Messy (11 page)

“I am very proud of how industrious you are,” Mrs. McCormack said. “And I am also totally unmoved. Go to the meeting. You will never get this wonderful high school time back.”

Max just looked at her. Apparently, her mother’s formative years were one big glossy picnic, where nobody threw elbows in the hallway, or thought “budget shopping” meant buying only
one
Issa dress, or got a huge zit on their noses that ended in half the grade calling them Mount
Kermitmonjaro (Chaz had been so pleased with that one). Max loved her mother, but she suspected that she would love her mother a thousand times more when the woman wasn’t up in her grill every single day.
Like when I go to New York.
If
I go to New York.

But all she said was, “Fine,” then spun around on her boot and stomped toward Mr. Kemp’s classroom.

“And so it is with deep regret that I must step down as the head of the Spring Carnival Planning Committee,” she could hear Brooke saying. Max leaned against the doorjamb to watch. Anna Fury looked thrilled, and Jake was sitting with his back to Jennifer and texting someone, apparently not having heard a word of it.

“Oh, my God! That’s just so sad for us!” Anna said, clicking into sycophant mode. “Are you okay?”

“I’ve never been better,” Brooke said. “But, as I said in my statement, I simply have too many professional and creative obligations on my plate to give the Spring Carnival the attention it deserves. That being said, I am confident that I’m leaving you in good hands.”

Anna’s grin consumed her whole head. Brooke turned around and looked at the classroom’s ticking clock.

“She ought to be here any minute,” she said.

Anna’s face fell. “Wait. Shouldn’t we vote on—” she began.

“I’m here, Brooke,” said a voice from behind Max. Brie squeezed past her with an apologetic smile.

“Excellent!” Brooke said, clapping her hands in a way
that reminded Max of Brick. She gave Brie her front-and-center spot. “You all know my assistant, Brie. As of today, she is the acting head of this planning committee. Brie will be reporting back to me, so it’s not as if I’m completely abandoning you.” She stood up. “Brie, is there anything you want to say before I go?”

Brie tapped Mr. Kemp’s desk. “Um,” she said, flushing and rubbing at the left lens of her bifocals.

“Well, that was compelling,” Anna seethed.

“I’ve worked for Brooke for almost two years, so I know her vision,” Brie began. “And I plan to execute the duties she set out for me to the best of my abilities. I’m sure we’ll all work together to make this the best Spring Carnival yet.”

“Obviously,” Brooke said, pulling her glossy leather Louis Vuitton satchel out from under Mr. Kemp’s desk. “My name
is
still on this thing.” Suddenly she spotted Max still standing in the doorway. “Oh, Maxine,” she said loudly. “A word, please, in the hallway.”

Max backed out of the door frame. “What’s wrong?” she whispered.

Brooke held up a finger. “Maxine, we need to talk about your raging attitude problems,” she said loudly, aiming her mouth at the open door. To Max, she whispered, “Nothing. The audition requests are pouring in, so we need to get out of here. But we can’t look too chummy.”

“I—”

“Play along,” Brooke urged her.

Max considered this. Maybe it would be therapeutic.

“I don’t care what you say, Brooke. I am bored with your pointless carnival,” she practically shouted. That
did
feel good. In a lower voice Max added, “My mother told me I had to come. She’ll totally check in.”

“That’s why I have a plan,” Brooke said, shaking her head. “You have
so much
to learn from me.” Then Brooke raised her voice. “No wonder you never have a date,” she all but yelled. “You’re married to your own smug sense of superiority. I am taking you straight to your mother’s office.”

Max let out a melodramatically fatigued breath. “Fine,” she boomed.

Brooke nodded briskly. “Your delivery needs work, but that should do it,” she whispered, grabbing Max’s arm and trotting off toward the main office. Max watched as Brooke stuck her head inside.

“Is she—Oh, hi, Headmistress McCormack,” she heard Brooke say. “Groovy cardigan. I just wanted to let you know that Max and I are heading off campus to price some things for the carnival. Awesome! Thanks.”

Brooke turned back to Max, looking self-satisfied. “See?” she whispered. “All taken care of. Now give me a ride home—we need to figure out how to run with my raging success.”

Max felt a little buzzing in her head. It was either the fatigue or she was completely stoked. Possibly both. “Let’s go kick some ass,” she said.

“JUST ONE MORE TIME.”

“No, I haven’t even had any caffeine yet,” Max grunted, heaving her banged-up tan satchel onto the security table and walking through the metal detector.

“Pleeeeease?” Brooke wheedled from the other side of security.

A uniformed Warner Bros. guard rummaged through Max’s bag, pulling out her Blistex, a torn spiral notebook, a half-eaten Luna Bar, a pair of sunglasses missing one lens, and three socks. He cocked an eyebrow.

Yeah, buddy? You should see my room.

“I promise this is the last time,” Brooke said.

“That’s because your audition is in, like, five minutes,” Max pointed out, as the guard dumped everything back
into her bag and handed it over with a curt nod. Max thanked him and shuffled onto the lot, rubbing her eyes. Apparently, in Brooke’s dictionary of made-up words,
blogographer
also meant
lackey
. On this particular Saturday, she’d dragged Max out of bed at seven in the morning for a day of auditions—“I don’t want you to miss any of the action!”—and in the last week alone Max had spent every waking hour forced to rehearse as a psychic, a detective, an evil twin (sort of fun), a good twin (completely
un
fun), and the main detective from
Bones
. At first Max amused herself by deploying a series of deliberately terrible accents. But then Brooke became compelled to try to coach memorable performances out of her, and Max didn’t have the patience to morph herself into an actress on top of everything else.

At least the blog was going okay. Traffic was soaring. The other day Vixen.com had called Brooke the “celebutante Dorothy Parker of our time.” The hyperbole had made Max want to barf a little—it was just a blog about random crap, half of which she made up—but then Brooke had given her a bonus. Maybe, Max thought as she trailed Brooke down a wide lane filled mostly with white vans, she should stop being such a crank. It wasn’t
Brooke’s
fault that Max’s father had broken the coffeemaker when he’d tried to turn it into a cocktail shaker, and a sunny, crisp mid-March day rolling around the back lot of one of the biggest movie studios in Hollywood was bound to be more fun than her usual routine (sleeping until noon,
picking a fight with her mother, staring at her still-blank NYU application, and then watching a crummy Drew Barrymore movie on HBO).

“Fine. One more time,” Max said. “But just the part with your speech, okay? And you now owe me
two
coffees.” She cleared her throat and read aloud, in the most deadpan voice she could muster, “Nancy, this is crazy.”

“No, Ned. Crazy is me lying shivering and hungry on a bed made of the trash bags of
strangers
,” Brooke replied, halting in front of a vending machine and reciting the line from memory. “Crazy is how all my bedtime stories came from the drug dealer selling crack outside my window. But finding the man who killed your father? Fighting for the truth? From where I’m sitting, Ned, that’s the only thing that makes any sense at all.”

A tear squeaked out of Brooke’s left eye and rolled through her bronzer onto her chin.

“Not bad,” Max offered, trying to take in the sights of the lot. She was pretty sure the parking spot they’d just passed said
G. CLOONEY
on it.

“Gee, thanks,” Brooke snorted, turning away and breaking into a walk so speedy that Max could barely keep up. “Daddy always says, ‘Nothing is
so
bad as something that is not-so-bad.’ ”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“It means that if you can’t be awesome, you’re better off being awful, because at least awful is memorable,” Brooke
said from several feet down the road. “I mean, look at Keanu Reeves.”

Max thought about the
Point Break
poster in her room. “Huh. I actually agree with you,” Max said. “Okay, then, you were good. Very believable.” And she meant it. “But the script is cracktacularly bad.” She meant that, too.

Brooke sighed, and finally stopped to examine her lip gloss in the reflection of an office window. As Max caught up, a guy looked up from his computer and jumped in surprise when he saw them.
I feel you, dude
, she thought.

“No, Max. It’s actually a really gritty look at the
Nancy Drew
mythos,” Brooke explained, in words Max suspected she’d been fed by Caroline Goldberg. “Nancy is
the
hot role in town right now. They’ve been trying to cast her for months.” She fluffed her hair. “It’s a lot to expect my first time on the circuit, of course. Personally, I think I’d make a wonderful Bess. She
is
the pretty friend.”

“I also seem to recall them calling her fat a lot of the time.”

Brooke brightened. “Yes! A fat suit would be so humble. I mean, Nicole Kidman won an Oscar for going ugly, and that was just a fake nose and a bun.”

A golf cart sped past them—was that Jeremy Renner?—as they trudged across the expansive studio lot. Max had only been there once before, when she was in sixth grade and her mother had insisted they go on the official tour. Like any kid that age being forced to sightsee, Max had
spent the entire time staring at her sneakers and wishing she was somewhere else—specifically, a place where nobody used perky phrases like
movie magic
and meant them. So this was Max’s first real look around the lot, which felt like it had been up and running for hours already, or maybe never shut down from the night before. Numbered soundstages loomed above them in endless, tidy rows, like gargantuan cream-colored versions of boxy Monopoly hotels. Their barnlike wooden doors hung open as men lugged ladders and lighting rigs through them; if she peeked inside at just the right angle, Max could see familiar living room sets and spy caves and schoolrooms, all of which looked impossibly small under the soundstages’ soaring ceilings, crisscrossed by complex wooden catwalks, tangled wires, and electronic equipment. Brooke swung left and detoured them through the lot’s semirealistic outdoor sets: fake brownstones, fake small-town America, fake big-city America. A parade of what
had
to be extras—on account of their animal costumes—marched toward Small Town U.S.A.’s gazebo, led by a harried girl holding a clipboard. The donkey nearest to Max carried a croissant in each hoof.

“The people-watching here is unbelievable,” she said.

“Tell me about it,” Brooke said. “A couple of years ago I came here for the Harry Potter costume exhibit, and I saw Shia LaBeouf sitting outside the commissary in his
Indiana Jones
costume, all fake-bloodied and dirty, as if that
was totally normal.” Brooke wrinkled her nose. “Except he was smoking, which is so
over
, like, hi, you’re not Don Draper.”

As Max took it all in—peeling shop windows dusted with fake frost and decorated for a Christmas movie, the diner on the corner that was Luke’s when
Gilmore Girls
still existed and that now appeared to be (temporarily) a toy store, and crew members in headsets barking at one another—she felt goose bumps pop up on her arms. It seemed dorky to admit it, even to herself, but the air felt oddly electric—and it made her want to be part of it. To create. To write. For real.

“I bet it was fun growing up around all this,” was all Max allowed herself to say.

“I didn’t, really,” Brooke said, sounding almost too casual. “Daddy didn’t want me exposed to the industry until I was older, so I never came to set. He thought it would warp my brain or something. His assistant always showed me pictures, though, so… you know. It
seemed
super exciting.”

There was a hint of loneliness in Brooke’s voice.

“Here we are,” Brooke said, effectively preventing Max from having to figure out how to react. She guided them toward a tall office building on the fringe of the lot. “Daddy rappelled down this building in the climactic scene of
Dirk Venom: Bite to Kill
,” she said. “But it’s actually just corporate offices.”

They pushed through an incredibly heavy set of double doors and into a generic-looking lobby, albeit one with unusually flattering lighting and an expansive array of orchids on the reception desk. Brooke flashed an e-mail on her iPhone to the man behind the blooms, and he nodded toward the elevator. Max wondered if this was a private audition, a personal favor to Brick Berlin, because there was absolutely nobody else in sight. But as soon as the elevator doors slid open again, Max realized this wasn’t just some random meeting: The fifth-floor lobby was crammed with easily two hundred girls, some naturally redheaded, some in wigs whose quality ranged from decent to Fell Off the Back of the
Annie
Tour Bus, all looking two seconds away from needing to breathe into a paper bag.

“Wow,” Max said. “If this is how many they see in one day, how many did they see in months?”

“I told you, this is
the
part,” Brooke said.

“Is that Emma Roberts?” Max asked, squinting down the hall.

“Probably,” Brooke said. “Nobody saw her version of
Nancy Drew
. She might as well try again. Okay, stay put, I need to go let the coordinator know I’m here. It’s supposed to be first come, first served, but… you know.”

Max found a spot against the wall and slid down to the floor. Everyone in her vicinity was picking at scripts they’d nervously rolled into scrolls and then squeezed to death. Several were reciting lines under their breath, like a very
superficial Gregorian chant. Suddenly, somebody burst out of a conference room door sobbing and ran to a hard-looking woman Max assumed was her mother.