Carter's Big Break (10 page)

He cries, “Damn it, Carter!”

I yell back to him, “Sorry, dog, I’m trying to show Hilary how we roll!”

None of the Escalade drivers are paying attention, so I grab EJ’s bike, and she jumps on the pegs like she’s been doing it for years. As we roll out, her mom yells down from the roof deck, “HILARY, where the hell are you going?”

I squeeze the brakes, but Hilary orders me to keep pedaling, before yelling back, “We’re just going to go do something cool!”

Her mom exclaims, “WHAT?!” as I weave through the bottleneck of illegally parked cars. Matilda rushes out the front door as the lead SUV fires to life. She jumps in the passenger seat, and I hear the horn blast as the driver finds his fat-ass Escalade unable to follow my sleek BMX.

Hilary is squealing with delight and jerking my shoulders all around.

I yell, “Don’t make me wreck. I’m in enough trouble as it is!”

We zip around the lake and cut across a footbridge that leads to the golf course before I dip off the cart path and narrowly miss getting whacked by an old lady about to tee off. We angle onto the wooded trail that leads to the rope swing. We hop off the bike, and she follows me down to the water’s edge.

I doubt she’ll think this is as cool as I do, but I strip off my shirt and pick up the old knotted rope. I trek backward up the small incline, jump as high as I can (not that high), and swing out over the lake. I wait till the last minute before I release, spin around, smile at her and yell, “WHOOOAHH!!!” before I splash into the cool lake and yell, “YEEESSSS!!!” under the water. I come up for air and find Hilary giggling on the bank.

“You wanna try?” I ask as I climb out. She strips down to her bikini (thank you!) and takes the rope from me. She’s smiling from ear to ear as she steps back a few feet. You can see her rib bones as she leaps into the air and glides out over the water with a gleeful scream. For just a second I feel like such a pimp for bringing her here and showing her something so cool and out of the ordinary . . . but that second passes. The rope reaches its climax and she does
not
let go. I guess I wasn’t specific enough with the instructions. I saw this happen to a younger kid last year, and it was not pretty. The rope is headed back to the tree whether you’re attached or not. And bark is not as soft as it looks. Her glee turns to terror as she sees the thick trunk getting closer and closer.

“Release!” I order, but she’s got that Pilates-kung-fu grip in her fingers and a deer-in-headlights look in her eyes.

Just before she smashes into the tree, my feet leave the ground. I bury my shoulder in her tiny waist and blast her away from the tree. My football coach would have been proud of the form tackle, but horrified at who I delivered it to. Hilary yells out a painful, “Ouhhhh!” and lets go of the rope so we can crash into the muddy bank. I’m lying on top of her as she’s convulsing in the slop.

At this point my debate is, Would it be faster to carry her back to C. B.’s house, or leave her here while I ride over there and call the ambulance?

But I’m super relieved to find that she’s actually laughing.

“Oh my God, I’m such an idiot!” she cackles. Her face and hair are all muddy, and she’s rolling around.

I sit up and chuckle. “No, it happens to the best of us. Are you okay?”

I stop laughing (and breathing) when she sits up. Her swimming suit has come . . . ajar. It’s twisted around and both triangles have moved three inches to the left. . . . Neither one is doing its job anymore.

She’s oblivious to the peep show as she giggles. “My mother would have killed me!”

“Uh . . . uuum . . .” I say, motioning to her chest.

“This mud is probably good for your skin,” she adds, smearing it onto her cheeks.

I hear a rustling in the woods, but don’t look away from her chest as I mutter, “Hey, um, your, your boobs are out.”

“What?” she asks, and then looks down before busting out laughing again.

I try to make her feel less embarrassed. “I h-h-hate it when that happens!”

I close my eyes and try to take a mental picture of what I just witnessed so I can reflect on it later and brag to my boys with great detail.

When I open them, I expect to see her bikini restored to its original position, but it’s not. It is now on the ground next to me, and a ninety-six-percent naked Hilary Idaho dives into the lake!

No need for the mental pictures, because my boys will
never
believe this. She swims around, and I hear that same rustling in the bushes. I’m waiting for Ashton Kutcher to bust through the leaves and tell me I’m being “Punked!” or some kid is coming down to use the rope swing and is about to get the shock of his life! She dips her hair back into the lake and steps out onto the bank. A clicking, cracking sound is coming from somewhere, and I just know someone is coming, so I extend my hands to cover her exposed breasts.

“Sorry, sorry, uh, G-G-Grey Goose isn’t that kind of lake, I don’t think.”

She doesn’t freak out about my hand placement, but simply explains, “Carter, I swim like this all the time in France. No tanlines.”

“Well, that does make sense, but uh, w-w-we’re a long ways from France and I think people are coming.”

She just laughs. “My breasts are all over the Internet anyway. . . .”

“They are? I haven’t seen ’em.” (Liar.)

“You’re seeing them now.”

“No, I’m not! I’m blocking them, see? And I-I-I’m not like an expert or anything; I’ve only felt one boob . . . a pair, I mean . . . One girl’s breasts is all that I can draw on for my research, but yours feel pretty real.”

Annoyed, she responds, “That’s because they are.”

“Oh, I just heard . . .”

“Yeah, I know what you heard, but it’s not true, like most of the crap they print.” She seems annoyed that I’ve brought her back into the world she’s trying to escape. “I thought you didn’t read the tabloids.”

“I don’t. I just heard that. Does anyone actually
read
them?”

She places her hands over mine (because I’m still cupping Hilary Idaho’s boobies!) and asks, “Would you prefer it if I put my top back on?”

I cannot believe what I’m saying when I sigh, “Yes.”

Once her breasts have been reluctantly released and put away, we start having a good time again. She tries the rope swing another time and doesn’t fly quite as high, but she does let go at the right time and enjoys it a lot more. Who wouldn’t? When she comes to the surface, she squeals, “Oh my God!!! That’s like the best drug ever!”

I say, “Hells yeah it is!” but I don’t think she’s talking about Advil. I try to show off with a flip, but bust a
SMACK
, instead.

She laughs at my pain and goes again. She screams, “It’s like flying!” in midair.

I’m a lot stronger this summer from working out, but I can only do about ten swings before my grip is shot. Hilary is wicked buff from doing Pilates since birth, so she’s unstoppable. She starts doing gainers in no time. I give her a boost so she can reach higher on the rope, and my hand is totally touching Hilary Idaho’s butt! For some reason, it’s not really that hot. It’s not like I’m grabbing a dude’s butt, but I’m not that attracted to her. Probably because there’s no chance of her being into me, or I’m turned off by her ribs sticking out. We’re having fun, though, so I try not to worry about it. We swing off of it together a few times and swim around for a bit before I climb out to take a break. She’s floating out in the water, staring up at the sky (her boobs are real . . . and buoyant).

She softly says, “I like it here.”

I reply, “That’s because you’ve got a great tour guide.”

I’m not sure if she heard me, because she asks if I’ve ever been to Hawaii.

I just laugh. “The only flying I’ve ever done is here.”

She raises her head and looks at me, so I clarify. “I’ve never been on an airplane.”

She makes a face of pity and says, “Well, I went last year with some friends, to party. It was me and the Wienus Bros, the Molsen Twins, Tito, and a bunch of other kids. We were staying at this private villa and we had champagne and lobster out on this big terrace overlooking a perfect blue lagoon. There were these local boys, a bit younger than us, swinging out into the water on this old rope, and they seemed to be having so much fun. I wanted to go over and hang out with them, because there we were, celebrities, paying all this money to have the best drugs and food, but we weren’t having half as good a time as these kids who’d just tied a rope to a branch and were splashing around in the water together. Zac-Michael called security, and they shooed them away and cut down the rope. It made me so sad when he did that. He couldn’t stand to see ‘nobodies’ enjoying themselves, and that’s disgusting. I had other stuff going on. My dad had just left for New York and he didn’t tell us when he was coming back, so that may have caused it. The third Princess Journal was going down in flames about that time, but it was the look on those boys’ faces that pushed me over the edge. They were like, ‘Who do you think you are?’ and I couldn’t deal. I got so wasted that day, and I stayed wasted. We got kicked out of the villa after I trashed it, and my mom had to fly out and get me. She checked me into rehab when I got home, and I got Matilda as a Christmas present.”

I’m just sitting on the bank, looking at her. She’s telling a story about how sad her life is, but she really seems to be enjoying herself here. She’s in no hurry to get back to her suite at the President Hotel or her movie star life. I know that I’ve never been to Hawaii, and she may pity me because of it, but I feel so bad for her.

“What do you do at rehab?” I ask.

“Arts and crafts,” she says with a laugh.

I smile at her little joke, but I don’t say anything so she can answer the question. She shrugs. “It’s in the desert so there’s nothing to do except talk about our problems. You know, why we use, and why it sucks to be a celebrity. We work on ways to stay clean.”

I probably shouldn’t, but I try for a joke. “I use Lever 2000, so I’m clean and also moisturized.”

She doesn’t seem to know that brand of soap, so I try a different style of humor. “Does
The Get Up Gang
get a group discount at rehab?”

She kind of laughs (thank you) and says, “We should.”

“Yeah, you guys are a mess.”

She tries to explain. “Every one of us has been working since we were little, supporting our families. You know, my dad is a theater actor, and he’s great at it, but he doesn’t make enough money to live in New York. My mom is my manager. I’m making all this money that I know I’ll never see. I live in a fishbowl. If this movie flops, it’ll probably be your fault because you don’t have enough box office pull to sell tickets, but I’ll get blamed. I won’t get any more serious acting work. You only get a few chances before you’re stuck on the reality TV circuit and VH1 produces
What Happened to Hilary?
My last album sucked. I eat 1200 calories a day. No more, no less. I take voice, dance, diction, and movement lessons every day. And I can’t complain about any of it because it’s supposed to be fun. But it’s not, when you have to do it. Everyone thinks my life is so great, and I’m a bitch for not appreciating it. So I used to drink or take pills or whatever because people offered them to me, and they made me forget about all of it for a little while. I think that’s why the others do it, too. I’ve been clean for two months, and I feel good, but I’ve been on lockdown and haven’t been working. And working is the hardest part for me. If I really was a regular kid and this was my life and I went to a real school, I know I could stay clean.”

I toss a pebble into the water and ask, “Acting in a movie is going to be harder than I think, isn’t it?”

She replies, “No, I just make it hard. I feel like, when those cameras roll, I have to be perfect. I need to look perfect and feel perfect, and if I have to take a shortcut to get there, then so be it. I’m a professional and that means doing whatever it takes. Zac-Michael is the opposite. He has to be employed at all times, or he turns into a junkie. Phil Coates knows that, too, and he still didn’t hire him.”

I’d like to avoid the subject of why Zac-Michael didn’t get the part in
Down Gets Out
, so I ask, “Does Phil know that working is hard for you?”

She nods, so I ask, “Do your parents know?”

She doesn’t answer that one, so I inquire, “Do you know who Dickens is?”

She lifts her head and looks over at me like she doesn’t, so I explain, “He’s this old-time writer who told stories about kids working in factories, and sometimes they’d get crushed by a machine or get their little hands caught in the gears or something horrible like that. . . . I think your life might be considered, in a Hollywood sort of way,
very Dickens
.”

She smiles and puts her head back into the water. She softly sighs, “Do you know, I didn’t even go swimming in Hawaii?”

I break the somber mood by quietly grabbing the rope and swinging out over her. I yell, “You’re swimmin’ with the locals now!” and bust a cannonball right next to her,
BOOOM!!!
We get into a playful splash fight, but stop when we hear a crashing sound in the bushes.

Matilda busts through like a linebacker on safari. “Goddamn it, Hilary, you know the rules! You’re never to leave my side. What the hell have you two been doing?”

I know we haven’t done anything wrong, but I feel sooo guilty. Hilary swims to the bank and climbs out screeching, “Nothing, we’re just talking!”

Matilda sarcastically pants, “Yeah right . . . This’ll go on my report, and you’re submitting a urine sample!”

I interrupt, “W-w-we’ve just been swimming.”

She looks down at me with daggers coming out of her eyeballs when she sneers, “Nobody asked you a question! You’re in big trouble, young man.”

What the hell? I don’t think she can get me fired from the movie, but I’m terrified of her tracking skills. Hilary angrily puts on her shirt and stomps up the path to the waiting Escalades. Matilda growls at me as I slip my shoes on and grab the bike.

As I get to the road, the three SUVs speed away and leave me in the dust. I wave to them and say, “No, I’m good! I don’t need a ride . . . because I’ve got this bike here, and I’m really into the environment . . . and your trucks aren’t responsible enough for me.” The paparazzi motorcycle blows past. The guy on back is smiling. He’s covered in leaves and clutches his cameras in one hand while giving me a thumbs-up with the other.