly lit cubes of the generic party mansion. I turned to wave to Jackie, but she was already back to entertaining.

“Adios!” Marco expelled suddenly and loudly, just like on the show.

 

SIX

1977. New York City, New York. Carey.

Randall held up a single finger. I spotted it out of the corner of my eye, swung around, and punched him in the chest.

This was a game we played called Reaction, where one player starts counting with his fingers. If he gets to three before you notice, he punches you in the chest. If you can punch him in the chest before he gets to three, you … don't get punched in the chest.

Look, nobody said it was a
good
game.

But we were bored and anxious. It was pissing down rain outside of Max's Kansas City. Ceaseless sheets of fat, warm drops that triggered a blink reflex every time they hit your face. It felt like God was spitting right in your eye every couple of seconds, and the only dry space, right under the awning, was already full of big shots and hot girls showing cleavage.

The bouncers called who got those spots, so there we were: standing in heaven's urine stream, killing time until the doors opened.

Randall had stopped coughing from the blow and went back to talking to Gray Greg, the ashen-faced junkie who sold dope to kids in line at shows.

“I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying he talks, you know, like people, so if you had to have sex with—”

Randall wasn't looking at me. I held up my pointer finger as nonchalantly as possible.

Nothing.

“I don't understand,” Gray Greg was protesting, still awkwardly holding out a bag of dope that Randall wouldn't take.

I flipped up my middle finger.

“I mean it's like you have something in common, right? You could at least affirm it was consensual—”

I clenched my fist and went to raise the third finger.

“No, I guess I wouldn't want to hear him speak.” Gray Greg was shaking his head, little flecks of dry skin grating off of his face like dandruff.

I managed the slightest twitch of my ring finger before Randall spun like a tornado and struck me square in the solar plexus.

“So what you're saying, then, is that you like to fuck dogs because they can't talk back,” Randall finished, without missing a beat.

Greg threw up his hands and walked away. Off to find easier marks.

I doubled over, gagging on my own lack of air, and waited for the stars to pass. When they did, I saw Randall grinning at me in the side mirror of the station wagon he was leaning on.

God damn it. Leave it to Randall to turn a nice game of punch exchange into some tactical fucking exercise.

I nodded concession to him and looked for something else to occupy my time. The parasites had latched on to us again tonight. We had invited them over to the apartment a few times this week, because they usually chipped in for beer money. They had taken that as some sort of official approval, and now we couldn't get rid of them. We tried telling them to fuck off; they didn't listen. We were all out of ideas.

Thing 1 and Thing 2 were playing a game with string laced between their fingers. They were trying to teach Wash, who was studying it like an electron microscope. Safety Pins had secured a spot under the awning, where she stood with studied disinterest, just like the rest of the cleavage girls. We tried to use her as an excuse to take some space in the dry, but one look at my busted-up face and sideways nose, and the bouncers jostled us back into the rain.