Messy (12 page)

“Let me guess—you blew it,” the girl’s mother scolded. “
Again
. You have no focus. Do you have any idea how much
money
we’ve spent on you? Acting lessons, and your chin job, and all that acne…”

The woman’s nasty berating trailed off as they stepped into the elevator. There was something naggingly familiar about the pair.
Do I know them?

A girl to her left nudged her. “Did you see? That was—”

“Carla Callahan,” Max blurted. The last time Max had seen Carla in person, Carla was standing in front of their art class, announcing that she had landed a major TV role and telling everyone she hoped they, too, someday might beat the odds and amount to something. Max had gagged.

“This has happened with her every time since
iNeverland
got canceled,” the girl said, picking at the ends of her long, sandy ponytail. “I’ve seen her on, like, ten auditions this year, and her mother always screams. Mrs. Callahan is the worst stage mom in town. Well. Actually, Jennifer Parker’s is really mean, too.”

“I go to school with Jennifer,” Max said. “I didn’t realize anyone knew who she was anymore.”

“Oh, yeah,” the girl said, warming up to her topic. “We all know each other. Half of us did guest spots when she was on
That’s My Room!
It’s so sad now, though. She auditions for
everything
. That’s why you see her in so many
late-night infomercials. Her mother is desperate to milk her for cash. Always tells her she should’ve gotten her teeth done. So mean.”

But accurate.

“But accurate,” the girl added suddenly. “So, what are you up for?”

“Oh, I’m not auditioning,” Max said. “I’m just waiting for someone.”

“Good.” The girl exhaled. “In the script, Nancy lives in some kind of shanty in Baltimore, and with your hair and those boots you kind of
look
like a drug addict, so…”

“Thanks so much,” Max said with a withering stare, her mind snapping shut again.

“God. Sorry. This whole competition thing messes with your head,” the girl apologized. “I just meant… never mind. Who are you here with?”

“Brooke Berlin? She’s—”

“Brick Berlin’s daughter?
She’s
up for this part?” the girl snapped. “The shallow blonde one, right? Not the boring new one with the terrible bangs?”

Max felt her hackles rise. “Have you even
met
either of them?” she asked.

“I don’t need to,” the girl said. “Those legacy kids are all alike. Dumb, strung out, and pretty sure they deserve to be famous just for being born.”

“Brooke is a lot smarter than people give her credit for,” Max said, suddenly feeling an urgent and inexplicable
need to defend Brooke’s honor. “I mean, her blog is a huge hit. That has to count for something.”

“Please.” The girl rolled her eyes. “I’m sorry, but it just sucks. Girls like her get everything handed to them, while talented people like me work really hard and get nowhere.”

Max stood up hotly. “Brooke
does
work really hard. She can’t help who her father is,” she said. “And maybe if you spent less time being bitter about other people’s successes, you’d find some of your own.”

“What are you, like, on Brooke’s payroll?” the girl snapped.

“She’s my friend,” said a voice, and both girls looked up to see Brooke standing above them looking very ticked off. “And my scene partner. And thanks to her, I just nailed it in there.”

“You’re done already?” Max asked.

“Yes. Obviously, they wanted to see me right away,” Brooke said, then flashed a sweet smile at their cowed companion, who was suddenly extremely interested in examining her split ends. “And when I was done, they actually applauded. Good luck following that up. But don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll make a
great
extra.”

Without looking back, they swept out of there. Well, Brooke swept. Max trotted behind her with as dignified a gait as she could manage.

“Did they really clap?” Max asked as soon as the elevator doors closed on them.

“No,” Brooke said. “But it made a better story that way.” She cast Max an odd look. “Thanks for sticking up for me.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Max said.

In truth, she had surprised herself. But as they walked back out onto the lot toward the parking garage, Max realized what had rubbed her the wrong way: The girl was saying exactly the type of stuff Max usually said. And Max hadn’t liked how it sounded.

The rest of the day was as grim as Warner Bros. had been satisfying. From the vast, impressive studio, they’d driven across town to the
Rogue Justice
office, and found it in a windowless cube flanked by a pawn shop and a podiatrist’s office on a pothole-marked stretch of Culver City. They visited two potential CW shows being developed in similarly depressing places, dropped by a well-known TV producer’s offices that claimed to be “in the shadow of Paramount Pictures’ iconic Melrose Avenue lot” but were in fact more of a neighbor to the Astro Burger’s Dumpster, and were coming from a place in Beverly Hills that looked promising until they’d gone inside and seen that it contained no furniture. Brooke had read for the project—a
Saved by the Bell
reboot—sitting cross-legged on a scratchy brown Berber carpet while the producer, who Max could swear was one of the original cast members, flicked his cigarette into a bottle of Mountain Dew and
asked her things like, “Yes, but dig deep—what is the bell saving your character
from
?”

They capped the day with a drive down Hollywood Boulevard, the eastern part of which was mostly latex-clothing stores and places that sold “hilarious” bongs. A sixtyish man in knee socks and sandals snapped a photo of his wife giving the thumbs-up sign to something on the sidewalk, while a nearby homeless man held up bunny ears.

“I can’t imagine coming here as a tourist,” Max said. “Hollywood is so
disappointing
. Do you think Audrey Hepburn would still want her star on the Walk of Fame if she knew it was in front of a place that hawks edible panties?”

“Oh, Max, don’t be so literal,” Brooke scoffed.

“What, they’re not actually edible?”

“No, I mean, Hollywood isn’t about the actual street, or geographical place. It’s an idea. A concept.”

“Well,
conceptually
, it needs to name itself after someplace more attractive,” Max said. Then she paused. “I sound like you. We are spending too much time together already.”

Brooke laughed, then grabbed the armrest as Max took a hard right down Gower Street. “Careful,” Brooke scolded. “This isn’t your old junkheap. This is a Lexus. It demands finesse. Wait, there it is. Pull over so we can switch.”

“Fine, but don’t go fifty miles an hour into the parking spot again,” Max warned her. “If this thing has a scratch on it tomorrow, Molly is going to kill me.”

Max parked by the sidewalk and hopped out of the car. After Max had driven Brooke home from school that one afternoon, Brooke announced she would never again grace Max’s “unfumigated steel death trap” and brokered a deal with Molly wherein Max—as an actual licensed driver—chauffeured Brooke around town in the Lexus. But Brooke privately insisted that Max let her behind the wheel for all their arrivals and departures, claiming she needed to be seen as down-to-earth.

“Also, they need to know I can drive, for any potential chase scenes,” she said brightly.

As if she were in one of them now, Brooke jammed the car into Drive and flew left through a broken guard gate, parking in front of an expanse of three-story buildings that had all the curb appeal of a prison.

“We’re here!” Brooke said, brandishing the script sides for the reading.

“Thank God,” Max said, wincing as she spied a gang tag. She’d had no idea that so many Hollywood producers worked out of such nickel-and-dime office spaces. At this rate their next stop would be a shed in the bowels of Sun Valley. “We should have called your blog ‘Notes from the Underbelly.’ ”

“You can change it to that if I get
Saved by the Bell
,” Brooke said.

Max laughed. “Funny and true,” she said grudgingly.

“See? I’m actually a scintillating and witty person,” Brooke said. “I just don’t have time to type about it.”

They entered a poorly lit office with dingy, off-white walls and dark blue industrial carpeting. Brooke exchanged a few words with the receptionist and immediately waved Max off, which Max knew meant she had finagled a meeting with the top honcho. Max retreated to the small waiting area, dotted with attractive people studying script sides in cheap-looking plastic chairs. Max slumped into a lime-colored one and closed her eyes. She never
had
gotten any coffee.

A voice said, “Long day?”

She opened an eye and saw a familiar-looking guy sitting to her right—cute, in a bookish way, and wearing faded cords and a vintage
COKE IS IT
T-shirt.

“The longest,” she said. “I know you from somewhere, right?”

“Moxie Stilts’s party,” he said. “You’re Max. We almost broke each other’s noses.”

“Oh, right, sorry—I didn’t recognize you with the glasses,” she said.

“I’m blind without them,” he admitted. “The only reason I recognize you is that when that door hit my face, it gave me half an hour of twenty-twenty vision.” He touched the thin black frames. “Do they make me look smarter?”

“Compared to who?” she teased.

“Don’t you mean
whom
?” he retorted with twinkling eyes, tapping his glasses again.

“Yes, you’re
such
a brainiac.”

“I owed you one,” he said, patting his nose exaggeratedly. “You almost destroyed the Sexy.”

“Oh, you’re fine. Cry me a river.”

“I’m an
actor
,” he said. “We’re very sensitive. Especially about our faces.”

Max sat up straight. “Wait, you told me at the party that you hate actors.”

He scrunched up his face. “Welcome to my existential crisis,” he said. “I really only got into acting by accident. I won a commercial-writing contest in Pittsburgh and then they made me star in it. One thing led to another and suddenly I’m doing incredibly prestigious roles like Third Altar Boy from the Left on a Very Special Episode of
Cougar Town
.”

Max shook her head slowly. “I can’t believe you let me sit there and say all actors are irritating. I feel so dumb now.”

“But it’s true!” he insisted. “My roommate is Method, so the time he got a part as a villain in
Spy Kidz 5: Look Who’s Skulking
, he spent three weeks talking sports with me in a Russian accent. ‘Steelers vill vin das Super Bowl, yes?’ ”

Max laughed. “You’re making that up!”

“Scout’s honor,” he said, holding up the familiar two-fingered salute. “And I once had an audition for something set in Tennessee, so I ordered pizza from five different Domino’s in a fake accent just to practice. Maybe
I’m
irritating. Who
does
that?”

“I used a British accent to call the library one time,” Max admitted. “I owed late fees on a book and I was too embarrassed to talk to them about it as me.”

“What book?”

“I’ll never tell. You’re too irritating,” Max teased. “You won’t even tell me your name.”

He stuck out his hand. “Whoops. I’m Brady—Brady Swift.”

Max took Brady’s hand and shook it. He felt warm but a little rough, as if he wasn’t the type of Hollywood pretty boy who got manicures or waxed his chest. Big points.

“
Of course
that’s your name,” she said. “That’s the perfect actor name.”

“Yes. That’s another irritating thing about me,” he said, fishing a Snickers bar out of his pants pocket and unwrapping it. “It’s the perfect actor name because, like every third person in this business, it’s not my real name. I had to change it.”

Max raised a brow. “
Had
to?”

Brady took a bite of his candy bar. “Prepare yourself,” he said, swallowing. “My real name is Taylor.”

He looked at her expectantly.

“Taylor…?”

“… Swift?” he finished for her.

Max tried to make her mirth sound polite, but it was hard. “Wow, I’m really sorry it didn’t work out with Jake Gyllenhaal. I was sure that was true love.”

“That girl ruined my life,” Brady said cheerfully. “So I used my mother’s maiden name instead. I lobbied for Skippy, or Engelbert, but my mother said it would bring shame to my unborn children or something, as if that
Cougar Town
episode isn’t going to embarrass them enough.”

Max’s phone buzzed. She checked it; it was Jake. She felt rude reading a text, so she decided to deal with it later. (She hated people who were chained to their cells.)

“So, what are you auditioning for, Skippy?” she asked Brady, tossing the phone back into her bag.

He covered his face with his hands. “
Psychic Lifeguard
,” he said through his fingers. “Don’t think less of me. I need to eat and pay for college.”

“Shut up! I love that show,” Max said. “How he runs up to people who are just sunbathing and tells them that in ten minutes he’ll save their lives?”

“And they all go in the water anyway, because they are morons?” Brady chimed in, his gray eyes dancing. “It’s the dumbest show on television. Totally brilliant.”